ReadingAnimals

A recent feature about language at Forbes.com is accompanied by a flashback to a 2005 interview with Jane Goodall. Reflecting on chimpanzee relations, she notes:

“Chimps are very quick to have a sudden fight or aggressive episode, but they’re equally as good at reconciliation. They make an appeasing gesture–reaching out a hand, crouching, giving little cries of fear or sadness. Then, very often, the aggressor will reach out and pat or reassure–offer an embrace or something like that–and the victim relaxes, and it is over.”

Many claims about the subjective experiences of chimpanzees and especially the “chimpanzee mind” are based on experimental paradigms that are object- and food-oriented. Further, they regularly disregard the effects of captivity and tend to treat all chimpanzees as interchangeable units rather than accounting for the significance of kin relations, friendships and the subtleties of group dynamics from the level of the dyad to intergroup and even interspecific encounters. Are chimpanzees highly social beings? Yes. Do scientists therefore think of their relationships - in all their complexity, subtlety and variety - as a matter of course when they write, study and think about chimpanzees? No. Not necessarily.

In 2007, Dunbar and Schultz published an elegant analysis which looked at relationships between the brain and the nature of animals’ social lives. The discussion emphasized the quality of primate relationships as a critical factor in the evolution of cognition, perception, behavior, etc. The authors even coined the term “bondedness” to describe primate relationships and give a nice account of its association with encephalization and primate evolution more generally. The questions and answers in this paper point to just how important the relational world of chimpanzees and other primates are, both for their evolutionary history and their daily lives. I also see it as a nudge to behaviorists to bring the study of the relational to the fore.