He was the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory,[1] and author of numerous books including Chimpanzee Politics (1982) and Our Inner Ape (2005).

His research centered on primate social behavior, including conflict resolution, cooperation, inequity aversion, and food-sharing.

In 1977, De Waal received his doctorate in biology from Utrecht University after training as a zoologist and ethologist with professor Jan van Hooff, a well-known expert of emotional facial expression in primates.

His dissertation, titled "Agonistic interactions and relations among Java-monkeys", concerned aggressive behavior and alliance formation in macaques.

[5] In 1975, De Waal began a six-year project on the world's largest captive colony of chimpanzees at the Arnhem Zoo.

[7] De Waal's early work drew attention to deception and conflict resolution among primates, both of which became major areas of research.

At first, his research was highly controversial and the label "reconciliation", which De Waal introduced for reunions after fights, was initially questioned, but came to be fully accepted with respect to animal behavior.

His most widely cited paper, written with his former student Stephanie Preston, concerns the evolutionary origin and neuroscience of empathy, not just in primates, but in mammals in general.

However, competition is not ignored in his work: the original focus of de Waal's research was aggressive behavior and social dominance.

See, for example, the research of Felix Warneken,[13] a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

[15] The most recent work in this area was the first demonstration that given a chance to play the ultimatum game, chimpanzees respond in the same way as children and human adults by preferring the equitable outcome.