Periodic Reporting for period 3 - FriendOrigins (The Evolutionary Origins of Friendship: A Cross-Species Comparison and Experimental Approach)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2023-11-01 al 2025-04-30
Friendship is crucial for human health and well-being. People who are socially isolated have a greater risk of heart disease than heavy smokers, drinkers, and the obese, and halting social isolation’s ongoing rise is a growing priority for public health and political policy. But coming to grips with our need for friends and the consequences we face in their absence requires we not only look at how friendship is manifested in contemporary societies but to its origins in our evolutionary past. Yet, the evolutionary origins of friendship and the degree to which friendship’s components reflect human specializations are unclear. Studying nonhuman primates allows us to identify the causes and consequences of friendship in evolutionary time and the extent of its human uniqueness. Nevertheless, we know surprisingly little about the contexts that drove friendly social bonds to emerge, whether friendship-relevant cognitive abilities reflect primate universals, and the reasons why evolution allows social isolation to persist despite being detrimental. In the FriendOrigins project, we will conduct a series of landmark studies to reveal critical insights into the evolutionary origins of friendship. We will generate an unparalleled cross-species dataset on the best-known taxa of group-living primates, the macaques, and will perform innovative social experiments on a unique macaque population. FriendOrigins has three key aims: (1) to test the environmental forces driving variation in social relationships across species; (2) to establish whether having information on the friendships of unrelated others is a uniquely human skill; and (3) to test whether social isolation is the result of competitive exclusion. Friendship may be one of the most important strategies humans have for surviving in large groups. Understanding friendship from an evolutionary perspective is therefore a critical component of understanding what it means to be human. The proposed project represents a major step forward in that endeavour.
Since the beginning of the FriendOrigins project to the date of this report, we have acheived a number of fundamental goals
We have built and launched the cross-species MacaqueNet database, which we describe in detail in a preprinted manuscript. We have build a new Bayesian framework for the study of social networks, BISoN, and have created an accompanying R package for this approach. We are currently working to apply BISoN to comparative empirical social networks. We have successfully collected field-based data to ask what information nonhuman primates have on the social relationships of others, have analysed these data and are currently preparing a manuscript that presents the results. Finally, we have launched our experimental paradigm to probe how competition impacts friendly relationships. Three more weeks of behavioural data collection remain for the experimental condition of this experiment, at which point data analysis can commence.
We have built and launched the cross-species MacaqueNet database, which we describe in detail in a preprinted manuscript. We have build a new Bayesian framework for the study of social networks, BISoN, and have created an accompanying R package for this approach. We are currently working to apply BISoN to comparative empirical social networks. We have successfully collected field-based data to ask what information nonhuman primates have on the social relationships of others, have analysed these data and are currently preparing a manuscript that presents the results. Finally, we have launched our experimental paradigm to probe how competition impacts friendly relationships. Three more weeks of behavioural data collection remain for the experimental condition of this experiment, at which point data analysis can commence.
We have built a new framework for the study of social networks that helps to cope with many of analytical challenges posed by relational data. This framework, BISoN, or Bayesian Inference for Social Networks, pushes network theory forward in new useful directions and we hope will allow researchers to use previously unuable data, and to address previously unaddressable questions.
We have also built the largest animal social network database of its type in the world. The MacaqueNet database is home to affiliative and agonistic social networks for over 3,000 individual across 14 species of macaque monkey. MacaqueNet adheres to F.A.I.R principles and is accessible to the scientific community via a simple request form. We have so far hosted two MacaqueNet global workshops and the community is growing as a result.
Finally, we have provided proof of concept of a new stimuli to be used in field-based social experiments. Mainly, we have digitally altered photographs of animals to show interactions that were not observed in real-life. Animals respond to these photos in a manner that suggests that they view these photos as representations of real-life events (similar to how they respond to images of social interactions that did occur and were photographed). The use of digitally altered photographs as simuli in social and cognitive experiments on primates opens a host of possibilities for future research.
We have also built the largest animal social network database of its type in the world. The MacaqueNet database is home to affiliative and agonistic social networks for over 3,000 individual across 14 species of macaque monkey. MacaqueNet adheres to F.A.I.R principles and is accessible to the scientific community via a simple request form. We have so far hosted two MacaqueNet global workshops and the community is growing as a result.
Finally, we have provided proof of concept of a new stimuli to be used in field-based social experiments. Mainly, we have digitally altered photographs of animals to show interactions that were not observed in real-life. Animals respond to these photos in a manner that suggests that they view these photos as representations of real-life events (similar to how they respond to images of social interactions that did occur and were photographed). The use of digitally altered photographs as simuli in social and cognitive experiments on primates opens a host of possibilities for future research.