Bonobos (Pan paniscus) vocally protest against violations of social expectations
Date
02/2016Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Research has shown that great apes possess certain expectations about social regularities and both perceive and act according to social rules within their group. During natural and experimentally induced contexts, such as the inequitable distribution of resources, individuals also show protesting behaviors when their expectations about a social situation are violated. Despite broad interest in this topic, systematic research examining the nature of these expectations and the communicative signals individuals use to express them remains scant. Here, we addressed this by exploring whether bonobos (Pan paniscus) respond to violations of social expectations in naturally occurring social interactions, focusing on the vocal behavior of victims following socially expected and unexpected aggression. Expected aggression included conflicts over a contested resource and conflicts that were provoked by the victim. Unexpected aggression was any spontaneous, unprovoked hostility toward the victim. For each conflict, we also determined its severity and the composition of the nearby audience. We found that the acoustic and temporal structure of victim screams was individually distinct and varied significantly depending on whether or not aggression could be socially predicted. Certain acoustic parameters also varied as a function of conflict severity, but unlike social expectation, conflict severity did not discriminate scream acoustic structure overall. We found no effect of audience composition. We concluded that, beyond the physical nature of a conflict, bonobos possess certain social expectations about how they should be treated and will publicly protest with acoustically distinctive vocal signals if these expectations are violated.
Citation
Clay , S E V , Ravaux , L , de Waal , F B M & Zuberbuhler , K 2016 , ' Bonobos (Pan paniscus) vocally protest against violations of social expectations ' , Journal of Comparative Psychology , vol. 130 , no. 1 , pp. 44-54 . https://doi.org/10.1037/a0040088
Publication
Journal of Comparative Psychology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0735-7036Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2016 APA, all rights reserved. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0040088. This article may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.
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