Children, chimpanzees, and bonobos adjust the visibility of their actions for cooperators and competitors.
Abstract
Chimpanzees and bonobos are highly capable of tracking other's mental states. It has
been proposed, however, that in contrast to humans, chimpanzees are only able to do
this in competitive interactions but this has rarely been directly tested. Here, pairs
of chimpanzees or bonobos (Study 1) and 4-year-old children (Study 2) were presented
with two almost identical tasks differing only regarding the social context. In the
cooperation condition, players' interests were matched: they had to make corresponding
choices to be mutually rewarded. To facilitate coordination, subjects should thus
make their actions visible to their partner whose view was partially occluded. In
the competition condition, players' interests were directly opposed: the partner tried
to match the subject's choice but subjects were only rewarded if they chose differently,
so that they benefited from hiding their actions. The apes successfully adapted their
decisions to the social context and their performance was markedly better in the cooperation
condition. Children also distinguished between the two contexts, but somewhat surprisingly,
performed better in the competitive condition. These findings demonstrate experimentally
that chimpanzees and bonobos can take into account what others can see in cooperative
interactions. Their social-cognitive skills are thus more flexible than previously
assumed.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/15402Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1038/s41598-017-08435-7Publication Info
Grueneisen, Sebastian; Duguid, Shona; Saur, Heiko; & Tomasello, Michael (2017). Children, chimpanzees, and bonobos adjust the visibility of their actions for cooperators
and competitors. Sci Rep, 7(1). pp. 8504. 10.1038/s41598-017-08435-7. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/15402.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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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
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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