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The term alpha male came originally from wolf research, and it just referred, I think, to the highest ranking male wolf usually. And I adopted it in my book “Chimpanzee Politics,” and I talked a lot about alpha males. And then it was adopted by Newt Gingrich for freshman Republicans in the 1990s, I believe. And then it reached also the business community who started producing books of how to become the alpha male of the company and let everyone know that you’re boss and stuff like that.
I always felt that it was a simplification of the term because, for me, alpha male just means the top male of the male hierarchy. It is not a statement about the personality type. Some alpha males are wonderful and real leaders, and other alpha males are dictators and aggressive. And so it’s more a statement about who’s at the top of the hierarchy.
Alpha Males
The best alpha males that I have known in chimpanzees, in order to reach the top, they sometimes have to be harsh and aggressive, but once they’re there, they become sort of an anchor in the group, a social anchor, usually together with the alpha female. They protect the underdog. They break up fights. They are impartial when they do so. So if their best buddy has a fight with a female, for example, they may support that female. Even though that’s his best buddy, he’s not going to support him necessarily. They have a high level of empathy. If there is a disturbance in the group and someone is distressed and screaming and has lost a fight, he goes over to that individual and embraces them maybe.
Alpha males who are like that, they can become extremely loved and popular and their position stabilizes. So it’s actually in their own interest because their position becomes more stable because the group will defend their position. If there’s a young challenger who comes up, they will want to keep an alpha male like that. And if he’s a bully and violent with everyone, then everyone is basically waiting for the occasion that there comes a challenger, and they will put their weight behind the challenger.
In order to be alpha male, you have to have supporters. It’s very rare that a male does that on his own. Sometimes the smallest male is alpha male. People always think it must be a matter of the strongest male, but the smallest male can be alpha male if he has good supporters and he has female support. It means that a high-ranking female can have an enormous amount of power because if she can rally all the other females behind a certain male, she has all the power there.
Alpha Females
Alpha females, they can be aggressive, and they can punish others. That happens, but it’s not their physical presence that does the trick. It’s more their social relationships. So they’re very well connected usually. They have lots of friends that they groom with, and they use these connections. And that’s their political power. So it’s a very different basis than for the males usually.
When there’s a big fight in the community, it’s often the alpha male who will step in to stop the fight, but fixing the relationships afterward, that’s often the task of an alpha female. And she will bring parties together sometimes literally. She will grab a male by the arm and bring him to his opponent, so to speak, to make sure that they groom each other. And so alpha females have that task of fixing relationships basically.
And then in addition, you have bonobos who are very close to us, too. So in bonobos, the females have collectively taken the power. They dominate the males. People overestimate male dominance mainly because they think purely in physical terms. But primate societies are political systems, and physical power is only one part of the whole equation.
Becoming an Alpha
That’s the question always in the business books is how do you become an alpha male? Because everyone wants to be alpha male. I always look at that question as very strange because being alpha male is partly dependent on how others look at you. You may want to be an alpha male, but if your surrounding people don’t see you as that, they’re not impressed by you, it’s not going to happen.
I think if you take responsibility for your group, in the sense that you keep an eye on what’s going on in the group without being in favor of certain individuals and make sure that conflicts are resolved, that individuals who don’t have a voice get a voice, I think you may become a leader who is appreciated by everyone and gets the support from the group as a whole. So that’s a very different approach than trying to assert yourself and making sure that everyone obeys you. This is more like a group policy approach, but it is no guarantee that you will be automatically recognized as the alpha male if you do that.