Differences in Social Information Are Critical to Understanding Aggressive Behavior in Animal Dominance Hierarchies

Sociality often involves conflict as individuals compete with group members for resources. In many species, including humans, individuals assort into dominance hierarchies. Individuals with more social information may be able to better optimize which individuals they challenge and in doing so, improve their overall rank in the hierarchy. Understanding how information is perceived, processed, and used by individuals in hierarchical systems is critical to understanding how animals make aggression decisions because different types of information can underlie different kinds of aggression strategies. This review summarizes recent research on the effect of five information types on animal conflict: Firstly, individual experience; secondly, recognition abilities; thirdly, social context; fourthly, transitive inference; and finally, network or global inference. This increased understanding of the information underlying social interactions can begin to provide new insight into structured conflict and could be useful to better understand strategic decision-making, social plasticity, and the cognitive load of sociality across species, including humans.