Audience effects in sooty mangabey agonistic behavior - Frontiers

June: Hello and welcome to Kindred Minds — I'm June, a primatologist who has spent most of her adult life completely obsessed with our closest relatives, and honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way. Every episode I bring you true, carefully researched stories about the other primates — the ones who share our biology, our brilliance, and in so many ways, our inner lives. A huge thank you to our sponsors today: Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows; Ago Consulting — pronounced "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consulting from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a portfolio of companies across the silicon industry. We've got a rich episode today — a monkey who knows exactly who's watching before it makes its move, a sweeping new look at which primate societies get to keep playing into adulthood, a long-awaited name finally given to a mysterious Congo monkey, and some sobering news about our closest relatives that I think will leave you feeling not just informed, but genuinely moved. The through-line in all of it? How alike we truly are. Let's get into it. June: Okay, so I want to start with something that I find absolutely fascinating, and it has to do with a monkey you may not have heard of — the sooty mangabey. These are medium-sized, grey-brown Old World monkeys that live in the forests of West Africa — places like Ivory Coast and Ghana. They're intensely social, they live in large groups, and like a lot of primates, their daily lives are full of conflict negotiations, status contests, and what researchers call agonistic behavior — which is basically a scientific umbrella term for the whole spectrum of aggressive and submissive interactions. Fights, threats, chases, appeasement gestures, the works. Now, a new study published in Frontiers looked at something really specific about how these mangabeys behave during those conflicts: whether the presence of an audience changes what they do. And I want you to sit with that for a second — the idea that a monkey might behave differently depending on who's watching. Because that's not a simple thing. That requires a kind of social awareness, an understanding that other individuals exist, that they are observing, and that their observations might have consequences. June: What the researchers found is that yes — audience absolutely matters to sooty mangabeys. When other group members are nearby and watching, the mangabeys' behavior during conflicts shifts in measurable ways. And this makes a lot of sense when you think about the function of these interactions. Conflict in a social primate group isn't just about winning or losing a fight in the moment — it's about reputation. It's about signaling to every other animal in that group where you stand, what you're capable of, and how you handle yourself under pressure. If a dominant animal backs down from a subordinate and nobody sees it, that's one thing. But if the whole group is watching? That has social consequences that ripple outward. So these mangabeys are essentially performing, not just fighting. They're managing impressions. They're aware of their audience. Now, I want to be careful here — we're not saying these monkeys are consciously calculating all of this the way a politician might before a press conference. But the behavioral evidence suggests their nervous systems, their social cognition, is tracking who is present and adjusting behavior accordingly. That is genuinely sophisticated. And here's what I love about this finding: it connects so directly to something deeply human. We are extraordinarily audience-sensitive creatures. The presence of observers changes how we speak, how we posture, what risks we take. We have entire fields of psychology dedicated to this — social facilitation, impression management, face-saving behavior. And here, in the forests of West Africa, a monkey with a brain a fraction of the size of ours is running what looks like a very similar social operating system. The architecture underneath is the same. June: And that brings me to our second thread today — what I love to call our shared recipe. Because here's the thing: when we talk about primate cognition, we sometimes frame it as surprising — oh, look how smart they are! But I think the framing we should be using is: of course. Of course they are, because they're running on almost the same biological instructions we are. Let me give you the headline number, and then I want to go a little deeper than we usually do. Chimpanzees — our closest living relatives — share somewhere around 98.7 percent of their D N A with us. Gorillas, somewhere around 98.3 percent. Even more distantly related primates like rhesus macaques share around 93 percent of our D N A sequence. Now, I know those numbers get thrown around a lot, and I think sometimes they almost lose their meaning because we hear them so often. So let me try to make it vivid. June: Your D N A is essentially a recipe book — an extraordinarily long, detailed set of instructions for building and running a living body. And most of that recipe book, across all primates, is identical. The chapters on how to grow a heart, how to wire up a nervous system, how to build an immune response, how to develop a social brain — those chapters are almost word for word the same. The differences between us and a chimpanzee are scattered throughout the book — small edits, a few changed paragraphs, some chapters slightly lengthened or shortened. Not a different book. The same book, lightly revised. And this is why it is not surprising that chimpanzees form coalitions, that they grieve, that they use tools, that they can learn hundreds of symbols and use them to communicate. It's not surprising that sooty mangabeys track their audience during a conflict. These animals are built from the same evolutionary materials. They have the same stress hormones we have — cortisol spiking during conflict, oxytocin promoting bonding, dopamine driving reward. They have the same limbic architecture — the deep, ancient emotional brain structures that generate fear and attachment and pleasure. When a mangabey feels tension before a confrontation and scans the group to see who is watching — something chemically and neurologically very similar to what you feel before a difficult conversation at work is happening inside that animal. That is not metaphor. That is shared biology doing what shared biology does. June: Now I want to bring in two more stories today that really speak to this theme of shared recipe — and they push back, in interesting ways, on some of our assumptions about primates. The first is a beautiful piece of research — a broad analysis looking at play behavior across 37 primate species. And the