system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Are humans instinctually inclined to forming dominance hierarchies?

I know human societies can have tiers, but hunter-gatherers are generally egalitarian.  My interest is on the smaller-scale, whether humans have alpha, betas, gammas, etc like chimps or wolves.
gpt
If you look at primates, you have a range between species which exhibit very strong hierarchical systems and species which exhibit very weak ones. The very general rule is that the greater the sexual dimorphism (the physical differences between sexes, particularly size and strength in this case) the more likely the species has a strong hierarchy. As with most of the claims in this post, these are going to be generalities, there will always be exceptional circumstances and examples which make the whole thing both complicated and interesting.

Human behavior is more plastic (changeable) than in other species, but our range generally falls in the middle of primates with greater degrees of diversity. Take courtship practices as an example; hierarchical primates exhibit strong polygamous tendancies, with a few dominant males mating with many females and relationships not doing much to withstand changes in social status while egalitarian primates exhibit monogomous long-term relationships. Humans exhibit all of these behaviours with high degrees of frequency, but looking across time and cultures, we tend to see serial monogomy being the predominant mating strategy with dedicated relationships which are broken after a few child-bearing cycles.

Similarly, low-density tribal societies tend to be somewhere in the middle with a defined hierarchy which intermittently becomes important in settling disputes within the group. We tend to not see many populations of this sort with anything like the agressive dominance we see in hierarchical primates, but we do see hierarchy as a resolution to issues in a much higher degree than in egalitarian species.

The deeper issue is that there is no behavior without genetics and environment working together and human behavior is exceptional in its responsiveness to environmental context (learning). To say that something is an 'instinct' is far too simple. Our 'instincts' are always a reaction to the environmental stimulus we are and have previously received and the diversity of social hierarchical systems and the conviction which the people support them is tremendous. The capacity for either hierarchy or egalitarianism given different contexts is very large and making a claim that any of them is 'unnatural' would be very difficult.