Social life is good for you, even when your friends have lice — if you’re a Japanese macaque.

Whether the same is true for humans hasn’t been tested directly, at least not the way researchers in Japan conducted their experiments with networks of female macaques.

Julie Duboscq, a researcher at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute in Japan, tracked louse infestation and grooming interactions in about 20 adult female macaques. As she, Andrew J.J. MacIntosh and their colleagues noted in describing their research in Scientific Reports, grooming is known to reduce lice, but such close physical contact can also make it easy for lice to pass from one animal to another.

Dr. Duboscq is interested in the costs and benefits of social behavior. For animals that live in social groups, as macaques and people do, the benefits of social life are many, from defense against predators (for wild monkeys, and no doubt for humans at some point in their history) to emotional health and well-being (for humans, and probably monkeys, too).