The Rise And Fall (And Lamentable Rise) Of The “Alpha Male” Myth

It’s an idea that’s become weirdly – and some might say worryingly – widespread in recent years: that human society can and should be modeled on wolf packs, led by dominant “alphas” who get their pick of the best food and female attention. But here’s the thing: not only is that concept not applicable to humans, but it’s rarely true for any primate. 

Even worse, it never even applied to wolves in the first place.

So, where did the myth of the “alpha male” come from? And is there any truth to it at all? Anywhere?

The birth of a meme

For sheer geographical range, there aren’t many wild animals that can compete with humans. Wolves, however, are one of the few that can. Our two species have lived alongside each other, sometimes in very close proximity, for tens of thousands of years at least – which is, you would think, probably long enough for us to figure out how they live.

It’s strange, therefore, that so many of us have for so long imagined that wolves live under a strict and complex hierarchical society, governed by an alpha male and alpha female, with so-called betas underneath, and perhaps even a runty omega at the bottom of the pack. That’s simply not true – so where did it come from?

It all goes back to just one man: Rudolph Schenkel, an animal behavioralist working in Switzerland in the 1930s and 40s. “[Wolf] pack formation starts with the beginning of winter,” he wrote in his seminal Expression Studies on Wolves, with the “core” of the pack “compris[ing] the bitch wolf […] and the male ‘lead wolf’.” 

“By incessant control and repression of all types of competition […] both of these ‘α animals’ defend their social position,” he declared. 

It was little more than a side comment, but it caught hold. Inspired by Schenkel, the now prolific wolf researcher David Mech also talked about the “alpha” pair of a pack in his 1970 book The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species – and before long, the term had gone viral in a way few throwaway comments in ethology textbooks ever do. 

Thanks largely to these two writers, it was simply accepted for decades that wolves live a ruthless existence – either mercilessly dominated by their alpha, or else constantly facing off challengers to their position. We changed how we trained dogs because of it; we changed how we saw ourselves because of it. And there was just one problem with all of that.

It was nonsense.

Alpha Papa

Imagine an alien comes down to Earth, intent on cataloguing the inner workings of human society. They beam down, straight into the middle of Red Onion State Prison, and immediately start recording what they see: a single-sex species, strictly segregated by race and outer coverings, the bulk of whom spend 23 hours a day alone in a tiny, bare room. Hierarchy in the species is determined by a ritual known as “shivving”, and for the alpha class – those wearing so-called “guard uniforms” – any and all behavior is permitted, no matter how seemingly cruel or dangerous to the beta class.

Now, we don’t think it’s controversial to say that’s not really an accurate description of how Homo sapiens lives. But here’s the thing: the “alpha wolf” concept is kind of the same thing.

“When I wrote my book in 1970, everything we knew came from observations of wolves that were not related, but confined together,” Mech told Science Arena earlier this year. 

“In that artificial environment, in which the wolves were not related, it made sense that there would be power struggles,” he said, “and that the top-ranking individuals should be labeled as alphas.”

With further research, however – including the first field studies where wild wolves could be fitted with radio-frequency collars, allowing them to be followed individually – Mech realized he had made a big mistake. “We realized, ‘Oh, a pack is a family’,” he told The New Yorker in 2023.

From that perspective, talking about “alphas” and “betas” makes little sense. “What would be the value of calling a human father the alpha male?” Mech told Scientific American. “He’s just the father of the family. And that’s exactly the way it is with wolves.”

Fixing a mistake

Mech has since spent his career advocating against the “alpha wolf” concept – but nevertheless, the idea has stuck. And to be fair, it’s not entirely without merit: there are animals that fit that description, even if wolves don’t.

Take apes, for example. Gorillas live in groups led by what is pretty inarguably an alpha male – it’s why their dicks are so tiny, famously – and dominant male orangutans can be discerned from their submissive counterparts by sight, since they kind of literally hulk out when they reach “alpha” status.

But before you go drawing any conclusions from those two examples of species in our own family, a word of caution: they’re probably the outliers.

“Recent research [has] started to challenge the traditional views of male dominance being the default status,” explained Peter Kappeler, a sociobiologist at the German Primate Center in Göttingen, in a statement released earlier this month. As one of the team behind a new paper on power relationships in primates, he and his colleagues’ work “now provides a more comprehensive exploration of variation in intersexual dominance relationships,” he said.

For many of us, it seems sort of obvious that most species – of anything, really, not only apes – will be dominated by males. Examples of the opposite, as in bonobo chimps or ring-tailed lemurs, are “exceptional” cases, each requiring explanation as to why they deviate from the “natural” norm. But like the “alpha wolf”, this idea – while evidently durable – says more about ourselves than the animals we’re talking about.

Indeed, when we look at the hard data, it turns out that primates rarely have a “dominant male” setup – it was observed in only 25 of the 151 populations of primates included in the study. The opposite situation – a single dominant female – was found in 16 populations: less likely to occur, sure, but possibly not by as much as you’d expect.

The vast majority, however, were neither – they either had no sex bias, or just a small amount. And when it comes to thinking about how our own species “should” behave, it’s probably here, if anywhere in the animal kingdom, that we should look.

“Most primate societies do not have clear-cut sex-biases in power,” reads the statement on the study, and “the set of human traits places them closer to species showing more nuanced relationships.”

“Accordingly, arguments presenting human patriarchy as a primate legacy appear misguided.”

A better option

The term “alpha male” may genuinely apply in some scenarios – although ethologists tend to avoid it these days, preferring instead to talk about “breeding” individuals in a group. If it’s revealing that humans seem to apply the concept to those animals we like to identify with – wolves, great apes, lions, perhaps – then it must be equally ironic that these are precisely the species that seem to reject this form of hierarchy.

In fact, if you’re really looking for an animal that embraces this strict social structure – one on which to base your whole personality, perhaps, or use to justify a stray belch in an interview now and then – then there’s one that fits the bill. It was the first animal, in fact, to ever earn the title of “alpha” – and honestly, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more successful species to emulate, since its numbers outpace our own by a factor of three to one.

It’s the common domestic chicken.

There – suddenly nuanced social interactions without the presence of clear dominant individuals don’t sound so bad, do they?