The decision to urinate involves a complex combination of both physiological and social considerations. However, the social dimensions of urination remain largely unexplored. More specifically, aligning urination in time (i.e. synchrony) and the triggering of urination by observing similar behavior in others (i.e. social contagion) are thought to occur in humans across different cultures, and possibly also in non-human animals. In a new paper in the journal Current Biology, scientists report socially contagious urination in chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives, as measured through all-occurrence recording of 20 captive chimpanzees at the Kumamoto Sanctuary in Japan across over 600 hours. Their results suggest that socially contagious urination may be an overlooked, and potentially widespread, facet of social behavior.
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