Baboons socialize through verbal cues.

Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, husband-and-wife biologists at UPenn have spent 14 years learning how to talk like baboons.

Using recordings that imitate various members of the troop and watching their response, baboons social patterns and thinking can be revealed to a new level of detail.

The result is that a good deal of the processes we consider to be human, particularly social behavior, can be understood to be a product of natural selection.

Their conclusion, based on many painstaking experiments, is that baboons’ minds are specialized for social interaction, for understanding the structure of their complex society and for navigating their way within it.

“Monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behavior of women in so many 19th-century novels,” Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth write. “Stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are an impediment), but also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families.”

By contrast, the male hierarchy, which consists mostly of baboons born in other troops, is always changing as males fight among themselves and with new arrivals.

The shaper of a baboon’s mind is natural selection. Those with the best social skills leave the most offspring.

NYTimes

Chimps are not social actors and shouldn't be offered jobs in sales

Keith Jensen, Josep Call, Michael Tomasello
Chimpanzees are rational maximizers in an ultimatum game.
Science, October 5, 2007

This article describes a chimp version of a human experiment where a subject is offered cash who must split it with a second person. If the second rejects it, then neither gets to keep the reward. If the subject offers much less than 50%, human beings often reject the offer.

Two Chimpanzees, when offered two drawers of raisins, will accept nearly any split, the second only rejecting a 10/0 split reliably.

The article calls these people social actors and chimps 'economic' actors, which is to say that they are laid back and don't worry about fairness in the same way people do. In practice, if chimps are so laid back, then I bet that in practice, they share more evenly in their native environment, something people are definitely not so inclined to do..

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