AI Article Synopsis
- Complex social relationships in primates have driven the evolution of social cognition, which helps them navigate their social worlds.
- Research on Tonkean macaques shows that they react more strongly to conflicts between friends compared to non-friends, indicating an ability to recognize and prioritize important social bonds.
- This suggests that friendships play a crucial role in the social dynamics of primate groups, as monitoring such relationships helps them maintain social structure.
Article Abstract
Complex societies are shaped by social relationships between multiple individuals. The pressure to track these relationships has driven the evolution of social cognition in primates. Importantly, it can be adaptive to track not only personal relationships, but also those established between third-parties. Primates have knowledge about others' dominance hierarchies and kinship, but we do not know to what extent they also understand friendships. In a playback experiment, Tonkean macaques were presented with simulated conflicts involving third-party female dyads who were established friends or non-friends. Hearing a conflict between friends elicited a stronger behavioural response in listeners (i.e. an increase in looking time) compared to hearing a conflict between non-friends. Conflicts between friends are likely to represent a greater disruption of the social group and structure of the network, and therefore this difference in response may represent an adaptive strategy employed by the macaques to selectively monitor important social interactions in the group. These findings provide evidence that Tonkean macaques (and potentially other primates) can classify the relationships of others based on their degree of friendship and additionally, confirms the important role friendships have within the societies of social primates.
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7300006 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-66407-w | DOI Listing |
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