Pod Insights Endless Thread The Alpha Male Myth About this episode In 1970, a young biologist named David Mech published what could be the most consequential book on wolves ever written. At the time, The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, was the most complete collection of scientific knowledge on wolves money could buy, and it became best seller for Dave's publishers. But outside of the world of wolf biology, the book is also credited with unleashing a certain idea into our popular lexicon: The Alpha.
The thing is, Dave made a mistake – and the alpha wolf, doesn't exist.
This week on Endless Thread, Ben and Amory track down the origins of "the alpha," and whether this idea – which has been recanted by the very scientist who popularized it – has any legitimacy when talking about people.
Show notes:
The Myth of the Alpha Wolf https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-myth-of-the-alpha-wolf (The New Yorker)*
Do alpha males even exist? https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2016/oct/10/do-alpha-males-even-exist-donald-trump (The Guardian)
Elon Musk Shares Theory That Only ‘Alpha Males’ Should Vote https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-shares-controversial-theory-democracy-1947873 (Newsweek)
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1:03 Speaker 01 WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
1:15 Ben Brock Johnson? Okay, today we're going to be talking about a story we have been working on for what feels like a dog's age, or maybe we should say wolf's age? Am I right?
1:23 Speaker 01 Hmm, yes, maybe we should, because this story begins with wolves.
1:30 Speaker 01 Specifically, a book about wolves called The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species.
1:38 Ben Brock Johnson? You could even say it's the book about wolves.
1:41 Speaker 01 You could say that, because The Wolf, which is by biologist David Mech, might just be the most consequential book on wolves ever written, but not for the reasons you might think.
1:53 Ben Brock Johnson? When it was published in 1970, The Wolf was the most complete collection of scientific knowledge about wolves you could buy. But today, it is also credited with unleashing a certain idea into our popular lexicon.
2:09 Speaker 04 How would I describe myself? Three words: hardworking, alpha male, jackhammer.
2:15 Speaker 05 In the information age, Sheldon, you and I are the alpha males.
2:21 Speaker 05 One of these men will be the alpha male.
2:26 Speaker 01 Who's the alpha? You're looking at him, kid.
2:29 Speaker 06 Today, when talking about human beings, we know that alpha male usually means the guy at the top of the food chain. In theory, he's confident, competitive, capable, and successful with the ladies.
2:42 Ben Brock Johnson? In the manosphere, alpha status is an aspirational goal. Otherwise, you're being a beta, who's weak, unattractive, submissive, and lacks the traits of real manhood.
2:53 Speaker 01 Well, I think an alpha male is a man that other men want to be. And I think a beta male is that is a man that other men are not trying to emulate in any degree, right?
3:04 Ben Brock Johnson? That was Andrew Tate on The Dean Show in 2022, before he was charged with human trafficking, among other alleged crimes.
3:15 Speaker 06 For others, the alpha male is an emblem of toxic masculinity that has seeped into our lives far beyond the internet, notably into our political discourse.
3:27 Ben Brock Johnson? Like in 2024, when Elon Musk reposted a theory on X saying, "Only alphas are capable of making good decisions and should be the only people to participate in democracy."
3:40 Speaker 06 Woof.
3:42 Ben Brock Johnson? Also, President Donald Trump has frequently been described as an alpha by his supporters.
3:48 Speaker 06 So you might be wondering, what does all of this have to do with a book about wolves published in the 70s? Well, in Dave Meacham's book, he uses the term "alpha" to describe the animal at the top of wolf social hierarchies. There's a theory that this is what popularized the idea of the alpha male as we know it.
4:09 Ben Brock Johnson? Except here's the thing, Dave got it wrong.
4:16 Ben Brock Johnson? And I thought, wait a minute, why am I calling this thing the alpha male? I'm Ben High Value Alpha Johnson.
4:25 Speaker 06 I'm Amory Woof Sivertson.
4:30 Ben Brock Johnson? Today on Endless Thread, the Alpha Male Myth.
4:46 Speaker 06 To get to the bottom of this whole alpha male mix-up, we had to go back to the source.
4:51 Ben Brock Johnson? When did your wolf love affair begin, Dave?
