Social integration is the process by which individuals are accepted into a new group and establish social relationships with its members. Despite the importance of social integration, especially during dispersal, research has mostly focused on studying the implications and costs of dispersal decisions but the strategies that individuals use to successfully integrate into the new group are still unclear. Specifically, I aimed to assess whether a new individual initiates more interactions with the dominant member (befriend the dominant hypothesis), and whether possessing novel knowledge accelerates social integration (knowledgeable individual hypothesis). To do this, I used 16 female guinea pigs distributed in four enclosures. The experiment consisted of adding a new individual to an already established group of three individuals, for which the dominance hierarchy was previously established through a food allocation test. For the treatment condition a knowledgeable individual trained in a foraging task was introduced, while in the control condition a naïve individual was added. There were two replicas per condition. The results suggest that social integration is divided in three phases as proposed by Kohn (2019): exploration (the new individual exhibits affiliative interactions towards the others), pruning (affiliative and aggressive interactions within the group increase due to behavioral feedback) and consolidation (formation of longer-lasting relationships). I did not find support for the befriend the dominant hypothesis or the knowledgeable individual hypothesis. This suggests that the strategies for social integration in guinea pigs differ from those observed in primates. Overall, this study highlights the need for further exploration and understanding of the unique dynamics behind social integration in other animal groups that have been less studied.
