A Social Network Perspective On Macaque Social Styles
Résumé
Macaque social structures vary along an intolerant-tolerant gradient of social styles. In intolerant macaques, social relationships are often strictly influenced by dominance hierarchies and kinship, whereas tolerant macaques show more flexibility regarding who interacts with whom and how. Variation in these social styles is thus likely to reflect variation in individual social and ecological strategies regarding cohesion, coordination, competition and cooperation, which ultimately feedback on the evolution of these differences. Social Network Analysis (SNA) offers a useful set of tools that take into account direct and indirect connections between individuals in a social network. SNA provides a novel multilayered perspective on macaque social style differences and their impact on biological processes. For this symposium, we review studies and present our own empirical work on the comparison of social network characteristics along a gradient of social styles. For example, compared to intolerant macaque social networks, those of tolerant macaques show lower modularity, lower variance in group members’ centrality coefficients, and greater efficiency. We discuss how SNA provides further insight into how such differences can relate to various biological processes, such as patterns of reciprocity in the exchange of social services, or potential for disease/parasite transmission, and add further perspective on the evolution of divergent social styles.