Browsing by Subject "prosociality"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Open Access
Chimpanzees return favors at a personal cost.
(Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 2017-06-19) Schmelz, Martin; Grueneisen, Sebastian; Kabalak, Alihan; Jost, Jürgen; Tomasello, Michael
Humans regularly provide others with resources at a personal cost to themselves. Chimpanzees engage in some cooperative behaviors in the wild as well, but their motivational underpinnings are unclear. In three experiments, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) always chose between an option delivering food both to themselves and a partner and one delivering food only to themselves. In one condition, a conspecific partner had just previously taken a personal risk to make this choice available. In another condition, no assistance from the partner preceded the subject's decision. Chimpanzees made significantly more prosocial choices after receiving their partner's assistance than when no assistance was given (experiment 1) and, crucially, this was the case even when choosing the prosocial option was materially costly for the subject (experiment 2). Moreover, subjects appeared sensitive to the risk of their partner's assistance and chose prosocially more often when their partner risked losing food by helping (experiment 3). These findings demonstrate experimentally that chimpanzees are willing to incur a material cost to deliver rewards to a conspecific, but only if that conspecific previously assisted them, and particularly when this assistance was risky. Some key motivations involved in human cooperation thus may have deeper phylogenetic roots than previously suspected.
Open Access
Linking MPA effectiveness to the future of local rural fishing societies
(ICES Journal of Marine Science, 2018-05-01) Basurto, Xavier
Open Access
Prosocial Reward Learning in Children and Adolescents.
(Front Psychol, 2016) Kwak, Y; Huettel, SA
Adolescence is a period of increased sensitivity to social contexts. To evaluate how social context sensitivity changes over development-and influences reward learning-we investigated how children and adolescents perceive and integrate rewards for oneself and others during a dynamic risky decision-making task. Children and adolescents (N = 75, 8-16 years) performed the Social Gambling Task (SGT, Kwak et al., 2014) and completed a set of questionnaires measuring other-regarding behavior. In the SGT, participants choose amongst four card decks that have different payout structures for oneself and for a charity. We examined patterns of choices, overall decision strategies, and how reward outcomes led to trial-by-trial adjustments in behavior, as estimated using a reinforcement-learning model. Performance of children and adolescents was compared to data from a previously collected sample of adults (N = 102) performing the identical task. We found that that children/adolescents were not only more sensitive to rewards directed to the charity than self but also showed greater prosocial tendencies on independent measures of other-regarding behavior. Children and adolescents also showed less use of a strategy that prioritizes rewards for self at the expense of rewards for others. These results support the conclusion that, compared to adults, children and adolescents show greater sensitivity to outcomes for others when making decisions and learning about potential rewards.