One of the ways in which we are like animals is that we need to organize ourselves in order to survive. It’s not intuitive because we have this sense that in modern civilized society people have a tendency to prefer equality and egalitarian kinds of organizing structures to more hierarchical ones.
But what you find when you look at how people behave despite what they say they value, people have a tendency to form hierarchies almost instantly in all kinds of organizational settings, whether the task requires it or not, in part because it’s a very basic instinct to create structures and groups that help members coordinate so they don’t have to fight with one another, so that they know who has which rights and privileges, and that they’re able to select leaders that are going to benefit the group to the greatest extent. So, those are very primal instincts, and they really operate in humans just the way they do in animals.
Source: Stanford University
Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology
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