灵长类研究者：雄性友谊与合作被进化叙事误读

Across the Western world, young men and boys face a changing economy, with fewer manual labor jobs and factory floors that used to give a swathe of working-class men purpose and value. This leaves a large portion of recent generations feeling left behind and forgotten—and vulnerable to exploitation.

A profitable industry of influencers who misframe evolutionary science to justify their narratives have taken advantage of the addictive nature of social media to hook into this vacuum and light up phone screens every night with the same vitriolic messages: “Reclaim your manhood”; “You are being feminized”; “The world is making you soft.”

But this narrative conflicts with the biological reality. Across species—from fungal networks trading nutrients underground to astronauts sharing the role of emptying the latrine on the International Space Station—every organism must strike some balance between competing and cooperating. Lessons from the animal kingdom, from my research and others, show that cooperation doesn’t diminish masculinity.

Indeed, dominant primates use their power judiciously, and male friendship forms the foundation of cooperation in a variety of species, with affectionate touch, caring, and vulnerability playing crucial roles in male relationships. The simple picture painted for these boys is built on sand. Once we observe the reality of sex, behavior, and connection in the natural world around us, it washes away.

Human males stand to improve their relationships, benefit from a broader base of emotional and social support, and enhance their well-being with these friendship lessons from our closest cousins in the animal kingdom.

The role of care and connection

One term at the core of the manosphere is the notion of alpha males. Life coaches and politicians push this construct without understanding the true function of hierarchy in the natural world. They believe that to get ahead you must take advantage of others, and that the weak get left behind. In reality, dominant male primates care for relationships and wield their power judiciously.

It’s true that male chimpanzees form typically linear dominance relationships, where one submits to another, all the way to the top. They compete, and those competitions can spill into physical altercations. Higher-ranking males do tend to sire more offspring.

But these broad truths hide the nuance of layered cooperation, care, nurturing touch, and love among male chimps. Day after day, most of that competitive pressure never turns into a fight at all. What holds chimpanzee communities together is less the male at the top and more the alliances underneath him. Males groom each other for hours at a time. They embrace after conflicts and kiss the arms and shoulders of their allies before potential competition, to resolve any tension. Before risky boundary patrols, when they might encounter rival groups, they even hold each other’s genitals—a sign of deep trust. Data spanning nearly three decades from Gombe show that males with strong ties to the alpha sired more offspring than those without, and so did males with wider networks of close allies, whether or not they ever rose in rank at all. Those who look out for each other and contribute to a strong community end up thriving.

You can see the value of those alliances when a hierarchy is disrupted. At Taï National Park in Côte d’Ivoire, Anna Preis and her colleagues measured urinary cortisol in wild males across stable and unstable dominance periods. Stress rose in every male during the unstable stretches, regardless of rank. Aggression went the other way, rising when things were calm and the group faced less risk of destabilization. When the risk of escalation was greatest, males backed off. Stability has its own payoff; a group tearing itself apart can’t defend a territory.

Indeed, even in its origins, the term “alpha” contained more nuance than broadly understood. The term rose out of research during the mid-20th century on captive wolves who were thrown together into crowded spaces without room to escape. Such an arrangement would produce a tense, despotic dynamic in any species, including our own. Once biologists began studying wild wolf packs, it became apparent that they are, well, families. They comprise a breeding pair and their grown offspring. L. David Mech, the biologist who popularized the alpha wolf in the first place, has spent more than two decades asking people to retire the term in order to accurately reflect natural communities. Despite its inaccuracy, the idea still perpetuates on podcasts and social media.

Alpha-directed consolation from a whole group

The role of vulnerability and comfort in the natural world provides another powerful lesson for humanity. At a wildlife sanctuary in Zambia, I’ve come to know a longstanding alpha male chimpanzee named Doug over many years. One day, during my first field season observing his group, he was separated from his community for routine husbandry purposes, alongside a slightly younger rival and the rival’s paternal ally. During this separation, the rival pair ambushed him, leaving him incredibly shaken. I had known Doug as a strong leader who never broke composure, and I felt shocked to see him cowering and screaming, nothing like the composed figurehead his group had respected.

A low-ranking male, whom Doug had rarely paid attention to, approached first, offering himself in a gesture of submission. What followed drew in most of the roughly 40 other chimpanzees in the group. They embraced, touched, and kissed him; exchanged genital contact; placed their hands in his mouth; and invited him to mount them. This scale of collective reassurance directed toward a single individual is something I’ve never seen since, and is likely only sparked by moments of genuine crisis. The whole group responded to Doug’s distress with an outpouring of comfort and what to humans would appear to be love.

The main aim of this project was to study consolation: how chimpanzees, and their sister species bonobos, comfort each other after fights. But we kept noticing similar intense, friendly contacts occurring in the absence of conflicts, often in the anticipation of competition. To better understand this, we conducted a feeding task with a five-minute window before the food arrived, filming 116 apes across five groups at two sanctuaries. We found that those who exchanged more reassuring contact beforehand went on to spend significantly more time feeding peacefully alongside others. In chimpanzees, males exhibited most of this behavior, but primarily in Doug’s more tolerant group. In a more despotic group where resources were less evenly distributed, the male-male relationships were markedly weaker. Simply put, friendship and reassuring behaviors among males helped these chimps peacefully put aside competing interests, which may lay the groundwork for collective harmony.

