The Socio-Sexual Hierarchy – A Guide to the Male Personalities

In the early 1980s, Frans de Waal, a primatologist who studies the interactions of chimpanzees, published “Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes.” In the book, he drew parallels between the human and chimp societies. Biologists already used terms like alpha and beta to describe male types in the animal kingdom, but before de Wall, they had never been applied to humans.

At first, anthropologists and psychologists differentiated between alpha and beta males, but soon a whole hierarchy of male personality types became defined, and the socio-sexual order was born. At present, the hierarchy consists of six or seven personality types.

From Alpha to Omega: 

• Alpha Male.
• Beta Male.
• Gamma Male.
• Delta Male.
• Zeta Male.
• Sigma Male.
• Omega Male.

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