Media release

From: The Royal Society

Social groups with diverse personalities mitigate physiological stress in a songbird 

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

“Varietas delectat” said Cicero, the famous Roman orator, in 45 BC. Two thousand years later, we still do not know whether variety in social group composition affects the well-being of group members. Here we studied this question by creating groups of house sparrows with different personality compositions and found that individuals were healthier and experienced less stress in groups of diverse personalities and fared worse in groups of uniform personality composition. It seems therefore that diversity may be indeed delightful for the group members and this finding may have implications for animal sociality and welfare, but also for human health.