![]() As in other species, dominance relationships among chicken are established and maintained through agonistic interactions whereby one individual may exhibit aggressive behavior, whereas the partner either displays submissive behavior or avoids confrontation with the aggressor altogether ( Rowell, 1974). When the Norwegian zoologist Schjelderup-Ebbe (1922) published his dissertation on the social psychology of chickens a century ago, he was the first to report that the directionality and consistency with which hen peck at each other during feeding and resting yields a stable arrangement among individuals that he called a pecking order. Thus, this study provides important insights and key methodological tools to study intersexual dominance relationships in mammals. The relative prevalence of aggression and submission was sensitive to variation in the degree of female dominance across species, with more submissive signals and fewer aggressive acts being used in societies where female dominance prevails. The rank order among same-sex individuals was highly correlated between the intra- and intersexual hierarchies, and such correlation was not affected by the degree of female dominance. All indices of the degree of female dominance were well correlated with each other. Our analyses confirmed a continuum in patterns of intersexual dominance, from strictly male-dominated species to strictly female-dominated species. In this study, we draw on data from free-ranging populations of nine species of mammals that vary in the degree to which members of one sex dominate members of the other sex to explore the consequences of using different criteria and procedures for describing intra- and intersexual dominance relationships in these societies. These processes affect the fitness of both sexes, and are mitigated by intersexual hierarchies. However, males and females regularly compete over similar resources when living in the same group, and sexual conflict takes a variety of forms across societies. In particular, different methods continue to be employed to rank males and females along a dominance hierarchy, and sex biases in dominance are still widely regarded as simple byproducts of sexual size dimorphism. Most research has focused on same-sex relationships, however, so that intersexual dominance relationships and hierarchies including both sexes have remained much less studied. The causes and consequences of being in a particular dominance position have been illuminated in various animal species, and new methods to assess dominance relationships and to describe the structure of dominance hierarchies have been developed in recent years.
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