The Greek Alphabet (alpha, beta, gamma) has many uses, but is the identification and labelling of male personality types one of them? I have my doubts.
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Male Modals
We all know the top two, but let’s remind ourselves of them and get to know the others.
ALPHA: Confident, outgoing, a charismatic leader, enterprising. A macho man, but aggressive with it.
BETA: Friendly, reserved, loyal, collaborative. The quintessential “Nice Guy” no one wants to be. His default state? Submissive.
GAMMA: Adventurous, eager, aware, empathetic. Thinks big but can lack focus. Can be clingy in relationships.
DELTA: Resentful, blaming, self-sabotaging. A victim of life.
OMEGA: The creature outsider. Self-reliant, prefers to remain independent of social groups or hierarchies. Driven and intelligent but has little impulse to compete or conform. Gains strength from being alone.
SIGMA: Likeable and confident, but cunning and calculating. The cold assassin you didn’t see coming.
SIGMA we should automatically discount from the discussion. It doesn’t fit the hierarchical code, it’s been tacked on at the end, after the event. It’s genetically modified maleness; nowadays, we only eat organic.
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Hybrid Options Cost More
You can be more than one male modal in the course of your lifetime. An unsuccessful ALPHA is likely to become a DELTA, for example, even if only for a period, before dusting himself off and trying again. An impressionable young man may start off life as an ALPHA but might mature into a GAMMA. Then of course there’s the ALPHA/BETA hybrid *everybody* climbing the corporate ladder claims to be (“I’m the best of both worlds, I’m all of the positive, none of the negative!”).
Or you might be a BETA in the office and a GAMMA at home. Or an ALPHA amongst one group, but a BETA in another (out-ALPHAed by the competition). All this switching sounds impossibly tiring, but it does go on, apparently.
Or does it?
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A Debunked Concept from Lupine Behavioural Studies?
The scientist who coined the term “alpha male” did so to describe wolves who assert dominance over their pack through aggression. That scientist was David Mech, his book The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species (1970).
By 1999, he had abandoned the term “alpha male” entirely, calling it “useless”. Why? It described specific behaviour of animals held in captivity for scientific observation, which altered their behaviour. And the research didn’t take into account that, in their natural habit, wolves pair off (like humans), have children, and establish a new pack in which the male and female wolves are co-dominant.
Not that his clarification mattered.
The damage was already done; like COVID-19, ALPHAs had crossed over from the animal kingdom and into the realm of humankind, and from there they were — as a concept, and as a compelling proposition apparently — cemented into the public imagination by Neil Strauss’s The Game (2005) and the wider “pick-up artist” community. “Other men want to be him!” was an oft-heard rallying call around that time. “And women want to be with him!”
The trope stuck because the idea of an alpha male makes a lot of intuitive sense. Big, loud, and brash men who dominate and bully their way to the top of the pecking order — such people do exist, and they tend to hang out in places of power. And where there is power, there is (almost always) hierarchy.
The ALPHA traits are amongst those we continue to valorise — even now — if only because such behaviours do still yield results. People tend to give ALPHA dogs what they want, at least at first. We humans are very susceptible to social dominance. We are very influenced by displays of confidence.
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I don’t like to label myself — I’m unique!
But personality types do exist. (Only Zippy is genuinely “a” unique, and even he has an identical cousin, Zippo.)
We are genetically programmed to behave in certain ways, and we are all the products of our upbringing. How we live, what we prioritise, the people with whom we choose (and don’t choose) to spend time — all these components matter. And we are a whole lot more malleable than we sometimes like to think.
It’s all well and good to eschew labels. But even if we don’t label ourselves, we can bet the farm other people will.
If it were just a matter of labels, this aspect of masculinity wouldn’t have piqued my interest. What’s interesting is that the ALPHA/BETA/GAMMA paradigm is trying to do far more than (just) give expression to different personality traits and how they tend to cluster and manifest.
