Grunts, Grooming, and Making Up: How Animals Resolve Conflict

If you’re anything like me, conflict feels like a tax on your nervous system. It’s draining, it lingers, and even when it’s “over,” you can feel the residue in your body and in the relationship. And that's just if you're sure it's over.

In a previous piece for Psychology Today, I wrote about how animals (and that includes us) can avoid conflict before it starts, by investing heavily in positive interactions, affection, and clear boundaries. Avoiding conflict, though, is only half the story. The other half is what happens after something goes wrong.

That’s where baboons and my latest podcast episode with primate behavioral ecologist Joan Silk comes in.

During the episode, Joan told me about a pattern she and her colleagues kept seeing in baboons. Out in the field, when one female baboon approached another, she often gave a quiet grunt right before any physical contact. At first, the grunt was just background noise. Most observers were focused on who groomed whom, who sat next to whom, and who sided with whom in a fight.

But Joan’s collaborator, Dorothy Cheney, started to suspect the grunts were doing something important. She had this hunch that the grunt was more than a random sound—that it might signal “benign intent,” a kind of vocal “I come in peace.” So they decided to test it.

Here’s the basic outline of their experiment, simplified:

Two female baboons have a fight (it happens!). One is higher-ranking, one is lower-ranking. There’s aggression, chasing, you know, general drama. Eventually they separate.

Later, the researchers play back a recording of the higher‑ranking female’s grunt to the lower‑ranking female, the “victim” in this scenario. Then they watch what happens next.

What they found was incredible, especially considering its simple straightfoward implications. When the victim hears the grunt from her former aggressor, she is more likely to approach her. The grunt acts like a vocal bridge to re-establishing contact.

In other words, a small, quiet sound helps resolve the conflict.

Joan described it as the grunt saying something like, “Now I’m good. Now we’re good. At least I have no immediate intention to behave badly.” It’s not a written apology, but functionally it's similar. And baboons use this not only after fights, but also in other potentially tense situations. If a female wants to approach another female’s infant—a risky move if you don’t trust her—she often grunts as she comes closer. The grunt appears to say, “I’m going to be very nice; you can relax and let me handle your baby.”

It’s politeness, primate-style. And it’s not just baboons doing this with each other.

When I’m with gorillas in the field, we often copy their soft grunt contact calls as we move past them. It's a way of saying, “I see you, I’m not a threat, I just need to get by.”

Obviously humans don’t go around grunting (well, not usually-though maybe we should) to signal reconciliation or benign intent. But we do use tone of voice, body language, and little bids for connection in surprisingly similar ways. Think about the last time you had a serious argument with a partner, friend, or family member. After the yelling or icy silence, there’s usually a strange, uncertain in‑between phase: You’re not actively fighting, but you’re not sure where you stand. You might call, approach, or, these days, send a text. This is how we "test" to see if we are back in a good place or at least no longer in a bad place. These are human “grunts.” They’re not full conversations, and they’re not always polished apologies. They are signals: I’m not coming in hot. I don’t want to escalate. I might be ready to move toward you again.

In close relationships, we’re constantly reading these micro‑signals: a softened facial expression, a more relaxed posture, a change in how someone uses our name. We also notice their absence. When there is no bid for reconnection, no warmth, then we see it as a sign the relationship is in trouble.

In baboons, conflict is not just social theater. It's stressful. It raises uncertainty, puts individuals at risk, and can affect access to food, allies, and safety. That’s why reconciliation behaviors, like grunting and grooming after a disagreement matter so much. They allow social bonds to persist instead of fracturing every time there’s conflict.

Avoiding Conflict vs. Avoiding Repair

Many of us say we want to “avoid conflict,” but what we actually do is avoid the work of repair. We withdraw, go silent, or hope that if we pretend nothing happened long enough, the discomfort will evaporate on its own. The research on humans and other animals suggests that this is a risky strategy.

In many species, failing to reconcile after a conflict is essentially a declaration that the relationship is over. There may not be a formal breakup, but the absence of repair is a message: I am not invested enough to bridge the gap.

So what can we borrow from baboons and their politely grunted olive branches?

A few practical ideas:

• Send a clear, low‑intensity “I’m safe” signal after conflict. That might be a calmer tone, a simple “I’m ready to talk when you are,” or even a small act of kindness (making tea, a gentle check‑in) that shows you’re no longer in attack mode. It’s the human equivalent of, “Now I’m good. Now we’re good.”

  
  

• Respond when someone else grunts. When a partner or friend makes a small bid for reconnection, try to notice and respond to it, even if the conflict isn’t fully resolved yet. You can say, “I appreciate you reaching out. I’m still upset, but I do want to work through this.” Reassure them you are still in this.

  
  

• Keep the relationship padded with positives. As Gottman’s work on couples shows, it takes many positive interactions to offset even a single negative one. All that everyday affection, shared laughter, and small acts of care make it easier to interpret a post‑conflict “grunt” as sincere rather than suspicious.

  
  

• Don’t confuse silence with peace. In baboons, as in humans, quiet can mean things are safe again—or it can mean the bond has thinned to a thread. If a relationship matters to you, don’t let avoidance stand in for repair.

Listen to the full conversation

If you want to hear Joan Silk tell the baboon grunt story in her own words (and go much deeper into friendship, early adversity, and how evolution shapes social behavior), you can listen to our full conversation here.

…Note: This essay was originally published on my Substack site and is republished here for my website readers