Primate Social Conflict

This book examines conflict as a normal and recurrent feature of primate social life, emphasizing that the study of aggression and social conflict is important to understanding the basic processes that contribute to social order. The authors go well beyond the usual view which tends to equate social conflict with fights over food, mates, or social supremacy, and analyze the diverse manifestations and significance of conflict in a variety of case studies. Contributors are scientists with field and laboratory experience in anthropology, behavioral endocrinology, ethology, and psychology. Utilizing the growing body of research on life-span development in primatology, the authors offer more extensive analyses of the complexity of primate social relationships.

This book examines conflict as a normal and recurrent feature of primate social life, emphasizing that the study of aggression and social conflict is important to understanding the basic processes that contribute to social order. The authors go well beyond the usual view which tends to equate social conflict with fights over food, mates, or social supremacy, and analyze the diverse manifestations and significance of conflict in a variety of case studies. Contributors are scientists with field and laboratory experience in anthropology, behavioral endocrinology, ethology, and psychology. Utilizing the growing body of research on life-span development in primatology, the authors offer more extensive analyses of the complexity of primate social relationships.

Examines how simians cope with aggression, and how they make peace after fights.

"Filippo Aureli and Frans De Waal have succeeded in cross-fertilizing fields as disparate as ethology and medieval law to create a rich new field of research -- natural conflict resolution. It makes one see conflict resolution among humans through a new and fascinating lens. This is a landmark contribution!"—William Ury, co-author Getting to YES, author of Getting Past No and Getting to Peace

This conference represents the first time in my life when I felt it was a misfor tune, rather than a major cause of my happiness, that I do conservation work in New Guinea. Yes, it is true that New Guinea is a fascinating microcosm, it has fascinating birds and people, and it has large expanses of undisturbed rainforest. In the course of my work there, helping the Indonesian government and World Wildlife Fund set up a comprehensive national park system, I have been able to study animals in areas without any human population. But New Guinea has one serious drawback: it has no primates, except for humans. Thus, I come to this conference on primate conservation as an underprivileged and emotionally deprived observer, rather than as an involved participant. Nevertheless, it is easy for anyone to become interested in primate conserva tion. The public cares about primates. More specifically, to state things more realistically, many people care some of the time about some primates. Primates are rivaled only by birds, pandas, and the big cats in their public appeal. For some other groups of animals, the best we can say is that few people care about them, infrequently. For most groups of animals, no one cares about them, ever.

In more ways than we may sometimes care to acknowledge, the human being is just another primate--it is certainly only very rarely that researchers into cognition, emotion, personality, and behavior in our species and in other primates come together to compare notes and share insights. This book, one of the few comprehensive attempts at integrating behavioral research into human and nonhuman primates, does precisely that--and in doing so, offers a clear, in-depth look at the mutually enlightening work being done in psychology and primatology. Relying on theories of behavior derived from psychology rather than ecology or biological anthropology, the authors, internationally known experts in primatology and psychology, focus primarily on social processes in areas including aggression, conflict resolution, sexuality, attachment, parenting, social development and affiliation, cognitive development, social cognition, personality, emotions, vocal and nonvocal communication, cognitive neuroscience, and psychopathology. They show nonhuman primates to be far more complex, cognitively and emotionally, than was once supposed, with provocative implications for our understanding of supposedly unique human characteristics. Arguing that both human and nonhuman primates are distinctive for their wide range of context-sensitive behaviors, their work makes a powerful case for the future integration of human and primate behavioral research.

This book examines the biological, especially the neural, substrates of affiliation and related social behaviors. Affiliation refers to social behaviors that bring individuals closer together. This includes such associations as attachment, parent-offspring interactions, pair-bonding, and the building of coalitions. Affiliations provide a social matrix within which other behaviors, including reproduction and aggression, may occur. While reproduction and aggression also reduce the distance between individuals, their expression is regulated in part by the positive social fabric of affiliative behavior.Until recently, researchers have paid little attention to the regulatory physiology and neural processes that subserve affiliative behaviors. The integrative approach in this book reflects the constructive interactions between those who study behavior in the context of natural history and evolution and those who study the nervous system.The book contains the partial proceedings of a conference of the same title held in Washington, DC, in 1996. The full proceedings was published as part of the Annals of the York Academy of Sciences.

In this work aggression and conflict in man and other primates are interpreted in the light of evolutionary biology and game theory models. Unitl now interdisciplinary collaboration between the humanities and the natural sciences has been rare and hampered by different methodologies and terminology. Nevertheless, such cooperation is essential for elucidating the causes and consequences of aggression in humans and in explaining what shape aggression takes in particular situations. The aim of this volume is to present empirical and theoretical studies from biologists and social scientists to create an interdisciplinary framework for understanding aggression.