GRK 2070: Understanding Social Relationships

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Human societies are characterized by highly differentiated social relationships, extensive collaboration, symbolic communication, and institutionalized regulations. The complexity of human societies is seen as unique within the animal kingdom. Yet, the pronounced sociality is shared with nonhuman primates, the majority of which also live in complex social groups with differentiated social relationships. Thus, the ability to maintain lasting social relationships and regulate social interactions at the individual and at the group level appears to be a shared and adaptive trait within the primate order. In this interdisciplinary RTG, we bring together developmental, cognitive, personality and social psychologists, behavioral and cognitive biologists as well as linguists. The overarching aim of this RTG is to study how physiology, emotion, and cognition are intertwined in the formation, regulation, and maintenance of social relationships in nonhuman primates and humans. Our global hypothesis is that nonhuman primates and humans share basal physiological mechanisms and emotional responses that affect the formation and maintenance of social relationships, while they differ in terms of their abilities to process and represent social information, which in turn affects decision making. Our studies encompass three domains: social signals, i.e., the use and understanding of social signals, social monitoring as the ability to track the social interactions of others, and social coordination and differentiation, the regulation of social interactions in dyads and groups. We study infants, children, and adult humans, as well as different species of nonhuman primates, and employ diverse methodological approaches, ranging from neurophysiology to observations of nonhuman primates in the wild. We leverage the strengths of our various research approaches to gain a comprehensive understanding of the foundations of primate social behavior. We are in the unique position to offer access to field stations to study nonhuman primates in the wild, to run cognitive experiments with nonhuman primates at the German Primate Center (DPZ), to test children in established child labs, and to apply a variety of neurocognitive methods employed in humans. With this combination, we aim to push the boundaries of our understanding of social relationships, and to bridge the gaps between the scientific disciplines. Within this framework, our aim is to train a strong group of young researchers who are well equipped for a career inside or outside academia. Our teaching concept includes interdisciplinary supervisory committees, method courses, theory sessions, and workshops co-organized by the students, in accordance with the rules of the structured PhD program “Behavior and Cognition” at the University of Göttingen.