“…when groups of people – especially males – spend much time together, some sort of hierarchy , if implicit and subtle, is pretty sure to appear. Whether we know it or not, we tend naturally to rank one another, and we signify the ranking through patterns of attention, agreement, and deference – whom we pay attention to, whom we agree with, whose jokes we laugh at, whose suggestions we take.”

From the Moral Animal by Robert Wright.

Pretty funny stuff.