4:54 Speaker 06 Well, I began working with wolves in 1958. So, we tracked down Dave Meach, the author of the book that started it all. These days, Dave is a senior research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey out of the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. But decades ago, he was a young PhD candidate observing wolf populations by airplane over Isle Royale in Lake Superior. I can't help but remember the first time I saw the wolves from the aircraft and saw this large pack of 15 out on the ice. Just seeing those for the first time from the aircraft was really quite a moment.
5:37 Speaker 06 But I had no idea which members were the young ones, which were the old ones, which were the dominant ones. I couldn't even tell one from the other from the era. So, I might just well be antedrunk around there. Very little was known about wolves at the time. I was there to learn anything I could about them, actually.
6:00 Ben Brock Johnson? The first thing that Dave will tell you about wolves is that they are incredibly shy creatures. They're so scared of humans, it can be almost impossible to get close enough to study them in the wild. And in the 1960s, scientists were only just starting to use technology, like radio collars, to track wildlife. Hence, the aircraft.
6:21 Speaker 06 So, at that time, a lot of what scientists knew about wolf behavior came from studying them up close in captivity. When Dave was starting out, one of the most comprehensive studies on wolf behavior available was a paper published in the 1940s by a Swiss researcher named Rudolf Schenkel. Schenkel was an animal behaviorist. Science knew at the time that wolves lived in packs, but we had no idea what a pack was other than a group of wolves. So he thought he'd like to study wolves in a pack. And so he needed a lot of wolves to do that. So he just went and recruited wolves from various zoos and put them all together in
7:06 Speaker 06 a colony and figured that was a wolf pack.
7:10 Ben Brock Johnson? Then Schenkel waited and watched and documented what happened next.
7:16 Speaker 06 Probably you know of, and most people have heard of, the pecking order in chickens.
7:21 Ben Brock Johnson? Oh, yeah.
7:22 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's a dominance hierarchy. And I think everybody learns that in some biology class or something. It turns out that many animals, if you put a bunch of random individuals of the same species together in captivity, they do tend to form a pecking order or a dominance hierarchy. And that's what these wolves did. There were two hierarchies, one for the males and one for the females. That's just the way the wolves in that group happened to sort themselves out. And that's what Schenkel described.
7:59 Ben Brock Johnson? Schenkel's wolves fought it out to establish their pecking order. In the end, the pack was led by a male and female wolf, both of which fought their way to that position. And they were called the alphas.
8:12 Speaker 06 Fast forward now to the 1960s. Dave has been studying wolves for about a decade, and he's getting ready to publish his epic book. And as he's compiling his research, he includes Schenkel's findings and the concept of the alpha. Well, I didn't know any better. I put the first radio collar out in 1968, and I was getting a little better idea at that time of what a wolf pack was. But that's just about the time I was finishing up writing the book. So when I put the information from Schenkel into the book, I really didn't know much more about it.
8:51 Speaker 01 The wolf's social hierarchy than he did.
8:55 Speaker 06 Dave's book, The Wolf, comes out and it becomes a bestseller.
8:59 Ben Brock Johnson? He goes on with his life and his career studying wolves in the wild.
9:02 Speaker 06 And he hears about a place where you could live right next to wolves and study them up close.
9:08 Speaker 01 I spent 24 summers on Ellesmere Island and up near the North Pole where wolves are tame.
9:19 Speaker 06 What Dave means by tame is that on Ellesmere Island, wolves have had very little contact with humans, so they never learned to be afraid of us.
9:28 Ben Brock Johnson? When Dave and his fellow researchers came by to observe them, the wolves figured that these hairless apes who kept their distance, watched and took notes were pretty chill, if a little weird, maybe.
9:40 Speaker 01 I could live right with them and, and, and just day after day be with them and saw what they did up close, that kind of thing. And it was during one of those summers roughly around the late 1990s that it started dawning on me that what, what Schenckel had found was not really validly applicable to what I was seeing in the wild.
10:08 Speaker 06 So Dave, what is the truth about wolves in terms of a power structure?
