Large-scale cooperation is a hallmark of our species and appears to be unique among primates. Yet the evolutionary mechanisms that drove the emergence of humanlike patterns of cooperation remain unclear. Studying the cognitive processes underlying cooperative behavior in apes, our closest living relatives, can help identify these mechanisms. Accordingly, we employed a novel test battery to assess the willingness of 40 chimpanzees to donate resources, instrumentally help others, and punish a culpable thief. We found that chimpanzees were faster to make prosocial than selfish choices and that more prosocial individuals made the fastest responses. Further, two measures of self-control did not predict variation in prosocial responding, and individual performance across cooperative tasks did not covary. These results show that chimpanzees and humans share key cognitive processes for cooperation, despite differences in the scope of their cooperative behaviors.
AinsworthS. E.BaumeisterR. F.ArielyD.VohsK. (2014). Ego depletion decreases trust in economic decision making. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 54, 40–49.
2.
AronA. R.RobbinsT. W.PoldrackR. A. (2014). Inhibition and the right inferior frontal cortex: One decade on. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18, 177–185.
3.
BearA.KaganA.RandD. G. (2017). Co-evolution of cooperation and cognition: The impact of imperfect deliberation and context-sensitive intuition. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 284(1851), Article 20162326. doi:10.1098/rspb.2016.2326
4.
BearA.RandD. G. (2016). Intuition, deliberation, and the evolution of cooperation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 113, 936–941.
5.
BeranM. J.HopkinsW. D. (2018). Self-control in chimpanzees relates to general intelligence. Current Biology, 28(4), 574–579.e3. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2017.12.043
6.
BöcklerA.TuscheA.SingerT. (2016). The structure of human prosociality: Differentiating altruistically motivated, norm motivated, strategically motivated, and self-reported prosocial behavior. Social Psychological & Personality Science, 7, 530–541.
7.
BuckholtzJ. W. (2015). Social norms, self-control, and the value of antisocial behavior. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 3, 122–129.
8.
CrockettM. J.Kurth-NelsonZ.SiegelJ. Z.DayanP.DolanR. J. (2014). Harm to others outweighs harm to self in moral decision making. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 111, 17320–17325.
9.
CurryO. S.PriceM. E.PriceJ. G. (2008). Patience is a virtue: Cooperative people have lower discount rates. Personality and Individual Differences, 44, 780–785.
10.
DunfieldK. A.KuhlmeierV. A. (2013). Classifying prosocial behavior: Children’s responses to instrumental need, emotional distress, and material desire. Child Development, 84, 1766–1776.
11.
EspinA.Brañas-GarzaP.HerrmannB.GamellaJ. F. (2012). Patient and impatient punishers of free-riders. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 279, 4923–4928.
12.
EvansA. M.DillonK. D.RandD. G. (2015). Fast but not intuitive, slow but not reflective: Decision conflict drives reaction times in social dilemmas. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144, 951–966.
13.
HareB. (2017). Survival of the friendliest: Homo sapiens evolved via selection for prosociality. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 155–186.
14.
HerrmannE.CallJ.Hernàndez-LloredaM. V.HareB.TomaselloM. (2007). Humans have evolved specialized skills of social cognition: The cultural intelligence hypothesis. Science, 317, 1360–1366.
15.
HerrmannE.Hernández-LloredaM. V.CallJ.HareB.TomaselloM. (2010). The structure of individual differences in the cognitive abilities of children and chimpanzees. Psychological Science, 21, 102–110.
16.
HikosakaO.IsodaM. (2010). Switching from automatic to controlled behavior: Cortico-basal ganglia mechanisms. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14, 154–161.
17.
JensenK.CallJ.TomaselloM. (2007). Chimpanzees are vengeful but not spiteful. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 104, 13046–13050.
18.
JensenK.HareB.CallJ.TomaselloM. (2006). What’s in it for me? Self-regard precludes altruism and spite in chimpanzees. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 273, 1013–1021.
19.
