Study challenges distinctiveness
of human cooperation
Date: August 22, 2016
Source: Emory Health Sciences
When given a choice between
cooperating or competing, chimpanzees choose to cooperate five times more
frequently Yerkes National Primate Research Center researchers have found.
This, the researchers say, challenges the perceptions humans are unique in our
ability to cooperate and chimpanzees are overly competitive, and suggests the
roots of human cooperation are shared with other primates. The study results
are reported in this week's early online edition of the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.
To determine if chimpanzees
possess the same ability humans have to overcome competition, the researchers
set up a cooperative task that closely mimicked chimpanzee natural conditions,
for example, providing the 11 great apes that participated in this study with
an open choice to select cooperation partners and giving them plenty of ways to
compete. Working beside the chimpanzees' grassy outdoor enclosure at the Yerkes
Research Center Field Station, the researchers gave the great apes thousands of
opportunities to pull cooperatively at an apparatus filled with rewards. In
half of the test sessions, two chimpanzees needed to participate to succeed,
and in the other half, three chimpanzees were needed.
While the set up provided ample
opportunities for competition, aggression and freeloading, the chimpanzees
overwhelmingly performed cooperative acts -- 3,565 times across 94 hour-long
test sessions.
The chimpanzees used a variety of
enforcement strategies to overcome competition, displacement and freeloading,
which the researchers measured by attempted thefts of rewards. These strategies
included the chimpanzees directly protesting against others, refusing to work
in the presence of a freeloader, which supports avoidance as an important
component in managing competitive tendencies, and more dominant chimpanzees
intervening to help others against freeloaders. Such third-party punishment
occurred 14 times, primarily in response to aggression between the freeloader
and the chimpanzee that was cooperatively working with others for the rewards.
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