Coordination in Human and Non-human Primate Groups: Why Compare and How?

This chapter integrates the six chapters in Part I of this book. They offer different treatments of the theoretical aspects of small group coordination, thereby providing a framework for how coordination behaviour can be studied from the perspectives of social psychology and primatology. Although we have a good working definition of group coordination and have scientifically established that groups of all primates, including humans, are adapted to improve survival, we are less informed about the behaviours that keep groups together and resolve conflicts. Chapter 2 helps to narrow this gap by integrating contemporary thought on coordination and offering an inclusive model for investigators to use in their analysis of both human and non-human primate groups. Chapter 3 informs us about how and why group movements of non-human primates offer a particularly rich arena with which to study primate group coordination. Chapter 4 presents a thorough analysis of a classic tool in group coordination theory (Wittenbaum and colleagues’ Coordination Mechanism Circumplex) and how it can be used to understand behaviours of both an observable and tacit nature that occur before and during the actual coordination task. Chapter 5 takes another perspective – that of high-dynamic anaesthesia teams – to show how theories of coordination can be applied to prevent harm in the operating room. The final chapter offers an outline of how the analysis of the group task itself can be used to develop categories of group processes and performance, adapting hierarchical task analysis tool for in-depth structural analysis.