- 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. - Get smarter faster with videos from the
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