What the ALPHA/BETA/GAMMA paradigm is all about is hierarchy. And it’s a hierarchy of maleness in which the ALPHA is top dog.
Categorising personality types is one thing. But creating a hierarchy of them is quite another. Whatever else it might be (useful, toxic, necessary, inevitable), it’s also a compelling insight into what we currently believe (or are asked to believe) is effective (or even heroic) when it comes to the currently difficult issue of how men are expected to conduct themselves.
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The Pathology of Social Dominance
Here’s the thing about hierarchies.
The goals, rarely, are suspect. Who doesn’t want access to power, money, mates (in both meanings of that word)? Who, for that matter, wants to be weak, submissive, subordinate? No one volunteers to be low-status, because the lower you are in the hierarchy, the less likely you are to find financial stability or attract a sexual partner.
What’s suspect are the means and the mode. And what we’re dealing with here is a very black and white picture of masculinity which encourages (mainly young) men to act is certain predefined ways.
There is a cruelty to it, is there not? Moulding ourselves into an “ideal” personality, a quest for a place in a pre-existing, determinist “natural order”.
To get to the top, says this paradigm, you must be bullish and you must dominate your competition. Shout if you have to, is the implication.
And if you don’t, you’ll be relegated to BETA status or (as new studies claim the remaining letters of the Greek alphabet, no longer even in order of dominance) possibly GAMMA or DELTA or… whatever.
It’s so limiting, isn’t it? But that’s the à la carte invitation: you can choose your dish, but you can’t pick ’n’ mix the ingredients. When it comes to behavioural identity, are the rules of the restaurant appropriate? Are they even applicable?
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Rule by Fear and Alienation
There are plenty of men out there who want to be the leader of their chosen pack, but that doesn’t make all of us ALPHAs.
And who would want to be? These are dangerous times for the ALPHA male. He’s more likely to find himself cancelled than crowned King of the Jungle. The caveman vibe is not on brand. The opposite, in fact: single straight guys are told that if they want to attract women, they should dial down the assertion and cultivate “kindness” and “altruism” (which sounds very low-energy BETA).
There is considerable weakness and insecurity embedded into the impulse to dominate. To dominate is to intimidate, to threaten, to coerce. Its byproducts are arrogance, conceit and instability.
It’s a curious paradox of the ALPHA aesthetic. The achievements of those behaviours are, more often than not, transient, and there is a danger associated with that type of rule. There can only be one ALPHA per community (which does help explain the weirder corporate dynamics I’ve witnessed over the years), and you find yourself always watching your back in case an Iago underling is on manoeuvres.
Dominance, ultimately, is a short-term strategy for success. It condemns the ALPHA to a self-perpetuating lonely captivity, and it’s hard to retain one’s status as a mover and shaker if you are no longer carefully aligned to the particular needs of all the groups you command.
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Projection/Outcome Bias
ALPHA behaviour seeks to link dominance with attractiveness, respect and status. Remove that link and mostly what’s left is boorish, slightly foolish behaviour. So it is too with the ALPHA/BETA false dichotomy. Unless you dominate, so the argument goes, you are condemned to submit.
Awareness of the function of the ALPHA/BETA/GAMMA paradigm is, however, important. For these micro-cultures do exist, and knowledge of the behavioural rules and expectations helps young men achieve their goals, or at least figure out how best to game the outcome.
Humans are hierarchical creatures, but we’re not as hierarchical as packs of dogs and wolves, for example, in which every member has a place in the hierarchy. This gives us room for manoeuvre. Would we benefit from casting a more critical eye over certain ALPHA-styled behaviours? Yes. Culturally, that process has been underway for some time, though there is little evidence yet of meaningful real world change filtering through. Perhaps that will come with time.
And what would an ALPHA-less world hierarchy look like? Pretty similar to the way it’s always looked, a world in which the best looking, cleverest, socially able people rise to the top social strata. It’s the ALPHA who’s the historical anomaly.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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