Akademie Waldschlösschen, December 6-9, 2016

Having strong social bonds and being integrated into a tight social network improves an individual’s health and survival. This has been shown repeatedly and for humans and nonhuman animals alike. Despite this reproducibility and generalizability we remain largely unaware of the mechanisms through which social connections promote health and well-being. To advance our understanding of the possible mechanisms linking sociality to health and fitness we organized a closed and focused 3-day workshop with ~ 20 international and national experts on the study of primate sociality to target the most pressing questions and provide a road map for future studies.