finding is striking: in primate societies that are more despotic — meaning societies with very rigid, steep dominance hierarchies where power is held tightly at the top — adult play is rare. Animals in those societies tend to stop playing as they get older. But in more egalitarian primate societies, where power is more distributed and relationships are more flexible, adults keep playing throughout their lives. Think about what that means. Play isn't just for babies. In the right social conditions, primates maintain it into adulthood. And I think most of us who have watched primates — or honestly, who have watched people — recognize this intuitively. Play requires a kind of safety. It requires trust. It requires knowing that the power dynamics around you are relaxed enough that you can let your guard down, be a little silly, take a social risk without it costing you. In a rigid hierarchy, that safety doesn't exist at the bottom. You're always performing, always watching your step. Sound familiar? Because it should. Research on human workplaces and social environments shows exactly the same pattern — psychological safety enables play, creativity, experimentation, and by extension, learning. The primates who can play as adults are the ones in societies flexible enough to allow it. We are not the only species for whom freedom enables flourishing. June: And then there's the bonobo story — which I have to say, is one of the most interesting correctives to a popular narrative that's emerged in recent years. Bonobos have become somewhat famous in popular science circles as the peaceful, make-love-not-war alternative to chimpanzees. And there is real truth there — wild bonobos do show striking patterns of conflict resolution, female coalitions, and sexual behavior used socially in ways chimps don't. But a new study looking at bonobos in zoo settings found something that complicates the picture: in captivity, bonobos displayed aggression at rates comparable to chimpanzees. Now, before we panic and throw out everything we know about bonobos — context is everything here. Zoo environments are profoundly different from wild environments. Space is constrained, social groupings are artificial, resources are managed differently. What this study is likely revealing is not that bonobos are secretly as aggressive as chimps, but that bonobo peacefulness may be deeply dependent on conditions — on having the right social environment, the right freedoms, the right structures in place. Take those conditions away and the behavior changes. And again — does that sound familiar? It should. Human beings are also capable of remarkable cooperation and striking cruelty depending on social conditions. We are not fixed. Neither are bonobos. Both species carry a range of possibilities within them, expressed differently based on context. That, too, is shared biology. June: Which brings me to the story I want to close on today, because I think it earns its place as our meaningful primate-and-people moment — and it actually weaves together two things that happened recently. The first is a discovery that honestly gave me chills when I read it. Eighteen years ago, researchers in the Congo Basin spotted a monkey they didn't recognize. It had unusual features — a distinct look, a distinctive call — and scientists suspected it might be something new to science, but they couldn't confirm it. For nearly two decades, this animal existed in a kind of limbo: known but unnamed, observed but unclassified. And now, finally, after years of careful field work and genetic analysis, scientists have confirmed it as a distinct species. A new monkey, named and known. In one of the most biodiverse and threatened ecosystems on Earth, in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a primate that had been living there for who knows how long, going about its life, raising its young, calling through the trees — finally recognized by the scientific community. I find that deeply moving. Not just as a scientific milestone, but as a reminder of how much we still don't know, and how urgently we need to protect the places that hold those unknowns. June: Because here's the part that keeps me up at night. A new report out this year delivers a stark warning about the state of primate conservation globally. Endangered primate populations are in drastic decline. Across species and regions, the pressures are the same: habitat destruction, the illegal wildlife trade, climate change reshaping the forests these animals depend on. The report is a call for serious, coordinated conservation action — and it lands harder, I think, when you hold it against the image of that Congo monkey, living unnamed in its forest for eighteen years while the world around it was changing. We are losing members of our family before we even know their names. And I think about the sooty mangabeys tracking their audience, the bonobo whose peacefulness depends on having the right conditions, the primate societies where play survives because there's enough safety for it — and I think: what we owe these animals is exactly what they need from us. Safe conditions. Protected space. A world that recognizes them not as curiosities but as kin. June: Primates are not mirrors of us — they are not us, and I always want to be careful not to project or flatten their own remarkable natures into a human template. But they are family. Biological family, evolutionary family. The same ancient code, running in different bodies, producing different variations on the same deep themes: social bonds, power negotiation, play, grief, curiosity, care. When we lose a primate species, or a population, or a forest — we lose a chapter of our shared story. And when we protect them, we are, in some real sense, protecting something of ourselves. That feels worth sitting with. June: So — what a day of stories. A monkey who knows who's watching. Primate societies that play when they're free enough to. Bonobos reminding us that context shapes everything. A mystery monkey in the Congo, finally named. And a red alert for our closest relatives that asks us to pay attention. These aren't separate stories. They're all the same story, told in different voices. Kindred Minds, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three organizations doing the hard, forward-thinking work of building better futures. I'm so grateful for their support, and I'm grateful for you. If today's episode gave you something to think about, please subscribe, leave a review, share it with someone who'd love it — it genuinely makes a difference in getting these stories out into the world. You'll find links to all the research we talked about today at the link in show notes. Stay curious. Stay kind. And remember — the minds you feel most kinship with? They might be closer than you think.