Seed dispersal directly affects plant establishment, gene flow, and fitness. As a result, understanding patterns in seed dispersal is fundamental to understanding plant ecology and evolution, as well as addressing challenges of extinction and global change. Our ability to understand dispersal is limited because few frameworks have emerged that provide a means for predicting dispersal across time and space. We provide a novel framework that links seed dispersal to animal social status, a key component of behavior. Because social status affects individual resource access and movement, it provides a critical link to two factors that determine seed dispersal: the quantity of seeds dispersed and the spatial patterns of dispersal. Moreover, individual social status may have unappreciated effects on post-dispersal seed survival and recruitment when social status affects individual habitat use. Hence, environmental changes, such as selective harvesting and urbanization, that affect animal social structure may have unappreciated consequences for seed dispersal. The framework we present highlights these exciting new hypotheses linking environmental change, social structure, and seed dispersal. By outlining experimental approaches to test these hypotheses, we hope to facilitate studies across a wide diversity of plant-frugivore networks, which may uncover emerging hotspots or catastrophic losses of seed dispersal.