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Explaining how and why some species evolved to have more complex socialstructures than others has been a long-term goal for many researchers in animalbehavior because it would provide important insight into the links betweenevolution and ecology, sociality, and cognition. However, despite long-standinginterest, the evolution of social complexity is still poorly understood. Thismay be due in part to researchers focusing on the feasibility of quantifyingaspects of sociality, rather than what features are characteristic of animalsocial complexity in the first place. Any given approach to studying complexitycan tell us some things about animal sociality, but may miss others, so it iscritical to decide first how to conceptualize complexity before jumping in toquantifying it. Here, we briefly summarize five existing approaches tomeasuring social complexity. Then, we highlight three fundamental concepts thatare commonly used in the field of complex systems: (1) scales of organization,(2) compression, and (3) emergence. All of these concepts are applicable to thestudy of animal social systems, but are not often explicitly addressed inexisting social complexity measures. We discuss how these concepts can providea rigorous foundation for conceptualizing social complexity, the potentialbenefits of incorporating them, and how existing measures do (or do not)include them. Ultimately, researchers need to critically evaluate any measureof animal social complexity in order to balance the biological relevance of theaspect of sociality they are quantifying with the feasibility of obtainingenough data.

Rethinking animal social complexity measures with the help of complex systems concepts