10:14 Speaker 01 Well, their, their social structure is, is very much like a human family. A wolf pack, we found out, is a family that is a pair of wolves and their offspring. So the way it forms is a maturing male from one pack and a maturing female from another pack, leave those packs and go off and strike on their own, try to find a mate and a place where there's no other wolves and settle down. They pair bond, produce pups and start their own pack, just like a human family does. In fact, anthropologists consider the wolf
10:55 Speaker 01 pack a better analog for a human family than, than our most primates. In my notes, I had been writing, the alpha male did this, the alpha male did that. And I I thought, wait a minute. Why am I calling this thing the alpha male? You call an animal an alpha if it fights to get to the top. And this animal didn't have to do that. So that's when I decided, whoa, I better correct this.
11:23 Ben Brock Johnson? This is a super nice chill scientist's way of describing a kind of gobsmacking, or at least forehead-slapping, problem. The concept of the alpha male that Schenkel had observed almost 50 years ago at this point and that Dave had used in his bestselling book was incorrect.
11:41 Speaker 06 In 1999, Dave published a paper called "Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs," which was supposed to act as a correction to his book. In it, he discusses the revelation that wolf packs in the wild are not hierarchical in some intense way. They're just family units.
12:04 Ben Brock Johnson? Schenkel wasn't totally wrong about what he was seeing in his own study. The wolves in his captive wolf pack did fight amongst themselves for dominance. But those animals weren't a family. They were a bunch of random wolves from different zoos that had to figure out how to live with one another. And so they weren't representative of a natural pack led by a mom and pop wolf in the wild.
12:28 Speaker 06 But by then, Dave's original book had been in print for almost three decades. And it's not so easy to take back an idea. The concept of the alpha male as a default biological fact of animal behavior, including in humans, had taken on a life of its own.
12:46 Speaker 05 But the only way you're going to be able to truly reach your potential is if you conquer your inner alpha.
12:52 Speaker 06 What will happen is women will naturally allow him to take the lead. They will naturally submit to him.
12:56 Speaker 01 When you're an alpha male and you're against other alpha males, and we eat our own, alpha males eat their own.
13:03 Ben Brock Johnson? Do you think your book popularized the term?
13:09 Speaker 01 You know, I have to do a lot of interviews about this subject. And someone had put together a graph of some sort showing that, starting around the early 70s, that the term started becoming more... Common parlance. And so there's seems to be a correlation between when the my book was published and and an increase in the use of the term. But as you know, correlation is not necessarily causation. So we can't really say whether that book had anything to do with it or not.
13:45 Ben Brock Johnson? That's a classic scientist's answer right there, Dave. Dave asked his publishers to stop printing new copies to avoid the spread of misinformation. But no dice. Why wouldn't the publisher stop?
13:59 Speaker 01 Oh, the book was selling so well.
14:01 Ben Brock Johnson? It would take years for anything to be done about it. But we'll come back to that.
14:06 Speaker 06 At this point, we can clearly establish that there is no such thing as an alpha male when it comes to wolves living naturally in the wild. But does that make it wrong to use this term for humans?
14:19 Ben Brock Johnson? We asked Dave what he thought. Of course, Dave's a wolf guy. He doesn't claim expertise beyond that. However.
14:27 Speaker 01 There's no question there are dominance hierarchies, right? Not just in humans, but in many other species. So there is a biological basis for it. If in chickens, if nothing else. What do we consider forcing oneself to the top? Does it always have to be a physical fight? And I think what's been happening in society is that we've seen a lot of cases where some prominent people have asserted themselves more vigorously than others and have, by doing that, actually have gotten to the top.
15:11 Speaker 01 And whether it's valid to call them alphas is not up to me. But I could see where.
15:21 Speaker 06 Some folks might want to do that. And I wouldn't refute it.
15:33 Speaker 06 Dave told us if we wanted to learn more about alpha male behavior in people, we could try reaching out to a primatologist.
15:41 Ben Brock Johnson? After the break, we trace the origins of human alpha males down our evolutionary family tree. A familiar place for the next topic. Less of a "Ooh, ooh, ooh" and more of a "Ha, ha, ha."
16:15 Speaker 00 Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?
16:27 Speaker 04 Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation.
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17:23 Speaker 06 We don't use the term alpha male as much in gorilla society. We tend to use the term dominant male more often, although you will see alpha silverback on occasion. And in chimps, I think alpha male is used a lot more frequently.
