Andy’s Quick Hits (185): Social ranking and “winning mindset” in the brain

Many animal species including humans have forms of social ranking and hierarchies. Researchers at the Salk Institute have now identified the circuits in the brain that guide this and what’s more they have been able to predict in advance of an interaction how this will influence behaviour in a given situation.

The medial prefrontal cortex has been known to encode social rank, but we haven’t known precisely how. These researchers, working with mice, have now done this. They first put mice together and let natural ranks and hierarchies develop. This impacts things like who gets first dibs at the food bowl, etc. Then they put them through a series of experiments by matching different pairs together and changing the circumstances such as how much food there was, and how hungry the individual mice were.

First off, they noticed that the signal associated with social rank was activated as soon as another mouse was present. This shows that the concept of social hierarchy is always present in our brains!

However, there is a moderating effect of this on another region in the medial prefrontal cortex. Namely that of what the researchers called a “wining mindset” i.e. desire to get the reward. Of note is that winning mindset sometimes overplays social dominance.