Our Place in the Pecking Order

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For whatever reason, I’ve heard the phrase “pecking order” used across various contexts more times in the last week than ever before.

So, I got to thinking, where did this strange term come from?

A quick backstory.

The term “pecking order” started in the 1920s when a Norwegian scientist named Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe (now that’s a Norwegian name if I’ve ever heard one) was observing the social hierarchies of chickens.

He was home from college at his family’s farm one summer, and he wondered why the chickens always ate in the same order. Like clockwork, the 10 chickens would eat in the exact same order for every meal, every day.

So he got curious and wanted to see what would happen if he added a chicken to the flock. He went over to his neighbors’ farm, took one of their chickens from the coop, and threw it into his family’s chicken pen.

What happened? Absolute mayhem.

All of the chickens literally pecked each other aggressively, from the alpha hen all the way down to the bottom hen (which the others actually pecked to death!). After the chaos was over, order was restored, and the new hen found her place in the pecking order. The group stayed at 10 hens in size.

Young Thorleif’s takeaway was that when the chickens were placed in a group, they established a clear dominance hierarchy. The most dominant chickens were determined not by age or strength, but by who dared to peck whom in a fight. And thus, “pecking order” came to be.

Once the size of the flock grows too large, the pecking order becomes too complex, and it breaks down into aggression, fighting, and chaos.

Today, we use “pecking order” to describe social hierarchies, where people are ranked according to their status or power. And interestingly enough, human pecking orders don’t operate so differently from chickens.

Why do we self-organize?

In our society, individuals define themselves either by 1) their rank in a hierarchy (“the pecking order”), or 2) their connection to a territory (a “home base” or a “turf”).

We organize ourselves in these ways because the world is complex, and we find comfort in simplicity and order, as opposed to complexity and disorder. It gives us a sense of psychological security to create these mental shortcuts and trick ourselves into thinking the world is nice and organized.

Between the two, we tend to be hard-wired to prefer hierarchies.

Just think back to our childhoods — we had our “squads,” our packs, the groups of people we would ride or die with. In these groups, without even really mentioning it, we know who the top dog is, and we know our own personal place in the hierarchy, even if unspoken.

We define ourselves, almost instinctively, by our place within the group — whether that be on the playground, on the court or field, in a club, etc.

Hierarchies and defining ourselves by others’ opinions

We learn early-on to define our own self-worth by others’ opinions of us.

Colleges, advertisers, and social media all use this to their advantage.

Go to this school, get this job, buy this phone, wear these clothes, share this on your story, do this thing, and everyone will love you.

Nearly every major institution or organization is a hierarchy. Wall Street banks, Washington D.C., social media networks, giant corporations, colleges — they all have a pecking order.

But hierarchies tend to function better in smaller groups.

Back when we were kids and our friend groups were less than 10 people, hierarchies worked just fine. In high school, everyone has their place in the system The athletes, the nerds, the cool kids, the band kids — everyone knows their place and the system generally seems to work.

But there’s one problem — the pecking order can only hold so many chickens before it breaks down.

When hierarchies stop working

My grade school class had 28 people. In that world, everyone knew everyone, and we all felt comfort in the structure that the hierarchy provided.

Then my high school class had over 300 people. Although it was less comfortable, we grew used to it over time. Maybe we didn’t know everyone as well as grade school, but everyone pretty much knew where they stood in the social pecking order.

But after I graduated high school, everything changed. I moved halfway across the country to go to college at UNC-Chapel Hill, and with nearly 20,000 undergrads, this world was radically different. It was impossible to know everyone.

Fast forward a few more years, where many of us moved to major cities like New York or LA, and the idea of hierarchies breaks down entirely. We can’t possibly know millions of people and establish a clear hierarchy.

Not knowing a single person when I first moved to LA, I felt overwhelmed and anonymous, submerged as one among many in the masses.

As a thought exercise, if I were to walk down the street in Manhattan, I would go entirely unrecognized. Most people are the same — we couldn’t tell someone’s place in a hierarchy by their face or name on an island with millions of people.

Evolutionarily, this makes sense, as we’ve been wired to function most comfortably in tribes the size of which we stayed in for most of human history — maybe 20 people, but definitely not more than a few hundred.

The town where I grew up in the Midwest had around 1,000 people, and even at that size, most people knew everyone and their place in the hierarchy, so the system worked.

But any larger than that, there is a point where hierarchies stop working. We can only remember the names and faces of so many people.

So what do we do when we can’t remember everyone?

We revert to displaying status symbols as mental shortcuts that show our place in the hierarchy. We drive fancier cars, buy bigger houses, send our kids to better schools.

We must keep up with those around us so that they know where we stand in the pecking order.

But the irony of it all? Nobody cares.

We dove into why we want things in a previous article.

It’s only when we move past these status games that we begin to explore the alternative to hierarchies: territories.

Where territories become useful

Rather than getting caught on the social treadmill to create order and define ourselves, we can instead think territorially.

Everybody has “their thing.” Or we do, but we just don’t realize it yet.

For me, it’s running. For my sister, it’s making art. For some of my friends, it’s cycling, climbing, or playing the piano. These are our territories.

When Tom Brady steps on the football field, that’s his territory. When Dave Chapelle gives a comedy bit, that’s his territory. When Bruce Springsteen walks on stage, that’s his territory.

Territories can be physical locations, but they can also be actions, states of mind, or our “happy places.” They’re entities where we can define what success looks like for ourselves by our own benchmarks, rather than external ones.

In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield defines 5 criteria of a territory:

Think about the work or activities that bring you the most joy — chances are, they check some or all of these boxes.

The whole point of territories is that we determine them ourselves — we don’t seek external validation to justify them, they can’t be bought, and they don’t come at the expense of others.

In a previous post, we asked the question, “Am I more interested in playing the game or just winning the game? Would I still play this game if I could win and not tell anyone about it?”

We perceive life in relative terms to establish a sense of psychological order, but that can be either relative to others or relative to a past version of ourselves.

When we think in hierarchies, we only care about winning the game.

But when we think in territories, it’s us versus our past selves. We find just as much joy in the process as we do the outcome.

My grandpa used to always say, “cut the pizza into 4 pieces, I’m not hungry enough to eat 8.”

Constantly fighting our way to the top of a hierarchy is a losing battle. It’s a zero sum game where one person’s win comes at the expense of another’s loss. We’re fighting over how to divide up the slices of a fixed pizza.

Territories are positive sum games. There are an endless number of territories, and we can each have our own, developing them and making them better.

In territories, we’re creating more and better pizzas, and we don’t have to worry about how we divide them up.

As Schjelerup-Ebbe noticed 100 years ago, if we put too many chickens together, the pecking order breaks down. Pure chaos.

We humans aren’t that different.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Adam Grant.

Rather than worry about our place in the pecking order, it’s a lot more fun to explore the vastness of uncharted territory. That’s where the real breakthroughs occur.

Let’s play positive sum games. What’s your territory?

-Owen

Fresh Finds

Silk Road by Bike — Beijing to Barcelona

Newsletter | Multiple 5-10 minute reads

Last year, a guy I knew from college and his friend decided they were going to quit their jobs and traverse the Silk Road by bike. Yes, you read that correctly — ride bikes nearly halfway across the world, from Beijing to Barcelona. They just started writing a recount of their journey, and story is EPIC — the people they met, the things they saw, the crazy unexpected turns. Definitely take some time to check out their Substack.

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