Definition
Human beings are typically characterized as social primates, meaning they live in structured social groups, they communicate and interact with each other, and coordinate their activities around their conspecifics – much like other social primates, such as chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas.
Introduction
Forming social ties and living in social groups are of the most fundamental behavioral characteristics of human beings. Humans are frequently referred to as social animals to reflect this attribute (Aronson 2018). Living in social groups may have increased the chances of survival and reproduction of our prehistoric ancestors, via facilitating protection from the elements of nature and predators, finding resources (e.g., food, shelter, mates), and caring for offspring, and hence may have been selected for throughout our evolutionary history. The fact that our closest primate relatives, the great apes, also display...
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Sakman, E. (2021). Humans as Social Primates. In: Shackelford, T.K., Weekes-Shackelford, V.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19650-3_1373
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19650-3_1373
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