About Us

At the Chase Lab, we have spent over 35 years thinking about how social creatures, from ants to humans, live and work together.


Whether in closely coordinated societies or more loosely associated groups, the simple facts of association and common tasks raises certain basic questions:


1. When small groups of individuals live together, whether they are chickens at one extreme or humans at the other, there must be some processes through which they set up social relationships so as to avoid conflict and fights at every meeting.

      • How do they form and maintain social relationships in these small groups?
      • Are processes of relationship formation and maintenance similar across different species?


2. In many populations of humans and animals, important material resources are in short supply.

      • How are these resources distributed in populations of humans and animals?
      • Are the processes of resource distribution the same in some human and animal groups? If they are, why are they?


3. Individuals of various sorts such as ants, humans, and robots work together cooperatively.

      • How do these individuals coordinate their efforts so as to get jobs done?
      • Are there any common principles of coordination that apply across animals, humans, and even machines?


Regardless of the kinds of entities involved, these questions always require answers in terms of behavioral processes. We need to know the behavioral dynamics that produce patterns of social organization - the social relationships, resource distribution, and coordination.

At this point, my students and I are concentrating on projects investigating the formation of relationships in small groups and the distribution of resources. For relationship formation, we are investigating the formation of "dominance hierarchies", also known as pecking orders, in small groups of cichlid fish. And for the distribution of resources, we are investigating what are know as "vacancy chain" processes in hermit crabs. For more information about dominance hierarchies and vacancy chains, please see the links under Dominance Hierarchies and Vacancy Chains on the Home page.