Bonobos!

Everyone loves these promiscuous primates. Ira and guest primatologist Frans de Waal talk about his new book, Our Inner Ape and our chimpanzee and bonobo relatives. Here’s a transcipt of part of the interview that I found interesting:

I feel that the social sciences are total ignoring the topic of power and dominance in human relationships. If you open a textbook in social psychology they bareley mention power and dominance and they only mention it as abuse. Abuse of power or something like that. But power and dominance are very common and very prevelent and very well detected in human society. As soon as you walk in a room, you see what the power relationships are. We are very senesitive to it. And then the Lary King show of course what they did is they taped his interviews and they notice that in the low freqrencies of th voice which is called the low hum. There are adjustments being made. So for example, your low hum is different than my low hum but if you talked with me, let’s say I’m a high ranking guest, in larry king’s case he had for example blill clinton … he would adjust his hum to Bill Clinton’s. Whereas if he had a low ranking guest, according to that particular article, the lowest ranking guest was Dan Quail, if he had a low ranking guest, the low ranking guest would adjust his low hum to Larry King. And so they found in that study and they followed it up with many other experiments that we are constantly communicating status to each other by this low hum, we do it unconsciously, we can bareley detect it but the machines can detect it. So even if you talk with your boss over the telephone you are communicating status differences with him. And so that’s a very important part of our social being but it is to a large degree neglected, I think.

Listen . . .