Sociality
degree to which individuals in an animal population tend to associate in social groups and form cooperative societies
Sociality is the degree to which individuals in an animal population tend to associate in social groups (for which, the desire or inclination is known as gregariousness) and form cooperative societies.
Sociality is a survival response to evolutionary pressures. For example, when a mother wasp stays near her larvae in the nest, parasites are less likely to eat the larvae. Biologists suspect that pressures from parasites and other predators selected this behavior in wasps of the family Vespidae.
This wasp behaviour demonstrates the most fundamental characteristic of animal sociality: parental investment. Parental investment is any expenditure of resources (time, energy, social capital) to benefit one's offspring. Parental investment detracts from a parent's capacity to invest in future reproduction and aid to kin (including other offspring). An animal that cares for its young but shows no other sociality traits is said to be subsocial.
An animal that exhibits a high degree of sociality is called a social animal. The highest degree of sociality recognized by sociobiologists is eusociality.
“Sociality” enters the record as degree to which individuals in an animal population tend to associate in social groups and form cooperative societies. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sociality, degree and individuals can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3307505.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sociality” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.