URtheALIEN wrote:
At the top the alpha who is a leader and actually tries to do well for those below him, as this rank is nearly universally a him. Second a beat that is a bully and has power only by supporting the alpha. Then on down through other ranking that had particular little details like being interested in defusing conflicts or putting down the weaker while currying favor from the higher ranks until finally the lowest two ranks which were the guy, nearly always a guy, that everyone picks on but is in the group and the outcast that is driven away and tortured by all. Long sentence. Anyway, supposedly these ranks appear in any sufficiently large group, I think the critical number was around 50-60 for all ranks to appear and the really interesting part was that if you took all the individuals of one rank, alpha, beta, whatever, from a number of groups and made them interact long enough then some of the individuals will change to take on the positions that are vacant. Example, 100 alphas put in a group 1 stays an alpha, 1 becomes a beta and so on until one is an outcast even though they were an alpha in their original group. Anyone ever hear of this? I'd love to re-read this theory as it was about 20-25 years ago I read it the first time.
Try looking for W. C. Allee's original work. The first page of this article references his work from the 1930s that sounds like it might be hinting a similar direction:
link Like apparently he said that a group hierarchy can make the group stronger (so that fits with the leader wanting the others to be okay). The author in this article seems to be working on top of Allee's work, and considers hierarchy formation in a group of "N individuals" (at least in the intro). So maybe this is the right direction.