Professor Zanna Clay
speaker
23 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 22 Jul
Professor Zanna Clay’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It was a study with actually two great ape species, our two closest cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos.
And we were interested in both species because they have different types of social structures.
And chimpanzees are known as quite aggressive and bonobos are known as peaceful.
So we were interested in how these two great ape species interacted.
managed to mitigate conflict prior to stressful events.
Exactly.
Yes.
So we mimicked essentially a stressful feeding event, which is the arrival of food or the discovery of food.
We had a special experiment where we threw like a half pipe full of peanuts in a very controlled way into their enclosure.
But we gave them a five minute warning that this was coming.
And this kind of replicates what happens in the wild.
So everybody's doing their own thing and they hear this call and they all rush over.
And there's a five or 10 minute period where everybody's excited, waiting to eat.
And we wanted to understand how they use friendly social contact to kind of manage that social situation and hopefully avoid conflicts before they start happening.
Well, actually, yes and no.
So in the study, we found lots of evidence that the more friendly contact that took place in the five minutes before the feeding took place, we found that they were much less likely to have fights.
They showed much greater levels of social contact.
co-feeding, which is a marker of tolerance, so they could sit together and share food.
And actually, in many stressful situations in humans, you do see lots of friendly contact happening prior to a stressful event where you need to cooperate.
So a classic example is on the football pitch.
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