There's some psych stuff I vaguely recall. These recollections are not quite correct, and that's the only thing I'll say to discourage their repetition, as if their source (psychology) and perpetuator (me) were not sufficient to dissuade.


In groups there are three sorts of people. The alphas are the leaders - they're the guys that everyone wants to be like. The betas are the ones who follow the alphas. The gammas are the people who just go off and do their own thing. Now the thing is that there are very few - if any - who are perfectly in one category or the other and the deviation occurs along at least two axes.

First, there can be several alphas in a group, sometimes in their own subgroups and sometimes there are those who are alpha with respect to most members of the group, but beta with respect to the more-alpha alphas.


Second, even in a group of, say, gammas, alphas and betas will emerge. You can see this phenomenon at a chess club, for example, although the criterion might be very different than strength or looks or charm.

(Often time the terms are used to describe stereotypically male behavior - as in alpha male, but my recollection is they are much more general than this.)


There's a whole branch of psychology that deals with ingroup/outgroup behaviors - how do people behave towards those they perceive are members of their groups and whom they do not perceive in like wise. I can't recall study titles or who did them, but as an example, there was one (and I've probably got everything wrong, but I'll repeat it anyways) in which they took a group of girls and put them together and the pretty ones formed a clique unto themselves and treated the less pretty girls very shabbily - and the more plain girls just took it as if that was the way things were supposed to be. The pretty girls just took the role of alpha and the plain girls just took the role of beta. Then they took a group of girls, all of whom were considered very beautiful and they broke down again - suddenly girls who were previously deemed flawless manifested egregious imperfections that made them distinctly less worthy of alphadom.

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