Abstract

DE LA O, Claudio  and  MONDRAGON-CEBALLOS, Ricardo. The resolution of social conflicts in primates: 35 years of research. Acta Zool. Mex [online]. 2014, vol.30, n.3, pp.662-687. ISSN 2448-8445.

Social conflict, especially that involving aggressive interactions, for years has attracted the interest of the disciplines devoted to the study of behavior. Behavioral biologists claim that peaceful postconflict contacts involving former opponents, also known as "reconciliation", are a strategy for buffering the costs resulting from aggressive interactions. The start of carefully controlled research on this topic can be set in 1979. Thenceforth, this issue has been addressed mostly by primatologist, leaving a gap in the information for other orders. To date, peaceful posconflict affiliations have been reported to occur in almost 40 species, most of them primates. Even though all studies agree about the homeostatic social function of peaceful postconflict contacts, several questions remain unanswered. These include investigating the importance of these interactions for non-primate species, the relative importance of diverse sources of occurrence and variation as well as functions and processes involved in their evolution. In this paper we summarize the current knowledge on the topic, and state some issues that should be addressed in future research in order to get a better understanding of conflict resolution dynamics, and even the organization principles underlying animal societies.

Keywords : Conflict; Aggression; Affiliation; Social relationships; Reconciliation.

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