Animals that live in stable social groups need to gather information on their own relative position in the group’s social hierarchy by either directly threatening or by challenging others, or indirectly and in a less perilous manner, by observing interactions among others.
Horses copying behavior
Researchers determined that whether or not a horse learns new behavior by copying another horse depends upon their social status, and they will only readily pick up the new behavior if they have a certain relationship with the horse they're watching.
Indirect inference of dominance relationships has previously been reported from primates, rats, birds, and fish. In a study, German scientists showed that domestic horses, Equus caballus, are similarly capable of social cognition.
Taking advantage of a specific “following behavior” that horses show towards humans in a riding arena, researchers investigated whether bystander horses adjust their response to an experimenter according to the observed interaction and their own dominance relationship with the horse whose reaction to the experimenter they had observed before.
Researchers determined that whether or not a horse learns new behavior by copying another horse depends upon their social status. Horses can learn how to do something simply by observing another horse, but they'll only readily pick up the new behavior if they have a certain relationship with the horse they're watching.
The study at the University of Regensburg made use of horses adopting a "following behavior" towards people. One horse reacted to a handler in a riding arena and eventually responded by following the person around. Meanwhile another horse stood watching the whole event.
Then the bystander horse had a turn in the arena. If the horse they'd been watching was dominant in social status, the bystander quickly copied the following behavior.
Conversely, the bystander would not readily follow the handler if it had previously observed a subordinate horse. A horse also failed to mimic another horse's behavior if the horses were from two different social groups and didn't know each other.