Jun 13 2009
Primates Value Strong Alliances
I’ve recently encountered two articles that highlight the importance of friendly relationships: one on humans, the other baboons.
In the first, by cognitive psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania, the researchers looked at the cognitive/perceptual elements of a close friendship. They discovered that an important component is not what you receive from others, but what you perceive to be their “ranking” of you.
friendship rankings were most strongly correlated with individuals’ own perceived rank among their partners’ other friends.
In other words, we tend to rank someone as a very good friend when we perceive that they perceive us as very close, relative to their other friends and associates. What does this have to do with alliances? In the least, the two are intertwined. Co-author Robert Kurzban said, “”Friendships are about alliances.” He elaborated,
In a way, one of the main predictors of friendship is the value of the alliance. The value of an ally, or friend, drops with every additional alliance they must make, so the best alliance is one in which your ally ranks you above everyone else as well.”
Interesting. Next we turn to the baboons. And that study actually helps shed more light on this one.
On the other side of the continent, at UCLA, lead author and professor of anthropology Joan Silk made this finding:
“If you’re a baboon, the strength of your mother’s relationship with other females is the best predictor of whether you’ll live to have children yourself.”
A direct genetic benefit to friendship. A female baboon will have more offspring if she has strong relationships with other females in her troop.
The research, however, did reveal one puzzling lack of a link. Baboons live in dominance hierarchies, yet they found that the mother’s rank had no affect on the survival rate of her offspring. Curious. Very curious. What then is the payoff for that type of social arrangement? I imagine there must be one or at least must have been one. Do the males with higher rank have more offspring and the females are just “brought along for the ride” of baboon hierarchical strivings, so to speak? I wonder.
An additional quote, by co-author Dorothy Cheney, makes a very significant point, one that pulls the findings of these two primate studies (human and baboon) together:
“The benefit comes not from being wildly social — it’s about having close social bonds.”
And closeness of social bonds is measured relative to other bonds. That we can depend on a relationship is important to us.
It seems primates want to know this of their associates: In the heat of a crises, will you side with me?
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Sources
1) http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-06/uop-byb060209.php
2) University of California – Los Angeles (2009, June 11). Close Social Ties Make Baboons Better Mothers, Study Finds. ScienceDaily
