Ronald Noë's personal site - grooming in primates

Biological Market examples

grooming in primates

vervet monkeys

Loskop Dam Nature Reserve, South-Africa

photo: Ronald Noë

Grooming is one of the few, if not the only, naturally occurring altruistic behaviour in primates that can easily be quantified. Louise Barrett and Peter Henzi were the first to systematically look at grooming from a biological market point of view. They realised that grooming can be traded, both for itself as well as for other commodities, such as tolerance near resources, access to young infants, support in conflicts and compliance during mating. Grooming thus has something in common with a currency that can be used to pay for different goods and services. The possibility of quantifying grooming opens the way to testing whether shifts in supply and demand lead to shifts in exchange rates of different commodities. The fact that grooming can be used to compensate for unbalanced trade in several other goods and services lends it a currency-like character.

More recently, important contributions have been published by Stefano Kaburu and Nick Newton-Fisher. They analysed the grooming patterns among adult male chimpanzees in two different communities and over different periods in great detail. I list a number of their papers below. One I can recommend in particular is Newton-Fisher (2017) in Animal Behaviour.

Primates trade grooming against grooming itself, but also against a number of other 'services', examples of which can be found on the following sub-pages :

See for 'A common fallacy: reciprocity and time frames' the Biological Markets main page

Some general discussions and examples of primate grooming markets

Balasubramaniam, K. N., Berman, C. M., Ogawa, H. & Li, J. 2011. Using biological markets principles to examine patterns of grooming exchange in Macaca thibetana. American Journal of Primatology, 73, 1269-1279.
Barrett, L. & Henzi, S. P. 2001. The utility of grooming in baboon troops. In: In: Noë, R.; van Hooff, J.A.R.A.M. & Hammerstein, P. (eds.) Economics in Nature. Social Dilemmas, Mate Choice and Biological Markets. Cambridge Univ. Press. pp. 119-145.
Barrett, L. & Henzi, S. P. 2001. Grooming and family life. Exchanging services among female monkeys. In: In: Macdonald, D. (ed.) The New Encyclopedia of Mammals. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, pp. 306-307.
Barrett, L. & Henzi, S. P. 2006. Monkeys, markets and minds: biological markets and primate sociality. In: Cooperation in Primates and Humans (Ed. by Kappeler, P. M. & van Schaik, C. P.), pp. 209-232. Berlin: Springer.
Gilby, I. C. 2012. Cooperation among non-kin: Reciprocity, markets, and mutualism. In: The Evolution of Primate Societies (Ed. by J. C. Mitani, J. Call, P. M. Kappeler, R. A. Palombit & J. B. Silk), pp. 514-530. (This is a general review of cooperation among unrelated primates)
Gomes, C. and C. Boesch 2011. "Reciprocity and trades in wild West African chimpanzees." Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 65(11): 2183-2196.
Huang, P., Teichroeb, J. A., Zhang, E. & Chen, M. (2024). Male juvenile golden snub-nosed monkeys acting as the mountee to receive grooming in their same-sex mounts. Current Zoology, 71(1), 40-48
Henzi, S. P. & Barrett, L. 2007. Coexistence in Female-Bonded Primate Groups. Advances in the Study of Behavior, 37, 43-81.
Kaburu, S. S. K. & Newton-Fisher, N. E. (2013). Social instability raises the stakes during social grooming among wild male chimpanzees. Animal Behaviour. (This paper reports a test of the 'raise-the-stakes' (RTS) model by looking at grooming among chimpanzees after relationships have been 'reset' (RTS predicts how relationships start from scratch), but concludes that the data are best understood in the context of a grooming market).
Kaburu, S. S. K., & Newton-Fisher, N. E. (2015). Egalitarian despots: hierarchy steepness, reciprocity and the grooming-trade model in wild chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes. Animal Behaviour, 99(0), 61-71 (An excellent analysis of grooming patterns in male chimps, contrasting BMT with Seyfarth's 1977 model.)
Kaburu, S. S. K., & Newton-Fisher, N. E. (2015). Trading or coercion? Variation in male mating strategies between two communities of East African chimpanzees. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 69(6), 1039-1052 (Great paper that shows that markets (in this case exchanges of grooming for sex) don't work in a community with a steep male hierarchy, but do explain grooming patterns in a community with a shallow hierarchy.)
Kaburu, S. S. K., & Newton-Fisher, N. E. (2016). Bystanders, parcelling, and an absence of trust in the grooming interactions of wild male chimpanzees. Scientific Reports, 6, 20634 (Another great paper of this rather productive duo, this time they pay attention to Connor's parcelling strategy. Watch also what they have to say about 'bonds' and relationships based on trust.)
Newton-Fisher, N. E. 2014. Roving females and patient males: a new perspective on the mating strategies of chimpanzees. Biological Reviews 89(2), 356-374.
Newton-Fisher, N. E., & Kaburu, S. S. K. (2017). Grooming decisions under structural despotism: the impact of social rank and bystanders among wild male chimpanzees. Animal Behaviour, 128, 153-164
Russell, Y. I. & Phelps, S. 2013. How do you measure pleasure? A discussion about intrinsic costs and benefits in primate allogrooming. Biology & Philosophy 28(6), 1005-1020
Sánchez-Amaro, A., & Amici, F. (2015). Are primates out of the market? Animal Behaviour, 110, 51-60 This is a paper with some good points, but also several errors and some dubious claims. Several rebuttals to this paper have been written. The whole discussion is quite interesting and worth reading; notably the paper by Dunayer and Berman should not be missed!

a first rebuttal: Kaburu, S. S. K., & Newton-Fisher, N. E. (2016). Markets misinterpreted? A comment on Sánchez-Amaro, A. and Amici, F. (2015). Animal Behaviour 119, e1-e5
the answer to that: Sánchez-Amaro, A., & Amici, F. (2016). Markets carefully interpreted: a reply to Kaburu and Newton-Fisher (2016). Animal Behaviour, 119, e7-e13
a second rebuttal: Dunayer, E. S., & Berman, C. M. (2016). Biological markets: theory, interpretation, and proximate perspectives. A response to Sánchez-Amaro and Amici (2015). Animal Behaviour, 121, 131-136).

Xia, D.-P., Wang, X., Garber, P. A., Sun, B.-H., Sheeran, L. K., Sun, L. & Li, J.-H. (2021). Effects of Hierarchical Steepness on Grooming Patterns in Female Tibetan Macaques (Macaca thibetana). Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 9(126). A nice paper in which two neighbouring groups are compared that differ in the steepness of the hierarchy. The authors base their explanation why the females in the group with the steeper hierarchy, and notably the middel-ranking ones, groom more than in the other group on biological market theory.

See also Dario Maestripieri's book 'Games primates play' (2012) Chpt 8 'Shopping for partners in the biological market'. This chapter gives an easy to read account of the BM paradigm with examples from primates as well as non-primates, several of which you'll find elsewhere on this site too. Oddly missing, however, is an acknowledgement of the role play by Louise Barrett and Peter Henzi in developing market ideas in primatology.

last update of this page: 10 MAR 25

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