Dominance

This topic submitted by Sarah Brad and Leslie (HornBM@muohio.edu) at 4:58 pm on 2/28/01. Additions were last made on Saturday, March 2, 2002. Section: Cummins.

Spanning hundreds of years, discrimination, oppression, torture, brutality, and tyranny remain all too common features of the human condition. This nearly ubiquitous barbarism surfaces in cultures consistently across the globe. Why is oppression so hard to eliminate? What is our own human capacity to torture?

INTRO:
As animals, we all have the capacity to be either dominant or submissive. However, in human society, dominance and submission become much more complex than genetics. Genocide, prejudice, and torture do not exist in the animal world, nor do the motivations behind them. Although there are similarities, dominance in modern human society is no longer restricted to competition for resources/wealth/mates. Often times, it is the product of ideologies, values, rationalizations, and beliefs. These belief systems are built into the infrastructure of human societies (laws, rights, religion, socio-economic status, education, etc.), and are used by the people at the top to keep other people at the bottom in submission. Advances in technology and weaponry have also radically changed our ability to dominate and destroy. We believe that dominance is highly situational, which would mean that it could be both controlled and induced. We are interested in examining what in our biology allows us to be so malleable, so capable of becoming the oppressor or the oppressed. In conjunction with avenues of social control, this is a scary combination, which can have horrible implications. We will examine specific cases where the dynamics of the culture determines where one stands and who prevails. We will do a case-study analysis of honor killings in Pakistan, Nazi concentration camps, and the indigenous Haurani struggle to maintain their existence, and see how the maintenance of and motivations behind the dominance differs from that in the animal world. This research is interesting because the question of how humans are capable of committing unimaginable atrocities against one another remains unanswered. Does our increased capacity for intelligence bring with it an increased capacity to justifiably harm and manipulate others?

RELEVANCE OF RESEARCH QUESTION:
There are numerous existing theories behind social dominance. Although there are profound differences between societies there are also elements of social power shared between societies. It has been social scientists that have tried to construct a theoretical understanding of these phenomena. We will be looking at psychological theories, social psychological theories, social structural theories and evolutionary theories of oppressive behavior; all of these theories approach different aspects of oppressive behavior. We will try and answer two main questions: Why do people from one social group oppress and discriminate against people from other groups? What elements interact and reinforce each other to produce and maintain group based social hierarchy? Each case study speaks of a different type of dominance and therefore demands its own explanations and research.

For example, our study of concentration camps focuses on the psychology of torture, how it creates a submissive victim, but also looks at the evolution of the torturer as well as the bystander. The Nazis controlled the Jews in several different ways, which can be seen in the stories that Holocaust survivors tell. First, all the Jews are restricted to ghettos. Ghettos were a community of houses that were cut off from their surrounding neighbors and given very little food. The Nazis then mandated that a Jewish council be established and held responsible for obeying and implementing the Nazi's orders. One of those orders was the elimination of all public religious practices. This was a huge way of making the Jews submissive because it was their faith that had kept them motivated and hopeful. These ghetto settings were used to force people to die of starvation and disease and caused an all-around demoralization of the Jews. After leaving the ghetto the Jews were then forced into cattle cars that carried upwards toward 500 people and there was no way to sit, no food and no air. After traveling for several days like this the Jews would disembark the train and be sent either to the gas chambers for immediate extermination or to work camps where they were fed only enough to still be able to work. In Behind Barbed Wires, Barker discusses how this is one of the first occasions where prisoners were utilized as workers. Sometimes this work was farming or factory working, but on many other occasions it was simply to move something from one side of the field to the other. If the Jews failed to follow any orders they would be severely beaten, if not killed. There was also a certain socialization process behind the perpetrators of these actions. We will examine basic human tendencies to differentiate, dislike the unfamiliar, identify with a group, stereotype, etc; people evolve a certain capacity to harm others in the same way one would gain the capacity to help others. What role does a sense of power play?

In the case of women in Pakistan, we will delve into the social structure, mainly focusing on who has the power, who the laws protect, who sets the moral codes, etc. Honor killings are the murder of women for adultery or suspicion of adultery, usually executed by a male relative in order to restore the honor to the family. Additionally, women are encouraged to commit suicide to restore honor to the family if either party commits adultery. In Pakistan, the rights of women are not protected, as males are often not persecuted for these crimes. If a woman is raped, according to the law, the rapist cannot be tried if he marries the rape victim because it is seen to restore honor to the family. Otherwise, the female is viewed as unpure and cannot marry. All of these forces work to keep women in a submissive position within society.
In the research we will be doing for this project we will be focusing on dominance and how it affects animals. In the one article it described how a species of animals determined who would be dominate. They found that normally older ones would be more dominant then younger ones. They also found males who were the same age as other females, would be more dominate. This information pertaining to animals will help us to see if people and animals have the same 'rules' for who is dominate. We will be able to tell this from the answers we get when we have people take our survey. The effects of animal dominance will be another topic we will be studying. One article that we read was very interesting on this topic.

It was about the declining black duck population and the increasing population of the mallard population. The researchers found the reason for this was that the mallards were being more dominate over the black ducks. The mallards were preventing the black ducks from breeding with the other black ducks. Instead the male mallards were breeding with the female black ducks causing the black duck population to decline and the mallard population to increase. This obviously was causing a large population change since scientists decided to research it. This just was an interesting study into the effects of dominance. Studying animals will also show us ways that dominance is possessed over others and see if those methods are the same that humans use.
MATERIALS AND METHODS:
Although we will use data from psychological experiments relating to dominance, submission, and torture, the majority of the data will be from first hand accounts of concentration camps, honor killings, and indigenous persons. We will gather data and analyze data showing the dynamics of dominance within the animal world. Most of our materials are first hand accounts or personal experiences derived from literature. However, due to the time and material constraint, we will rely on data from psychological experiments pertaining to torture, dominance, etc. for the simple reason that they would be more statistically sound. We will also be using information from scholarly journals and the surveys collected on campus. We will be surveying our natural systems class, a global gender politics class and other students on Western's campus. We will end up distributing about 90 surveys. We plan to have these surveys tallied and taken at the end of two weeks.
LINK TO SURVEY.

Here is a link to our survey

Barker, A.J. "Behind Barbed Wire"
Sidanius, Pratto. "Social Dominance"
Forrest, Duncan. "A Glimpse of Hell: Reports on Torture Worldwide"
http://students.depaul.edu/~lhandzli/auschwitz/index.htm?dropmenu
http://library.thinkquest.org/13195/gather/frame/htm.
Bryant, David M. and Newton, Anne V. "Dominance and survival of dippers Cinclus cinclus"
Nol, Erica & Cheng, Kimerly & Nichols, Cathleen. "Heritability and phenotypic correlations of behaviour and dominance rank of Japenese quail"
Khazraie, K. Campan, M. "The role of prior agonistic experience in dominance relationships in male crickets"
Hoysak, Drew J. & Ankney, C. Davison. "Correlates of behavioural dominance in mallards and American black ducks"
Suedfeld, Peter. "Psychology and Torture".

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