Reconciliation in Homo sapiens : Behavioral Perspectives on the Human Post-Conflict Period

Abstract

Evolutionarily, social living can confer both fitness benefits and costs. In order to reap the benefits—such as access to valued resources and protection—social animals often have to overcome the disruptive costs of conflict, aggression, and competition by maintaining social bonds. Within primatology, the label “reconciliation” as a conflict-resolution tactic was first employed in 1979 when de Waal and Roosmalen noticed that, in chimpanzees, former opponents were more likely to interact peacefully in the minutes that followed conflicts than at other times. Since then, systematic study of post-conflict affiliation compared to control periods has taken place in a wide range of species, but hardly at all in human adults. In this study, same-sex dyads of young adult friends participated in a standardized conflict procedure that included relaxation periods before and after an intense competition. From the procedure, video data was coded to quantify the duration of selected behaviors. Data for seven behaviors was analyzed to investigate the effect of condition (pre- or post-conflict), gender, and post-conflict status (winner or loser) on behavior durations. Results show an increase in anxiety-related behavior and in human affiliative behaviors—such as talking, laughing, and looking—in the post-conflict period. The results in this study signal that, immediately after conflicts, human adults naturally behave in ways that could smooth interaction and increase affiliation. This study provides concrete evidence for behavioral continuity between humans and other primates regarding an increase in both anxiety markers and species-specific forms of affiliation in the post-conflict context.