Five studies explored the ways relative rank is revealed among individuals in small groups through their natural use of pronouns. In Experiment 1, four-person groups worked on a decision-making task with randomly assigned leadership status. In Studies 2 and 3, two-person groups either worked on a task or chatted informally in a get-to-know-you session. Study 4 was a naturalistic study of incomi...

Social hierarchies are a common feature of the Animal Kingdom and control access to resources according to the fitness of the individual. We use a similar concept to form an Adaptive Social Hierarchy amongst nodes in a heterogeneous wireless network so that they can discover their role in terms of their base attributes (such as energy or connectivity). Three different methods of forming the hie...

Dominance hierarchies are ubiquitous in social species that require social cognition to maintain. Status may be established initially through physical conflict but is maintained by social signals between individuals that depend critically on the relative social status of those interacting. How do individuals collect information they need to modulate their behavior? Using a particularly suitable...

Ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, dominance hierarchies emerge through social competition and underlie the control of resources. Confronting the disruptive influence of socioeconomic inequalities, human populations tend to split into groups who legitimize existing dominance hierarchies and groups who condemn them. Here, we hypothesized that variations in the neural sensitivity to dominance rank...

We thought that the issues associated with bullying among children and teenagers deserved the attention of bioethicists. We were specifically interested in why bullying has traditionally been treated as an almost normative childhoodexperience, something that is just apart of growing up, and that children should learn to deal with it on their own. Themodel for this benign neglect of the seriousn...

We examine whether private feedback about relative performance can mitigate moral hazard in competitive settings, by modifying agents’ self-esteem. In our experimental setting people work harder and expect to rank better when told they may learn their ranking, relative to cases when feedback will not be provided. Individuals who ranked better than expected decrease output but expect a better ra...

In order for interactive agents to be believable, they will need to respond to any likely situation in a manner that is consistent with their personality, as well as their position within social hierarchies. Thus believable agents will need to have a clearly defined personality, social role, and other traits that will govern their actions in a virtual world. The goal of this paper is to present...

We here present a fixed agents version of an original model of the emergence of hierarchies among social agents first introduced by Bonabeau et al. Having interactions occurring on a social network rather than among ’walkers’ doesn’t drastically alter the dynamics. But it makes social structures more stable and give a clearer picture of the social organisation in a ‘mixed’ regime.

Researchers have suggested that viewing social inequity as dominant-group privilege (rather than subordinate-group disadvantage) enhances dominant-group members' support for social policies aimed at lessening such inequity. However, because viewing inequity as dominant-group privilege can be damaging to dominant-group members' self-images, this perspective is frequently resisted. In the researc...