Do Primates Make Friends Like Humans?

Have you ever wondered what skills you need to make friends? How your brain processes the information that you need to make friends? What features of your daily life make having friends difficult? Primates are the mammals that are most similar to us in the animal kingdom. Primates face similar challenges to humans when it comes to making friends. Primates must understand the goals and intentions of others to make friends. However, the stress they experience in their environments can make understanding others’ goals and intentions difficult. Stress causes primates to switch from understanding goals to understanding behavior alone, meaning they respond only to input from their senses. To overcome this challenge, primates use sounds and gestures when making friends. These are called intentional communication, and they motivate animals to figure out the goals of other animals by using their knowledge of past interactions. Knowing how primates communicate to make friends can help us to understand how humans make friends, too.