Many social mamals do bully those who are not normal enougth to their standards. You can see that in wolves, dogs, cows, dolphins, monkeys...
Maybe humans do have many more categories to bully others, but at the end in most mamals group there are bosses (alphas), followers, and members who are even lower that followers.
The democracy thing of all being ecuals, same rigths, respect for all, lets include minorities, etc... Has never been seen in nature, and is not part of our biology either. So its great theorical concept but most of the time what apply is biology.
About people on the spectrum, the common feature we have is that for us, social skills do not come instinctively. If we are asked "How are you doing?" we may take it in a literal way and not inderstand the social intentions behind that, or how are we spected to answer, or when to answer, or in which tone to answer, or what body behavour use while answering, or how to adapt all those if we are asked by an alpha or by a follower or by a marginated person. Normal humans do know that in an instinctive way when they get to 10 years old.
We may need years of training to understand and mimic NT instinctive social skills, we can do that paying a lot of energy and get drained. High Functionality ASD may do it better while low Functionality ASD will have more problems or being unable.
Not having social skills is very high in the bully categories of any human group. The reason is that we Clash with alphas, followers and all the social structure of the group. So in order to maintain the structure of social group that human biology demands, the only place for us is out of the group or at a lower level. Only masking and camuflating or in exchange of a lot of work value can we aspire to be accepted as followers.
There goes another wall of text with info that may be useful or not.
I think you had a lot of useful things to say. As a biologist though, I do have to add something to what you said above.
A lot of the behavioural biology experiments that were done to study dominance hierarchies in social animals, that concluded what you are saying here, are actually outdated studies that were flawed, and involved the confirmation bias of the researchers at the time - this is now over 50 years ago, and the researchers themselves were part of a dominance hierarchy as described, and tended to project that onto their research, and conclude according to their confirmation bias instead of dig deeper. One big methodology problem was that these early studies were done with captive animals (zoo, captive domestic etc) instead of wild, which is a bit like studying a prison population and saying that is representative of the general population or of normal family and social life. You can see the problem there, can't you - but the hasty conclusions of those studies are still held up in popular culture as truths, when the truth is more complex, and more beautiful, that the early research suggested.
At the same time, researchers who were in the field with wild animals were drawing rather different conclusions. They saw a lot of cooperation amongst the groups of animals they were studying, and even compassion, but could not fully publish their findings at the time because they would have been laughed off the academic stage for it, like Alfred Wegener was when he proposed the theory of continental drift - he was ostracised by geologists for his idea, and told, "You're not even a geologist!" but actually, he turned out to be right, and his theory is now accepted.
One of those people was Jane Goodall. You don't have to dig deep to find her talking about these things if you do some internet searches, and it's really interesting to hear her talk about all of that. (Another good account on cooperative versus competitive social behaviours and how they vary depending on conditions in an experimental equine herd is given by Dr Marthe Kiley-Worthington in What It Is To Be Equine.)
The behaviour of captive social animals put together willy-nilly by humans and kept in enclosures is different from the behaviour of wild social animals in their original family groups / self-selected social groups. It's an insecure and stressful situation for a lot of animals, especially if they didn't grow up together, have older group members to model behaviour, etc. Insecurity and stress bring out a lot of aggression - also in humans, and biologists like Desmond Morris (baboon researcher) argued in the 1960s that humans themselves have created a "zoo" situation with modern society, which is causing a lot of unnecessary stress and aggression, similar to what you see in overcrowded rat cages.
So there's two main ideas from this.
1) While social dominance hierarchies do exist, they are much less important than is popularly imagined in the lives of wild social mammals, and have to be balanced against the fact that social mammals other than humans also show a lot of cooperation, care and help to one another. The "cooperation" part is given far less popular press than the "dominance hierarchy" part which is often extrapolated into "dog eat dog".
2) Human beings themselves typically are, in modern Western societies, far more "dog eat dog" and stressed than they were, for example, in Indigenous hunter-gatherer groups (e.g. from Australia, Tahiti etc - as documented even by Captain Cook and his crew). This is especially so in places based politically on dictatorships, and even in countries that have adopted a very competitive neoliberalism, like the US, UK and Australia - see also the difference between those countries and Finland, for example, in their "world happiness" ranking. So even humans themselves are more "dog eat dog" in situations like this than in more traditional societies.
...and I guess what I'm saying in relation to your post, @Atrapa Almas, is that when we compare ourselves to the kinds of dominance hierarchies you are describing, we have to also keep in mind that a lot of that stuff is actually quite dysfunctional, and that as a society we need to work on making the way we behave towards one another healthier - whether NT or ND!
Gold medal for anyone who got this far.
I find this topic so fascinating...By the way, I've worked with equine groups for a few decades, and in the past decade have spent time rehabilitating a couple of super-aggressive stallions who were improperly socialised and kept separate from a social group, back into a social group, and we've done that successfully on both occasions. These animals have learnt from their new social group to have a happy and cooperative life in a herd. The group includes a blind donkey, who is given special leeway by all the other herd members, and is specifically looked after by a donkey who basically adopted her. She also does pretty well for herself, but our equine group is evidence against the idea that an animal that is "different" is necessarily ostracised by the group, and that such a behaviour is "natural".
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