Clarity from Violence? Intragroup Aggression and the Structure of Status Hierarchies

Status hierarchies are fundamental forms of social order that structure peer interactions like intragroup aggression. The reciprocal relationship, however, remains unclear. Does intragroup aggression strengthen, or weaken, status hierarchies? Under what conditions? To answer these questions, I analyze an original dataset containing victimization and directed friendship networks of 8,229 adolescents across 256 classes and three semesters. Measuring the strength of status hierarchies by how likely friendship nominations are characterized by hierarchical triads, I show that peer aggression weakens status hierarchies, and temporal sequences indicate the results are unlikely to be explained by reverse causality. I theorize that clear status hierarchies emerge through coordinated reallocations of esteem, and peer aggression engenders hierarchy primarily by giving onlookers shared opportunities to coordinate. Peer aggression, however, is frequently ambiguous, and onlookers arrive at inconsistent interpretations, fragmenting how they assign esteem and reducing the clarity of status distinctions. Additional analyses confirm that whether peer aggression strengthens or weakens status hierarchies depends on the consistent perceptions of onlookers. Taken together, this research demonstrates the significance of third-party onlookers and their ability to consistently interpret interactions, while offering new explanations for when peer aggression is self-limiting or persistent.