Some of these behaviors require remarkable trust. Placing a finger, or even a whole hand, inside another male’s mouth or pressing your own mouth to someone’s body after they’ve just been attacked may be misinterpreted as having aggressive intent and could spark a new conflict. Chimpanzees have a reputation for amputating the extremities of others, and that, along with the size of their canines, makes these behaviors exceptionally risky during such turbulent times. Our hypothesis: That could be the point. You only offer that kind of vulnerability to someone you trust not to use it against you, and doing so signals something about the relationship that a show of strength can’t. Again, we noticed that these behaviors were particularly amplified in Doug’s group compared to the one with a less benevolent leader.

Doug remains alpha to this day, and from our research, his tenureship seems to be thanks to the bonds he continues to invest in and the support he shows for his peers. He’s flawed and sometimes lashes out as any male chimpanzee might do, but throughout the seven years we’ve studied him, no challenges have managed to displace him. Doug looks out for others, and in turn they look out for him. Over my time studying many groups of chimpanzees, it seems the most tolerant social environments emerge from the leadership of strong, stable, and generally fair alphas who allow others access to resources and who keep tight bonds with their closest allies.

The power of touch and care

Humans can also learn from the way male chimpanzees can be tender in other contexts. At Taï National Park in Côte d’Ivoire, researchers recorded wild chimpanzees adopting orphaned infants, more than half of them taken in by males with no obvious kinship reason to bother. One adult male, Porthos, adopted an unrelated infant female named Gia and carried her on his back for years, sharing food with her long after any potential social debt to her deceased mother had lapsed. Later analysis found that what predicted whether a male took on that role was not the infant’s sex, and not relatedness, but the strength of the grooming bond he’d shared with the mother before she died.

Touch carries power in humans, as well. Research across five European cultures found that the area of the body you’ll let someone touch maps almost directly onto the strength of your emotional bond with them. There is cultural variation. British people are notably more guarded about casual contact than many of their European neighbours, and touch between men in many Western contexts carries particular social weight. Touch conveys intimacy and trust. Yet holding someone’s hand or shoulder can also be used to intimidate or harass. We could learn from primates to stop withholding touch where it would help most and back down from reaching for it where it shouldn’t be used at all.

One key area where more touch helps is sports. A study of all 30 NBA teams during the 2008–09 season found that the teams who touched more early in the season, through fist bumps, chest bumps, hugs, and high fives, went on to perform better and play more cooperatively later, even after controlling for player salaries and pre-season expectations. In women’s college basketball, players who received more physical contact from teammates after missing their first free throw were more likely to convert the second. After five straight shootout losses, England’s governing body in football, the FA, spent 18 months rebuilding England’s approach to penalties under Gareth Southgate, not just the technical side. Players were coached on how to treat each other after a miss. They learned to place an arm around the shoulder rather than leaving each other isolated. Celebrating wildly after a scored kick became a deliberate technique for steadying whoever was up next. Locker-room culture has never been shy about physical contact between teammates. Now we know that the contact might be doing real work.

To be sure, humans show exceptional diversity in our cultures and behavior, for better and worse. But when humans are violent or cruel, people call it primal, or animalistic. We emphasize our altruism as unique to our species. That’s unfair to animals. Humans have bullied others until they took their own lives. We’ve wiped out entire tribes and cultures. And beyond targeting other people, even now, humans are removing protections for endangered keystone species that ecosystems depend upon to thrive. But we don’t need to accept the drive to dominate as inevitable. If the apes show anything, it’s how much of that drive gets managed and set aside day to day, and how much depends on the community you find yourself in. We are a part of the natural world like all other animals, needing to balance our cooperative and competitive urges. And the evidence suggests we sit at the better end of that range far more often than we might think.

Where to start

Now that we know how central touch and cooperation are to primates and human nature, I hope we can stop being pessimistic when we predict others’ behavior and motives. A study published in Science this June, covering 125 countries and over 100,000 people, found that 69% of us cooperate with a stranger when given the choice. Asked to guess, people put it at 47%. That pessimism showed up in 124 of the 125 countries surveyed. This matters in the grander scheme of things because those of us who expect others to cooperate are far more likely to cooperate also. When researchers simply told participants that most people worldwide see climate change as a threat, belief in others’ willingness to cooperate ticked up, and actual cooperation followed it, slightly, but in the right direction.

Building on the lessons of primate relationships is easier than it seems.

Seek simple interactions. One of the main ways our primate cousins build affiliative relationships is spending time sitting in close proximity. They may groom, or play, or even sit in contact. More often than not they just like to hang out near their close partners. Just being close to one another is meaningful.

Try a car journey or a five-a-side game. Build trust and relationship through activities where nobody has to look anyone in the eye. If a mate isn’t much of a talker, doing something alongside him might get further than sitting him down and asking how he’s doing.

Reach out before a crisis, not after. Great apes exchange most of their reassurance in the tense minutes before competition, not the wreckage afterward. Reconciliation and comforting are commonplace in humans and primates, but it’s much easier to prevent escalation than it is to smooth things over after a fight.

Don’t wait to be the one who’s approached. That 22-point gap between how we actually cooperate and what we think everyone else will do shows the power of offering an invitation to relationship. Most of us are waiting for someone else to go first.

Influencers selling young men and boys on their primal nature fly in the face of the science and what nature actually looks like. Force and competition are real parts of biology, and something we humans have to manage in our everyday lives. But, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my many years studying our closest relatives, it’s that touch, care, cooperation, and even love are the most instinctive natural components of being part of the primate family.