Attention is the way social primates measure status. It is highly rewarding because it causes the release of brain chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins.
There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors.
The primate laugh is given in playful contexts, and as such has a strong similarity to the human laugh.
We are by far the most contradictory of all primates. An animal with this much internal conflict has never lived on this earth.
I actually taught perceptual psychology at N. Y. U. when I was younger. I was interested in the aesthetic impulse in lower primates. But what really interested me in Dian Fossey was that she made a difference - she saved the gorillas.
When we are bad, we are worse than any primate that I know. And when we are good, we are actually better and more altruistic than any primate that I know.
One of the great commandments of science is: 'Mistrust arguments from authority. '
Most of our social nature is like that of other primates - we're mostly out for ourselves.
We are just another primate but a very confused, malleable one.
Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning.
Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.
Primates are very territorial. It is in their nature to protect their food resources as well as their females and young.
Primates need good nutrition, to begin with. Not only fruits and plants, but insects as well.
It is a common trait of primates to become submissive and even worshipful toward one who has the power to kill them.
The townspeople are morons, yokels, peasants and genus homo boobiensis. . . surrounded by gaping primates from the upland vallies.
You display inordinate pride for someone who has completed a task which could have been performed by a lesser primate in a shorter time.
Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.
The only option is politeness-remember always that you are dealing with other primates.
This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call 'civilization' has been all about.
Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.
