Researchers Connect Baboon Personalities to Social Success and Health Benefits

Whether human or baboon, it helps to have friends. For both species, studies have shown that robust social networks lead to better health and longer lives. Now, a team of University of Pennsylvania researchers has helped show that baboon personality plays a role in these outcomes, and, like people, some baboons' personalities are better suited to making and keeping friends than others. The research was conducted by psychology professor Robert Seyfarth and biology professor Dorothy Cheney , both of Penn's School of Arts and Sciences. They collaborated with the Arizona State University's Joan Silk. Seyfarth and Cheney, along with their colleagues and students, have spent the last 17 years observing a group of baboons living in the Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana, studying the biological roots of their social dynamics. As with many other primates, baboon societies are strongly hierarchical.