About Frans de Waal
Franciscus Bernardus Maria de Waal was a Dutch-American primatologist and ethologist. He was the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, director of the Living Links Center at the Emory National Primate Research Center, and author of numerous books including Chimpanzee Politics (1982) and Our Inner Ape (2005). His research centered on primate social behavior, including conflict resolution, cooperation, inequity aversion, and food-sharing. He was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. De Waal was the first to introduce the thinking of Machiavelli to primatology, leading to the label "Machiavellian intelligence" that later became associated with it. At first, his research was highly controversial and the label "reconciliation", which De Waal introduced for reunions after fights, was initially questioned, but came to be fully accepted with respect to animal behavior.
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