Project Outline: A Comparative Study of Social Tolerance in Children and Vervet Monkeys

Social Tolerance in Children and Vervet Monkeys

Supervisor: Dr. Rachel Harrison, Department of Anthropology, Durham University

Project Background

Social tolerance – “the probability of individuals maintaining proximity with minimal aggression” (Opreni, van de Waal and Harrison, 2025) – is hypothesised to be a key factor in the unique complexity of human culture (Dean et al., 2012) through its facilitation of co-operation, prosociality (Martin et al., 2021; Zhou et al., 2025), social learning (Coelho et al., 2024), and innovation (Sandro Sehner et al., 2025).

Presently, while studies do exist which assess social tolerance in non-human primates during an artificial foraging task (Cronin et al., 2014), testing such tasks with children is novel, and there are very few comparative studies which have attempted to measure social tolerance in children at all.

Methodology

Two experiments exploring social tolerance have been conducted with multiple groups of vervet monkeys living in the wild in South Africa, and children in nurseries, aged 2 to 4. The first experiment comprised of laying down a carpet with rewards upon it (for vervet monkeys, food; for children, stickers) to observe how well the participants socially tolerated one another as they retrieved the rewards. The second experiment involved placing a puzzle box, which when solved yielded rewards, to observe how the participants socially tolerated one another in a different scenario.

For the project, I will be systematically applying an ethogram (inventory of behaviours) to the 17.5 hours of video footage from these experiments to yield a quantitative dataset of the frequencies of different social tolerance-related behaviours. Once this dataset is prepared, I will analyse the data using R, including a network-based diffusion analysis (a statistical technique to detect and quantify social transmission of behaviours).

Finally, I will visualise my results and write up the findings to deliver both a research report and research poster, the latter of which I aim to make easily digestible for those outside the field of study.

Impact

The project aligns with two UN Sustainable Development Goals: quality education, and life on land.

Identifying how young children socially tolerate one another will evidence what to expect when facilitating co-operative play in nurseries, and lay the groundwork for future research to develop strategies for improving social tolerance in classrooms.

Vervet monkeys are currently classified as Least Concern by the IUCN. However, hunting, habitat encroachment, and becoming the victims of roadkill may threaten this status in the future (Wingham Wildlife Park, 2025). Environmental policy, guided by research such as this, is essential to ensuring their population remains healthy and stable. Moreover, data on vervet monkey behaviour may roughly indicate what behaviours are likely in other closely related primate species who are at higher risk of extinction, with whom it is harder to ethically perform potentially behaviour-altering experiments.

References

Coelho, C. G., Garcia-Nisa, I., Ottoni, E. B., & Kendal, R. L. (2024). Social tolerance and success-biased social learning underlie the cultural transmission of an induced extractive foraging tradition in a wild tool-using primate. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(48). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2322884121 

Cronin, K. A., van Leeuwen, E. J. C., Vreeman, V., & Haun, D. B. M. (2014). Population-level variability in the social climates of four chimpanzee societies. Evolution and Human Behavior, 35(5), 389–396. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.05.004 

Dean, L. G., Kendal, R. L., Schapiro, S. J., Thierry, B., & Laland, K. N. (2012). Identification of the Social and Cognitive Processes Underlying Human Cumulative Culture. Science, 335(6072), 1114–1118. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1213969 

Martin, J. S., Koski, S. E., Bugnyar, T., Jaeggi, A. V., & Massen, J. J. M. (2021). Prosociality, social tolerance and partner choice facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation in common marmosets, Callithrix jacchus. Animal Behaviour, 173, 115–136. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2020.12.016

Opreni, F., van de Waal, E., & Harrison, R. (2025). Uncovering variation in social tolerance among wild vervet monkeys through a novel co-feeding paradigm. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.03.668336 

Sandro Sehner, Fichtel, C., Kappeler, P. M., & Meunier, H. (2025). Social Tolerance and Innovation in Capuchins: socially more tolerant brown capuchins are better problem-solvers than less tolerant white-faced capuchins. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.05.674457 

Zhou, W., Yin, B., Su, Y., & Hare, B. (2025). Tolerance as a key mechanism for large-scale social cohesion. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 48. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x25100435