ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
Comparing measures of social complexity: larger mountain gorilla groups do not have a greater diversity of relationships.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Freedom of choice supports social complexity in chimpanzees.iScience · 2026Article
- Social Interactions Are Related to Cognitive Development in Western Australian Magpie Fledglings.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Social fish have larger brains and greater relative telencephalon sizes: support for the social brain hypothesis from wild, intraspecific comparisons.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Group traits moderate the relationship between individual social traits and fitness in gorillas.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Ecological disturbance alters the adaptive benefits of social ties.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Aggressive interactions influence cognitive performance in Western Australian magpies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Group structure and individual relationships of sanctuary-living Grauer's gorillas (Gorilla beringei graueri).PloS one · 2024Article
- Multiple mechanisms for inbreeding avoidance used simultaneously in a wild ape.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- BISoN: A Bayesian Framework for Inference of Social Networks.Methods in ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Drone Observation for the Quantitative Study of Complex Multilevel Societies.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Review
- Cumulative early-life adversity does not predict reduced adult longevity in wild gorillas.Current biology : CB · 2023Article
- Interspecific interactions between sympatric apes.iScience · 2022Article
- Coevolution of social and communicative complexity in lemurs.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Volatile social environments can favour investments in quality over quantity of social relationships.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Article
- Measuring complexity in organisms and organizations.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social complexity reflects the intricate patterns of social interactions in societies. Understanding social complexity is fundamental for studying the evolution of diverse social systems and the cognitive innovations used to cope with the demands of social life. Social complexity has been predominantly quantified by social unit size, but newer measures of social complexity reflect the diversity of relationships. However, the association between these two sets of measures remains unclear. We used 12 years of data on 13 gorilla groups to investigate how measures of social complexity relate to each other. We found that group size was a poor proxy for relationship diversity and that the social complexity individuals experienced within the same group varied greatly. Our findings demonstrate two fundamental takeaways: first, that the number of relationships and the diversity of those relationships represent separate components of social complexity, both of which should be accounted for; and second, that social complexity measured at the group level may not represent the social complexity experienced by individuals in those groups. These findings suggest that comprehensive studies of social complexity, particularly those relating to the social demands faced by individuals, may require fine-scale social data to allow accurate comparisons across populations and species.
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