Aggression heuristics underlie animal dominance hierarchies and provide evidence of group-level social information
Elizabeth A. Hobson, Dan M{\o}nster, Simon DeDeo

TL;DR
This study introduces a new method to analyze aggression patterns in social animals, revealing how different groups use social information to establish dominance hierarchies, with implications for understanding social cognition evolution.
Contribution
The paper presents a novel social assay method to quantify aggression patterns based on social rank information across diverse species and groups.
Findings
Most groups follow a downward heuristic in aggression
A significant minority use complex social information patterns
Aggression patterns are not constrained by phylogeny or fixed species traits
Abstract
Members of a social species need to make appropriate decisions about who, how, and when to interact with others in their group. However, it has been difficult for researchers to detect the inputs to these decisions and, in particular, how much information individuals actually have about their social context. We present a new method that can serve as a social assay to quantify how patterns of aggression depend upon information about the ranks of individuals within social dominance hierarchies. Applied to existing data on aggression in 172 social groups across 85 species in 23 orders, it reveals three main patterns of rank-dependent social dominance: the downward heuristic (aggress uniformly against lower-ranked opponents), close competitors (aggress against opponents ranked slightly below self), and bullying (aggress against opponents ranked much lower than self). The majority of the…
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