Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 113, Issue 36, Pages 10215-10220Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1611826113
Keywords
Pan troglodytes; freeloading; enforcement; punishment; partner choice
Categories
Funding
- Living Links Center, Emory's PRISM Program [NSF GK12 DGE0536941]
- Emory's Dean's Teaching Fellowship program
- Emory's FIRST program, NIH/National Institute of General Medical Sciences IRACDA Grant [K12GM00680]
- Expanding the Science and Practice of Gratitude Project by the Greater Good Science Center
- University of California, Berkeley
- John Templeton Foundation
- Canisius Earning Excellence Program
- National Institutes of Health's Office of Research Infrastructure Programs [P51OD011132]
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Our species is routinely depicted as unique in its ability to achieve cooperation, whereas our closest relative, the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), is often characterized as overly competitive. Human cooperation is assisted by the cost attached to competitive tendencies through enforcement mechanisms, such as punishment and partner choice. To examine if chimpanzees possess the same ability to mitigate competition, we set up a cooperative task in the presence of the entire group of 11 adults, which required two or three individuals to pull jointly to receive rewards. This open-group set-up provided ample opportunity for competition (e.g., freeloading, displacements) and aggression. Despite this unique set-up and initial competitiveness, cooperation prevailed in the end, being at least five times as common as competition. The chimpanzees performed 3,565 cooperative acts while using a variety of enforcement mechanisms to overcome competition and freeloading, as measured by (attempted) thefts of rewards. These mechanisms included direct protest by the target, third-party punishment in which dominant individuals intervened against free-loaders, and partner choice. There was a marked difference between freeloading and displacement; freeloading tended to elicit withdrawal and third-party interventions, whereas displacements were met with a higher rate of direct retaliation. Humans have shown similar responses in controlled experiments, suggesting shared mechanisms across the primates to mitigate competition for the sake of cooperation.
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