What Primates Can Teach Us About Social Media Marketing

We are living through a historical paradox when it comes to human connection. Right now we are connected to more people than any humans who have ever lived. At the same time, many of us report having never felt more alone.

Social media sits at the center of that paradox. It has transformed how we meet the world, reshaping commerce, culture and human connection.

My mom sees that paradox from the other side of the screen. She is the director of trauma training at McLean Hospital just outside of Boston and, as all moms do, gives me a wiser perspective. Every day, she sees adolescents come in seeking help, witnessing firsthand how technologies built to connect us have the potential to instead deepen loneliness.

To understand why this is happening and the adaptive approaches marketers can take to help change the social media experience, we need look no further than our closest relatives in the animal kingdom.

British biological anthropologist Robin Dunbar noticed something simple: Primates spend much of their day tending one another’s fur. Across primate species, time spent on the ritual rose with group size. Primates, he argued, build community through physical touch.

Researchers on Berkeley neurobiologist Doris Tsao’s team showed macaques various images while scanning their brains, and found six small areas that lit up far more for faces than any other images. This research led to the insight that we are not creatures who happen to like faces—our brains have specific regions just for processing them. Every face on a thumbnail image taps hardware that evolved millions of years before the iPhone. 

Emory University researchers Sarah Brosnan and the late Frans de Waal asked capuchins to exchange tokens for food. A monkey given a cucumber after seeing another receive a tastier, preferred grape sometimes threw the cucumber back.

Now think about your social feed. We call it a feed for a reason: Too often, it fuels the part of us that keeps score. Every viral takedown, every “you deserve this” campaign trades on an ancient ache for that which we do not have. For all our sophistication, we are still marketing to capuchins with credit cards.

The pull of connection, the obsession with faces, the sting of comparison—these studies show traits that live inside all of us, embedded more deeply than we realize. 

But there is one more study that my mom and I keep returning to. A study that gives us hope. The same researcher, Frans de Waal—who was one of my professors at Emory—documented what happens after a chimpanzee conflict. Sometimes, an uninvolved chimp approaches and embraces the loser and offers comfort through physical touch. Vulnerability was the permission structure for connection.

Each of these primate truths shows up in our work as marketers. They offer a choice about which human instincts our work rewards.

Dunbar’s work suggests that connection does not scale automatically; it costs attention. Our industry measures reach. The troop measured touch. A million impressions cannot replace what combing gave the troop: small, consistent, intimate moments of recognition and bonding. 

Our sensitivity to faces explains why a creator with a face often beats a brand with a logo, and why the faces in our work can matter more than their production value. 

The capuchin study shows how comparison and outrage are among the easiest engagement mechanisms to engineer. But that also makes them the costliest, driving numbers while eroding the relationship. And they do it by activating resentment—not the right foundation for building a brand anyone loves.

Vulnerability turns out to be the playbook for the marketing work I am most proud of. The campaigns that actually move people, the ones that build community rather than impressions, all have a version of consolation, of naked vulnerability within them. And through that leap, they access a deeper form of human connection.

The marketing industry has an important role to play. Our work reaches billions of humans every day, across sight, sound, and motion. The brands that win the next decade will be the ones that understand their audience on the deepest level, knowing not only to whom they speak, but how those audiences evolved to be human in the first place.

Written with contributions from Dr. Cynthia Kaplan, director of trauma training and consultation at McLean Hospital, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, and, most importantly, his mom.