Abstract
Three separate measurements of pairwise social-dominance relations between 10 feral adult squirrel monkeys were conducted at 6-month intervals. The monkeys were housed individually throughout the experiment and were undisturbed between the dominance tests. These conditions permitted the assessment of both short-term stability of individual animals’ dominance behaviors and long-term stability of the group dominance structure in the absence of interpolated social experiences. Each dominance test consisted of observing all 45 possible pairs of monkeys in a competitive water-incentive situation. Dominance hierarchies were formed by ranking the animals on the basis of the total number of pairmates dominated within each separate test. A high level of stability in individual animals’ dominance ability was observed within each of the three tests. Very high correlations were also obtained between successively measured dominance hierarchies. The status position changes which were observed in the successive dominance tests were very similar to changes reported for free-living squirrel monkey males observed under seminatural conditions.
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Clark, D.L., Kessler, K.L. & Dillon, J.E. Long-term stability of pairwise social dominance in squirrel monkeys. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 2, 203–205 (1973). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329245
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329245