Monkeying Around: Triadic Closure and Homophily in Barbary macaques
In a study published in May 2017 in the American Journal of Primatology, researchers examined social network dynamics of nonhuman primates, more specifically a group of Barbary macaques, over the course of three years. As a student of social psychology, studying which human social factors reflect onto our furrier primate counterparts is something I consider a highly valuable pursuit. We have learned many important things regarding topics such as development and learning through the study of apes, and it has become a well -conceived notion that they are very similar to us. That is why, when I encountered the topics of homophily and triadic closure, I wondered whether or not social behaviors like these would manifest in a different part of the animal kingdom, and it turns out that they do.
Through complex statistical analyses, the researchers calculated the number of what they call “transitive triplets,” which, in our case, would represent a triad with two strong edges and a third edge. What they found for triadic closure is that even when controlling for kinship, triadic closure showed a significant existence amongst the apes, even those that were not particularly closely related, just like it does in humans. However, they did not find a presence of triadic closure in sleeping arrangements, which the authors speculate is due to the fact that sleep has very little to do with building friendship bonds. As for analyzing homophily, which is the idea that we tend to share similar characteristics to our friends, they calculated the number of relationships that existed between two macaques that shared similar features. The features they focused on were age, gender, and societal rank. Interestingly, homophily showed a significant presence in gender, but not in age or societal rank, which really does make sense due to the fact that apes are very family-oriented compared to humans and therefore spend more time with apes who are not their age.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxy.library.cornell.edu/doi/10.1002/ajp.22662/full
