Comparative transitive and temporal orderliness in dominance networks

David B. McDonald and Daizaburo Shizuka

Behavioral Ecology, 2013, vol. 24, issue 2, 511-520

Abstract: Dominance is a social relation between a subordinate animal and the dominant to which it submits. Animal groups seem regularly to form dominance hierarchies in which dominance relations are transitive and stable, but comparative studies are rare. Dominance hierarchies can be formalized as social networks, with arrows (directed edges) pointing from dominant animals (nodes) to subordinates. Using this network perspective, we explored the orderliness of 40 published datasets for taxa from ants to elephants. To quantify orderliness, we used the triad census, a technique from sociology, that enumerates the proportion of orderly (transitive) triads (e.g., A dominates B and C, B dominates C, yielding clear top, middle, and bottom rankings) versus disorderly (cyclic) triads (e.g., A dominates B, B dominates C, but C in turn dominates A). All 40 datasets showed a significant excess of orderly (transitive) triads and a deficit of disorderly (cyclic) triads compared with the null model of random networks. Most datasets showed relatively high rank stability (mean stability index of 0.81 on a scale from 0 to 1). Steep hierarchies arise when the scores used to rank contestants differ sharply, further promoting stability. All 40 dominance hierarchies were steeper than expected from randomized sequences of contests. The overwhelming conclusion was that animal groups are orderly, as assessed by a high proportion of transitive relations, a paucity of disorderly cycles, and high temporal stability in rankings. Thus, a certain degree of self-organization may characterize even agonistic interactions across many different kinds of animal societies.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/ars192 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:24:y:2013:i:2:p:511-520.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().