17:40 Speaker 06 Dr. Tara Stowinski has possibly the coolest job. She's the CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of the Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund in Atlanta, Georgia. But she spends a lot of her time with gorillas in Rwanda. I am trained as a primatologist and have been studying gorillas now for about 30 years. And my particular interest has traditionally been in male gorilla social dynamics and reproductive strategies. So, you know, male gorillas are the largest primate on the planet, weighing in at 400 pounds. They possess this incredible size and strength, but also this very gentle nature as well.
18:17 Ben Brock Johnson? Gorillas are one of the five species that help make up the great apes, our closest living relatives on planet Earth.
18:27 Speaker 06 The great apes include orangutans, gorillas, chimps, and bonobos. They also include... What's up, bro? You and me, baby, humans. Woo!
18:44 Speaker 06 Chimps and gorillas share around 98% of our DNA. All the apes are highly intelligent. Chimps are known to be great tool users. They use a lot of political maneuvering in their social structure. Gorillas are so strong and have such a unique sort of ecological niche that they aren't great tool users, at least not in the wild. In captivity, they can use tools quite well. But as a result of that, there's kind of this joke that gorillas aren't as smart as chimps. But we know that really not to be the case. They just show their intelligence in different ways.
19:17 Ben Brock Johnson? Hmm. Spoken like a true gorilla researcher.
19:21 Speaker 06 Exactly. While we might not always call them the alpha, chimp and gorilla societies do tend to be led by a dominant male. Their dominance-based social hierarchy is much closer to the model that the animal behaviorist Rudolf Schenkel observed in his captive wolf pack.
19:40 Ben Brock Johnson? But it turns out that the traits of an alpha male ape aren't as clear-cut as the ultra-manly alpha male we know in popular culture.
19:47 Speaker 06 There is a dominant side to it, of being a leader, of physical size, or maybe aggression sometimes. But size and aggression aren't everything. I think in the animal world, it's a lot more about social connectivity, it's about politics, it's about not just relying on your strength. But also relying on your social skills and being a statesman in a lot of ways, both in chimp and gorilla society.
20:15 Ben Brock Johnson? Which primate species do you think is most similar to us?
20:22 Speaker 06 I will say, one of the things I find funny is sometimes when we're talking about gorillas, you know, I've had people say to me, wait, can we stop for a second? Are we talking about gorillas right now? Are we talking about people? But in general, I think chimps are a good representation of the more aggressive side of of human nature.
20:42 Speaker 06 Chimps are very territorial and will actually go to war with neighboring families of chimpanzees, whereas gorillas stay in touch with other families. They even have family reunions sometimes when all the gorilla cousins can play together again. We do see, you know, these kind of multi-level societies where these gorilla families that will split can come back together. And unlike chimps where that might be really aggressive, here they can come back together, kids can play, individuals can interact. We see these relationships, they can be maintained over a decade or more. So I think elements of the more peaceful side of human nature, you know, we're learning more that that's reflected in gorillas.
21:27 Ben Brock Johnson? On this day, the year of our Lord, that we are talking to you, what is, you know, what resonates the most with you in terms of the comparison to humans?
21:40 Speaker 06 In this moment in time, I think chimps, unfortunately. I'm seeing less of our gorilla side at this moment in time, you know, both in our own country and worldwide. But so right now, I think the chimp side of us is winning a little bit. You know, not as much collaboration, not as much coming together, maybe a little bit more separation and focusing on differences rather than similarities. Yeah, this is kind of a fun game to play with oneself, like, am I having a gorilla day or a chimp day or a bonobo day? That's great. I haven't thought about that. I'm gonna do that in the morning now when I wake up. I want to have a gorilla day and then I'll assess at the end of the day what I actually was successful in doing. There you go. There you go.
22:29 Speaker 06 But despite everything we have in common with our great ape relatives, there is one really big difference between us and them, which is that over the course of millennia of human history, we've come to organize our societies in a very different way. And it's a lot more complicated than just simple biology.
22:49 Ben Brock Johnson? How do you define masculinity?
22:52 Speaker 05 I don't. I don't.
