ABSTRACT
Domination has social repercussions that endure beyond the original collective acts during which it was exercised. Acting units who routinely perform superordinate roles in the activities of a group or larger community usually stand at the top of their dominance orders, while those who routinely perform subordinate roles in these activities usually occupy the bottom tier. Over time, it becomes taken for granted that the acting units who are at the top of a group’s or community’s pecking order are generally superior to those who are at the bottom and that those at the bottom of a group’s or community’s pecking order are generally inferior to those who are perched at the top. Whether the acting units under consideration are individuals, clans, tribes, nationalities, races, or even nation-states, this remains the case. 1 In Nasar’s biography of the Nobel laureate John Foster Nash, she describes the pecking order and leaders of the cliques that operated while he was a graduate student during the late 1940s in Princeton University’s highly acclaimed math department:
