2010 Vol 101.pdf (1.63mb) - Primate Society of Great Britain

Social monitoring by reputation: How to compare human and animals
in an evolutionary framework?
Y.I. Russell
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford
Reputation is usually defined as an entirely human construct. This is
because the majority of studies in human disciplines (economics,
commerce, psychology, etc.) define reputation as a sort of one-dimensional
yardstick whereupon the same information is accessible to everyone. This
definition is of limited usefulness to animal studies because it requires
language ability and ubiquitous sources of public information. The exact
psychological processes that underlay social reputation monitoring are
poorly understood even in humans. In order to begin a comparative study of
human and animal reputation monitoring, “reputation” should be redefined
in a way that accommodates all animals. Here, I present a framework for
investigating the evolution of social monitoring abilities across all animal
taxa. I define reputation as “knowledge about an individual’s typical
behaviour, based on a knowledge of that individual’s past behaviour”
(Russell, 2007). The psychological process of reputation monitoring should
be dissected into its constituent parts in order to compare the abilities
between animals in a componential way (this approach is similar to
Hockett’s design features approach to language). Most organisms are
capable of some form of social eavesdropping and intention reading, but the
smallest brained animals are unlikely to cogitate much on the personalities
of their conspecifics. At the human end of the continuum, social reputation
monitoring probably involves a type of social expertise. It is important to be
aware, however, that human social expertise will necessarily involve a
series of memory distortions, affected by highly emotional events, schema
effects, primacy, and recency.
Emotional laterality - the influence of emotion upon visual field
preferences
A. Milligan
Department of Psychology, University of Stirling
Emotional lateralisation may influence motor lateralisation, and may
therefore have played a significant role in the evolution of social signals in
both humans and non-human animals. The ‘affective state’ of animals has
been shown to exert influence upon functional lateralisation in species from
five classes of vertebrates with studies observing strong lateral biases during
particular social interactions. However, the association between specific
emotions and social interactions may be more complex than previously
thought. Almost all of these studies focused upon scenarios of negative
emotion such as fear or aggression, and in each case visual field preferences
were identified as suitable indicators of lateral preference whereby subjects
22