22:55 Speaker 06 This is Matthew Gutman. He's a cultural anthropologist and professor emeritus at Brown University. He has spent his career studying what it means to be a man in cultures across the globe.
23:07 Speaker 05 Go out and interview 10 people. You're going to get 10 different definitions of what masculinity means for them. That's what is of interest to me.
23:16 Speaker 06 Matthew points out that when it comes to attributing certain behaviors to our biological sex, we seem more willing to explain away the behaviors of men.
23:26 Speaker 05 What do you expect? He's a guy. Of course, he's going to do that. We don't say, of course, she's a woman. Obviously, people do say that, but it's much more criticized, and rightly so. I think we need to criticize it more when we make these sweeping generalizations about guys. This is saying there are things that they cannot control. And so I would argue there has been more criticism, fortunately, of attributing things naturally to women's bodies. But I think we still continue to do it a lot with guys' bodies.
24:04 Ben Brock Johnson? Matthew argues that as a species, we have a vast repertoire of behaviors that allow us to coexist in societies. We make decisions about how to treat one another based on laws and morals that we came up with ourselves, not just biological or instinctual urges that we can't help but succumb to. This is something that ultimately sets us apart from our animal kingdom family members. Let's go back to Dave, the wolf researcher who was trying to get his publisher to stop making copies of his book and fix his alpha male legacy.
24:38 Speaker 01 Couldn't even get it stopped, the publishers to stop publishing it until two years ago. So that was, that book was in print for 52 years. And, and that misinformation was being out there. Uh, and the media people were looking at it. And so, um, and, and you know, science had been using that term for quite a while.
24:59 Ben Brock Johnson? I knew it was our fault, Dave.
25:07 Speaker 06 So where does this leave us with the whole alpha male concept? As it does or doesn't pertain to humans.
25:15 Ben Brock Johnson? This reminds me a bit of a meme that started this whole thing and that led to the pitch from our producer on this episode, Franny Monahan. And without describing it in great detail, I'll just say there's really a group of memes that now feature a photo of Dave Meach, a very normal looking mustachioed guy in a parka who does science. And this group of memes really serves to remind the extremely online that there's this guy who studied wolves once and referenced this idea of the alpha. And that may be the origin of this kind of mess that we are in when it comes to ideas about masculinity and power and leadership. Humans are animals formed by millennia of nature, right?
25:58 Ben Brock Johnson? And we're also, at least in our minds, special and different from the animal world. So reducing things to simplistic structures like the alpha or top dog is a pretty simplistic, non-scientific concept, um, and way of thinking of things. And I think there's a way to both recognize things that seem within our nature and also recognize those things in our nature are absolutely changeable. And society doesn't coalesce around our instincts, like society and civilization and the way that we interact with each other is really what we make of it.
26:29 Speaker 06 Yeah, I mean, biologically, I just want to kind of be like taking a little nap in a tree and instead I'm working this job. So what's up with that? You know what I mean?
26:45 Speaker 06 And also just that we associate the term alpha with being the leader when in reality, there are so many different ways to kind of like lead a group and guide a group and be a positive influence and, you know, member of that group.
27:02 Ben Brock Johnson? I've worked with all different kinds of leaders and, you know, alphas are great, but like, they're not always the best kind of leaders, right?
27:11 Speaker 06 Give me a beta with a good sense of humor any day.
27:13 Ben Brock Johnson? Yeah, right? Come on.
27:23 Speaker 06 Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Franny Monahan, is co-hosted by me, Amory Sivertson, and...
27:32 Ben Brock Johnson? Oh, Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by our production manager, Paul Vike. The rest of our team is Grace Tatter, Dean Russell, Emily Jenkaski, and our managing producer, Sumitajoshi.
27:43 Speaker 06 Endless Thread is a show about the clear lines between wolves in captivity and wild ones.
27:50 Ben Brock Johnson? If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or another story from the internet you want us to tell, you can hit us up, [email protected] .
28:23 Speaker 00 Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts, and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education. I am absolutely in favor of AI. In learning in the right context.
28:51 Speaker 01 And just to explain why you're excited about it.
28:52 Speaker 00 Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops. Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.
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