The Study of Social Behavior in Primates

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Abstract
Five major issues involved in research on the social behavior of primates have been examined here: (1) the general problems of research on primates, (2) the nature of the categories used to describe social behavior, (3) the sampling procedures used, (4) the reliability of the categories and (5) the types of variables studied. In connection with the first point there are such problems as: the difficulties of doing adequate research in the field situation, the fact of individual and group differences, the often unknown frequencies of occurrence of various types of behavior, the existence of multiple measures, the difficulty of scaling social dimensions, and the degree of inference about behavior required of the observer. There has been a tendency for each investigator to make up his own set of descriptive categories when studying social behavior. Quite often no rationale for the selection is given, and sometimes inter-observer reliability coefficients are not obtained. It was suggested that a category system will be of maximum value if it uses a relatively small number of categories, is based on theoretical considerations, has a wide range of possible application, and is exhaustive, reliable, and sensitive to certain experimental operations. Various sampling strategies have been used in the literature, but almost all have been either diary descriptions or variations of time sampling. Actually, relatively little attempt has been made to sample systematically the many variables that are relevant to social behavior. With regard to the problem of reliability of categories, it was found that many investigators do not report this information, and those that do have used a wide variety of statistical measures, including some of doubtful adequacy. Agreement between observers however, has generally been reported to be high. Contemporary research on social behavior in infrahuman primates has studied such variables as: sex differences in emotional reaction, group influences on eating, "parasitic" worker-dependent relationships, early deprivation of experience, social isolation, factors affecting communication, hormones, brain injury and brain stimulation. Quite often the experimenter tried to change a spontaneously established dominance hierarchy by manipulating some independent variable. In general, it is evident that an explicit recognition of the many problems involved in social behavior studies will enable their evaluation and eventual solution.

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