KahnemanD. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
20.
KrajbichI.BartlingB.HareT.FehrE. (2015). Rethinking fast and slow based on a critique of reaction-time reverse inference. Nature Communications, 6, 7455–7459.
21.
LotitoG.MigheliM.OrtonaG. (2013). Is cooperation instinctive? Evidence from the response times in a public goods game. Journal of Bioeconomics, 15, 123–133.
22.
LotzS. (2015). Spontaneous giving under structural inequality: Intuition promotes cooperation in asymmetric social dilemmas. PLOS ONE, 10(7), Article e0131562. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0131562
23.
MelisA. P.WarnekenF. (2016). The psychology of cooperation: Insights from chimpanzees and children. Evolutionary Anthropology, 25, 297–305.
24.
MelisA. P.WarnekenF.JensenK.SchneiderA.CallJ.TomaselloM. (2011). Chimpanzees help conspecifics to obtain food and non-food items. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 278, 1405–1413.
25.
MullerM. N.MitaniJ. C. (2005). Conflict and cooperation in wild chimpanzees. Advances in the Study of Behavior, 35, 275–331.
26.
NosekB. A.HawkinsC. B.FrazierR. S. (2011). Implicit social cognition: From measures to mechanisms. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15, 152–159.
27.
PaulusM. (2014). The emergence of prosocial behavior: Why do infants and toddlers help, comfort, and share?Child Development Perspectives, 8, 77–81.
28.
PeysakhovichA.NowakM. A.RandD. G. (2014). Humans display a ‘cooperative phenotype’ that is domain general and temporally stable. Nature Communications, 5, Article 4939. doi:10.1038/ncomms5939
29.
RandD. G. (2016). Cooperation, fast and slow: Meta-analytic evidence for a theory of social heuristics and self-interested deliberation. Psychological Science, 27, 1192–1206.
30.
RandD. G.GreeneJ. D.NowakM. A. (2012). Spontaneous giving and calculated greed. Nature, 489, 427–430.
31.
RandD. G.PeysakhovichA.Kraft-ToddG. T.NewmanG. E.WurzbacherO.NowakM. A.GreeneJ. D. (2014). Social heuristics shape intuitive cooperation. Nature Communications, 5, Article 3677. doi:10.1038/ncomms4677
32.
R Core Team. (2017). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Retrieved from http://www.R-project.org
33.
RiedlK.JensenK.CallJ.TomaselloM. (2012). No third-party punishment in chimpanzees. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 109, 14824–14829.
34.
RosatiA. G.HareB. (2013). Chimpanzees and bonobos exhibit emotional responses to decision outcomes. PLOS ONE, 8(5), Article e63058. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0063058
35.
SilkJ. B.BrosnanS. F.VonkJ.HenrichJ.PovinelliD. J.RichardsonA. S.. . . SchapiroS. J. (2005). Chimpanzees are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members. Nature, 437, 1357–1359.
36.
StevensJ.HauserM. D. (2004). Why be nice? Psychological constraints on the evolution of cooperation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 60–65.
37.
VerbruggenF.LoganG. D. (2008). Response inhibition in the stop-signal paradigm. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 418–424.
38.
WarnekenF.HareB.MelisA. P.HanusD.TomaselloM. (2007). Spontaneous altruism by chimpanzees and young children. PLOS Biology, 5(7), Article e184. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050184
39.
WarnekenF.TomaselloM. (2009). Varieties of altruism in children and chimpanzees. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13, 397–402.
40.
YamagishiT.MatsumotoY.KiyonariT.TakagishiH.LiY.KanaiR.SakagamiM. (2017). Response time in economic games reflects different types of decision conflict for prosocial and proself individuals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 114, 6394–6399.
41.
ZakiJ.MitchellJ. P. (2011). Equitable decision making is associated with neural markers of subjective value. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 108, 19761–19766.
42.
ZakiJ.MitchellJ. P. (2013). Intuitive prosociality. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22, 466–470.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
