Chimpanzees coordinate in a snowdrift game
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Date
06/2016Funder
Grant ID
609819
Keywords
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Abstract
The snowdrift game is a model for studying social coordination in the context of competing interests. We presented pairs of chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, with a situation in which they could either pull a weighted tray together or pull alone to obtain food. Ultimately chimpanzees should coordinate their actions because if no one pulled, they would both lose the reward. There were two experimental manipulations: the tray's weight (low or high weight condition) and the time to solve the dilemma before the rewards became inaccessible (40 s or 10 s). When the costs were high (i.e. high weight condition), chimpanzees waited longer to act. Cooperation tended to increase in frequency across sessions. The pulling effort invested in the task also became more skewed between subjects. The subjects also adjusted their behaviour by changing their pulling effort for different partners. These results demonstrate that chimpanzees can coordinate their actions in situations where there is a conflict of interest.
Citation
Sánchez-Amaro , A , Duguid , S , Call , J & Tomasello , M 2016 , ' Chimpanzees coordinate in a snowdrift game ' , Animal Behaviour , vol. 116 , pp. 61-74 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.03.030
Publication
Animal Behaviour
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0003-3472Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2016 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.03.030
Description
A.S.-A. was partially supported by a LaCaixa-DAAD grant (13/94418). J.C. was partially supported by an ERC-Synergy grant SOMICS grant 609819.Collections
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