Bad news, alpha males. You likely don't actually exist.

The concept of the alpha male isn't standing up to reality. A large majority of primate communities have shared dominance, meaning either sex can come out on top. And though the idea of male dominance has been disseminated across society, humans share many traits with non-male-dominated species.

Not all males

Primate societies in which males "win nearly all aggressive encounters against females are actually rare," according to a study published in the journal PNAS. The study found that in 70% of the studied populations, there were moderate sex biases, signifying both males and females could hold dominance. There was, in addition, male dominance in 17% of primate societies and female dominance in 13%. Male dominance is "not a baseline, as was implicitly thought for a long time in primatology," said Élise Huchard, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Montpellier in France and coauthor of the study, to The Washington Post.

In instances where males or females dominate, it's circumstantial. Female dominance is mainly observed in species where females are "monogamous or similar in size to males" and where "females control reproduction" and decide "when and with whom to mate," said El País. Male dominance occurs where males are "larger, groups are terrestrial and many females mate with multiple males."

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Only 30% of the studied populations show a specific sex holding dominance. "Strict male dominance" is "really a minority of systems," Huchard said to the BBC. "We didn't expect it to be a majority because we already knew the literature quite well," but "under 20%" is "probably smaller than what we would have expected."

Social systems

The concept of the "alpha male" originated from a book about wolf ecology from 1970. The author of the book later said the text made inaccurate claims. Even though the idea was disproved, the alpha male concept began being applied to other animal species and also to humans.

The belief that males are inherently dominant is likely because researchers "often projected their own biases and expectations onto animal behavior," said El País. "It's difficult, even for scientists, to free themselves from their subjectivity, as we are also influenced by the society in which we live," said Huchard.

The concept of men dominating women has pervaded culture and politics, and many describe themselves as alpha males. Still, there's "scant evidence to support the theory that sex-based inequities in humans originated from our primate relatives," said the Post. Rather, "humans share traits such as monogamy with groups of primates that don't exhibit clear male dominance." The dynamics seen in most of the primate communities "corroborate quite well with what we know about male-female relationships among hunter-gatherers, which were more egalitarian than in the agricultural societies that emerged later," Huchard said to AFP.

"When we think about power in animals as more than just who is biggest or baddest, when we recognize economic forms of power, such as the leverage that females derive from controlling reproduction, we find a wonderfully complex landscape of power," said Rebecca Lewis, a biological anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, to the Post. The research is an "important step forward in our understanding of which selective pressures lead to inequality between the sexes."