The northern muriqui, a famously peaceful monkey species in Brazil, for example, maintains a gentle, egalitarian society. Animals’ genetics as well as their environments may determine how despotic – or not – they are. And perhaps we can learn from that. “The more I observed mice,” wrote Crowcroft, “the more I came to recognise elements of the behaviour of my fellow men, and the more I began to understand both species.”
Crowcroft’s work – though criticised by some at the time as a waste of government money – has influenced many researchers, including Justin Varholick, a biomedical scientist at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, the US. He studied mouse behaviour during his PhD and says, “The basis of most of my research was that book.”
Mice housed in laboratories, often in small cages, are prone to despotism. In 2019, Varholick and colleagues published a study about this behaviour. They observed dozens of mice, which they separated into groups of three, and housed in standard lab cages. Varholick found that the rank of individual mice could change, depending on who was in the cage with them. They evaluated this using a method called a tube test: put two mice into opposite ends of a tube. Whoever backs out first has, by implication, declared themselves the subordinate.
“The social relationships in the cages are not the same across cages,” he says. “They’re very different depending on who is in the cages.” Varholick’s main goal was to better understand these animals in order to reduce aggression in lab mice, which can be problematic for researchers as well as the unlucky subordinate mice themselves.
In the wild, environmental factors might determine whether despotism emerges in a particular group of mice. And some animal species are famously despotic. Take chacma baboons, which live in southern Africa. A well-known 2008 study showed that despots typically ruled these baboon societies, and this played out, for example, when the monkeys went looking for food. “Group foraging decisions were consistently led by the individual who acquired the greatest benefits from those decisions, namely the dominant male,” the researchers noted.