Social complexity reflects the intricate patterns of social interactions in societies. Understanding social complexity is fundamental for studying the evolution of diverse social systems and the cognitive innovations used to cope with the demands of social life. Social complexity has been predominantly quantified by social unit size, but newer measures of social complexity reflect the diversity of relationships. However, the association between these two sets of measures remains unclear. We used 12 years of data on 13 gorilla groups to investigate how measures of social complexity relate to each other. We found that group size was a poor proxy for relationship diversity and that the social complexity individuals experienced within the same group varied greatly. Our findings demonstrate two fundamental takeaways: first, that the number of relationships and the diversity of those relationships represent separate components of social complexity, both of which should be accounted for; and second, that social complexity measured at the group level may not represent the social complexity experienced by individuals in those groups. These findings suggest that comprehensive studies of social complexity, particularly those relating to the social demands faced by individuals, may require fine-scale social data to allow accurate comparisons across populations and species.

中文翻译：

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比较社会复杂性的措施：更大的山地大猩猩群体没有更大的关系多样性

社会复杂性反映了社会中社会互动的复杂模式。了解社会复杂性对于研究不同社会系统的演变和用于应对社会生活需求的认知创新至关重要。社会复杂性主要通过社会单位大小来量化，但社会复杂性的新衡量标准反映了关系的多样性。然而，这两组措施之间的关联仍不清楚。我们使用了 13 个大猩猩群体 12 年的数据来调查社会复杂性的衡量标准如何相互关联。我们发现群体规模不能很好地代表关系多样性，而且同一群体中个体经历的社会复杂性差异很大。我们的发现证明了两个基本要点：首先，关系的数量和这些关系的多样性代表了社会复杂性的不同组成部分，两者都应考虑在内；其次，在群体层面衡量的社会复杂性可能并不代表这些群体中个人所经历的社会复杂性。这些发现表明，对社会复杂性的综合研究，尤其是与个人面临的社会需求有关的研究，可能需要精细规模的社会数据，以便在种群和物种之间进行准确比较。