- All social animals have social hierarchies.
If you put six puppies together,
they will fight over who's the highest ranking.
If you put six goslings together,
if you put kids together in a daycare center,
they will do the same thing.
All young animals, they will try to establish
their rank order.
But usually the first position is the most important one
and that's the one that they compete over.
People sometimes ask me,
what does it take to be an alpha male?
And they think the answer from a primatologist would be,
what it takes is to be the strongest and the meanest
and the most intimidating.
But that's not really what an alpha male usually is.
An alpha male is usually also admired.
They protect the underdog, they break up fights,
they have a high level of empathy.
So, yeah, you may want to be an alpha male
but if you're surrounding people don't see you as that,
it's not going to happen.
I'm Frans de Waal.
I'm a primatologist and a biologist
and I'm the author of the book
"Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist".
I've been working with primates I think about 50 years.
Mostly with chimpanzees, with bonobos
but most of my work is on social behavior.
The term alpha male came originally from wolf research
and I just referred, I think, to the highest ranking
male wolf.
But to apply the term as people do today,
people, usually with an alpha male, they mean a bully.
Someone who beats you over the head
and lets you know every day that he's the boss.
I'm partly responsible for that
because I wrote this book Chimpanzee Politics
and used the term alpha male quite frequently.
And then the Republicans in Washington,
they picked up on the book.
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 feel very conflicted because the term alpha male for me
is not a negative term.
People always think the alpha male is a sort of personality.
No, the alpha male is just a top male
and he can be a very nice guy or he can be a very nasty guy.
That is actually irrelevant,
if he's at the top, he's the alpha male.
And I think 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.
People don't realize that
the alpha male chimpanzees, for example,
you have to have supporters, you cannot do that on your own.
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.
And then, in addition,
you have bonobos who are very close to us too,
equally close as the chimpanzee
where the alpha individual is a female.
And most of these differences between the sexes
are actually smaller than we think.
We sort of, in our mind,
we blow them up, but they're actually
if you measure them, they're not so great.
Robert Martin is an anthropologist
who said that the difference between the sexes
is a bimodal difference.
What he means there is that the differences are statistical
and that there's a lot of exceptions to them.
For example, Donna is a chimpanzee that I've known
since she was three, so very little.
And already at that age, she was different from the rest.
She was a female clearly, but she liked to wrestle.
And when she grew older, when she became adolescent,
she grew big shoulders, a lot of big hair, a big head.
She started to look like a male.
And she associated with the males, she hung out with them.
So, that's one individual.
And I've known quite a few individuals also among the males
who don't exactly act like males
or females who don't act like females.
And so, individual variability
is basically the material of evolution
and that diversity I think that's the same sort of diversity
that we see in human society.
Sex is biological sex defined by
genitals, hormones, chromosomes.
Gender is much more flexible,
gender is more masculine, feminine
and everything in between
and is, of course, very much a cultural construct
in the sense that social norms
make how you have to behave as a male
or how you have to behave as a female
and those are the gender definitions
and they change with time, they change with society.
So, we have all that variability.
And in the other primates,
I've never seen that that's a problem.
So, that's something where we could
learn something from them
is that they take an individual like Donna as she is,
they're not making a big fuss about it
because they're much less normative than we are
and much less ideological, of course, than we are.
And so, I've never seen that these individuals
who deviate a little bit from the common patterns
that they get into trouble over that.
Many people consider empathy as the core of human morality.
You cannot have an interest in other people
and wanting to help them if you don't have empathy for them.
And so, empathy is the glue of our society
and our moral systems would be basically impossible,
I think, if we had no empathy.
I'm not saying that chimps and bonobos are
moral beings the way we are,
but they clearly have that capacity
of being interested in the state of somebody else.
I think a leader needs to pay attention
to the group dynamics,
make sure that everyone has a voice in the group
and that you, like alpha male chimpanzees,
that you protect the underdog
against potential violence or potential abuse.
I think humans are psychologically exactly like the apes,
so socially and emotionally we are like apes.
We are intellectually more developed.
We have language, of course,
we are technologically more developed.
But many of the basics of our social relationships,
both in terms of the hierarchies that we have,
the friendships, the attachments,
in all of these ways, we are very close to the primates.
We're very similar to them.
And so, certainly in that area,
the apes can tell us something about us
because there's basically no distinction.
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