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Chimpanzees return favors at a personal cost.

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Date
2017-06-19
Authors
Schmelz, Martin
Grueneisen, Sebastian
Kabalak, Alihan
Jost, Jürgen
Tomasello, Michael
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Abstract
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.
Type
Journal article
Subject
chimpanzees
cooperation
prosociality
reciprocity
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/14983
Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1073/pnas.1700351114
Publication Info
Schmelz, Martin; Grueneisen, Sebastian; Kabalak, Alihan; Jost, Jürgen; & Tomasello, Michael (2017). Chimpanzees return favors at a personal cost. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 10.1073/pnas.1700351114. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/14983.
This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Scholars@Duke

Tomasello

Michael Tomasello

James F. Bonk Distinguished Professor
Major research interests in processes of social cognition, social learning, cooperation, and communication from developmental, comparative, and cultural perspectives. Current theoretical focus on processes of shared intentionality. Empirical research mainly with human children from 1 to 4 years of age and great apes.
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