ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2015
The sociality-health-fitness nexus: synthesis, conclusions and future directions.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Impact of animal socioecology on gut microbial communities: Insights from wild meerkats in the Kalahari.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- The spatial distribution of pertussis, but not measles or smallpox, in pre-industrial Finland matches dialects.iScience · 2025Article
- Sex differences in health burdens across the lifespan in wild chimpanzees (Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2025Article
- Quantifying allo-grooming in wild chacma baboons (Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Correlated evolution of social organization and lifespan in mammals.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Social dilemmas of sociality due to beneficial and costly contagion.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Article
- Sociability in a non-captive macaque population is associated with beneficial gut bacteria.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- Social complexity as a driving force of gut microbiota exchange among conspecific hosts in non-human primates.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2022Review
- Gregariousness is associated with parasite species richness in a community of wild chimpanzees.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2021Article
- The plasticity of lifespan in social insects.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Major histocompatibility complex class II DR and DQ evolution and variation in wild capuchin monkey species (Cebinae).PloS one · 2021Article
- How disease constrains the evolution of social systems.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Social style and resilience of macaques' networks, a theoretical investigation.Primates; journal of primatology · 2019Article
- Social structure contains epidemics and regulates individual roles in disease transmission in a group-living mammal.Ecology and evolution · 2018Article
- Reciprocal Interactions Between Gut Microbiota and Host Social Behavior.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2018Review
- Article
- Family-transmitted stress in a wild bird.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Mule deer spatial association patterns and potential implications for transmission of an epizootic disease.PloS one · 2017Article
- Viruses and mobile elements as drivers of evolutionary transitions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This theme issue has highlighted the links between sociality, health and fitness in a broad range of organisms, and with approaches that include field and captive studies of animals, comparative and meta-analyses, theoretical modelling and clinical and psychological studies of humans. In this concluding chapter, we synthesize the results of these diverse studies into some of the key concepts discussed in this issue, focusing on risks of infectious disease through social contact, the effects of competition in groups on susceptibility to disease, and the integration of sociality into research on life-history trade-offs. Interestingly, the studies in this issue both support pre-existing hypotheses, and in other ways challenge those hypotheses. We focus on unexpected results, including a lack of association between ectoparasites and fitness and weak results from a meta-analysis of the links between dominance rank and immune function, and place these results in a broader context. We also review relevant topics that were not covered fully in this theme issue, including self-medication and sickness behaviours, society-level defences against infectious disease, sexual selection, evolutionary medicine, implications for conservation biology and selective pressures on parasite traits. We conclude by identifying general open questions to stimulate and guide future research on the links between sociality, health and fitness.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.