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Robin Bergh, Gregory K. Davis, Sa-kiera TJ Hudson, and Jim Sidanius He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.(Sun Tzu, c. 500 BCE) Many animals intuit what Sun Tzu put in writing two and a half thousand years ago: They consistently assess their own fighting abilities and those of their opponents, and they only choose to fight when there is a reasonable chance of success. Assessing fighting abilities makes them more victorious in the ultimate contest of surviving (eg, Arnott & Elwood, 2009; Parker, 1974). Primates are also strategic in this sense on a collective scale: Chimpanzees as well as human hunter-gatherer tribes will rarely (if ever) initiate an open attack on a larger group, but they will engage smaller outgroup parties, and particularly lone outgroup individuals (eg, Chagnon, 1997; Wrangham, 1999). In complex human societies, social dominance theory (SDT; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999) seeks to explain when, how, and why people choose to fight (physically or by other means) for their groups, as compared to seeking pacification, given the comparative power and status of groups. As such, SDT suggests that the classic social comparison question of what a person can do relative to others (eg, Jones & Regan, 1974; Suls et al., 2002) often depends on the power of his or her group. More broadly, SDT was introduced to explain the origin and consequences of social hierarchies and oppression (Sidanius, 1993; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), and it