This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

When primatologists observe chimpanzees, they take note of activities like fighting, playing, touching, and grooming. And it turns out you can learn

a lot about humans, we are primates after all, by observing the same behaviors in us.

Not grooming, but you know who was nice to who complimented, who talked to who, who flirted with who, all those kinds of things.

Laura Jones, an anthropologist at Emory University and Kaiser Permanente.

The primates her team studied were surgeons, nurses,

anesthesiologists, and other staff

at three US hospitals.

The researchers observed 200 surgeries,

while logging behaviors like cursing and

cowering, stomping or head shaking, joking and singing,

complimenting or flirting.

And they found that conflict in the OR surged

when male surgeons

teams were mostly male or when female surgeons were with mostly female

teams. I would say it would be a no-brainer if we have found that all females were cooperative but that's not what we found.

Instead the highest levels of cooperation occurred when a female surgeon had a male surgical team and

vice versa. Perhaps Jones says because those mixed teams avoided male, male, or female

female conflict. In fact, previous studies and primates, both human and non-human, have shown that

competition is strongest between individuals of the same gender.

The surgery findings are in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I would say that the most practical thing to do at this point would be using this to affect

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