Chimpanzees and children avoid mutual defection in a social dilemma
Abstract
Cooperation often comes with the temptation to defect and benefit at the cost of others. This tension between cooperation and defection is best captured in social dilemmas like the Prisoner's Dilemma. Adult humans have specific strategies to maintain cooperation during Prisoner's Dilemma interactions. Yet, little is known about the ontogenetic and phylogenetic origins of human decision-making strategies in conflict scenarios. To shed light on this question, we compared the strategies used by chimpanzees and 5-year old children to overcome a social dilemma. In our task, waiting for the partner to act first produced the best results for the subject. Alternatively, they could mutually cooperate and divide the rewards. Our findings indicate that the two species differed substantially in their strategies to solve the task. Chimpanzees became more strategic across the study period by waiting longer to act in the social dilemma. Children developed a more efficient strategy of taking turns to reciprocate their rewards. Moreover, children used specific types of communication to coordinate with their partners. These results suggest that while both species behaved strategically to overcome a conflict situation, only children engaged in active cooperation to solve a social dilemma.
Citation
Sánchez-Amaro , A , Duguid , S , Call , J & Tomasello , M 2019 , ' Chimpanzees and children avoid mutual defection in a social dilemma ' , Evolution and Human Behavior , vol. 40 , no. 1 , pp. 46-54 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2018.07.004
Publication
Evolution and Human Behavior
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1090-5138Type
Journal article
Description
A.S. was partially supported by a LaCaixa-DAAD grant (13/94418). J.C. was partially supported by an ERC-Synergy grant SOMICS grant 609819.Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.