Mice Are Secretly Teaching Us How Humans Compete for Power

In social species, hierarchy matters. From boardrooms to playgrounds, humans often sense where they stand in the social ladder—usually without needing to ask. But how is this rank determined when meeting someone new? A new study reveals that mice, like people, instinctively judge social rank using subtle sensory cues—specifically, smell.

This discovery about chemosensory dominance in mice not only deepens our understanding of animal behavior but could offer new directions for how we study brain-based processing of social status in humans.

How Mice Smell Social Power

In a recent study led by researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, male mice were tested in a "tunnel confrontation" challenge—essentially a clear tube where two mice meet in the middle and must decide who backs down. The outcome often reflected each mouse’s social confidence.

Interestingly, when meeting unfamiliar mice, the animals could instantly judge their opponent’s dominance without a history of past fights. How? Through scent.

Researchers discovered that mice rely on two smell-based systems:

• Olfactory system: for airborne odors

• Vomeronasal system: for chemical signals passed through close contact

Blocking both systems made the mice unable to detect dominance. But when just one was blocked, the other could compensate—showing these systems work together to determine who’s boss.

What This Means for the Brain

What’s striking is that mice don’t rely on size, hormone levels, or visual cues to assess dominance. Instead, they infer status in real-time by sensing chemical messages. This means that decisions about aggression or retreat aren’t hardwired; they are calculated in the brain using incoming information and prior knowledge of one’s own status.

This suggests that dominance isn’t just a behavioral trait—it’s a dynamic brain process, integrating external cues with internal status. Scientists now want to identify exactly which brain areas help make this decision.

Parallels in Humans

While humans don’t usually sniff each other to determine status, we do process rank quickly using other signals—such as tone of voice, body language, clothing, or posture. Just like mice, we use multiple sensory inputs to figure out where we stand socially, especially in new environments.

Understanding how the brain evaluates social rank could have major implications for psychiatry—especially in conditions like social anxiety, autism, or PTSD, where processing social cues can be altered. The mouse model provides a powerful tool to explore how the brain organizes social information and adapts to new groups.

The Future of Social Neuroscience

This study reminds us that behavior is deeply linked to brain processing—and that sensory systems play a bigger role in social interaction than we often realize. As researchers further uncover how dominance is encoded in the brain, it could open up new ways to support people who struggle with social processing due to neurological or psychiatric conditions.

By decoding the chemosensory dominance in mice, scientists may one day improve how we understand, treat, and even train the social brain.

Discover more at https://interventionalpsychiatry.org/

Citations:

1. Borak, N., et al. (2025). Dominance rank inference in mice via chemosensation. Current Biology.ttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.04.063ScienceDirect+3PubMed+3Kohl Lab+3 

2. Francis Crick Institute. (2025, May 20). Silent Signals: How We Recognize Social Rank Instantly. https://www.crick.ac.uk/news/2025-05-20-silent-signals-recognizing-social-rank