Cooperation not competition: Chimps can be team players

Our species is thought to be unique in its ability to achieve cooperation, whilst the chimpanzee, our closest relative, is usually described as competitive. However, a new study revealed that, given the choice between cooperation and competition, chimpanzees opted for the first option five times more frequently.

This research carried by the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, suggests that chimpanzees, considered to be aggressive and competitive, actually prefer cooperating over competing. The work shows that chimps work together at similar rates as humans, and when violence does occur, it is usually caused by an ape who is not being a team player.

To reach this conclusion, researchers worked with 11 chimps in an environment that simulates their usual conditions and devised an experiment to evaluate cooperation, defined as two or more chimps working together to achieve a food reward. Apes had nearly 100 hours to obtain their prize with other chimps as onlookers, so there were lots of chances for competition to occur. The researchers defined “competition” as episodes of violence or prize stealing.

In 94 hour-long test sessions, the chimps cooperated with one another 3,565 times five times more often than they were in competition. On top of this, apes used plenty of strategies to punish competitive behaviors or to prevent freeloading.

“It has become a popular claim that human cooperation is unique,” study co-author Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Yerkes, said in a statement. “Our study is the first to show that our closest relatives know very well how to discourage competition and freeloading.”

Plenty of other species exhibit cooperative behavior, for example the ants. But as lead author Malini Suchak explains, what her team observed in chimps is even more impressive. “Although cooperation is widespread across species, cooperation in ants, for example, as well as in many other species is directed toward kin and is basically preprogrammed,” she says. “Our study shows that chimpanzees are really thinking about cooperation and actively making decisions that maximize cooperation and minimize competition.” She adds: “Cognitively, what they did in our experiment is much closer to what humans do when we cooperate than it is to what ants do when they cooperate.”

As Suchaksays, her new findings signify that the origins of our cooperative behaviors may go farther back than it was thought. “In the past, chimpanzees have been characterized as overly aggressive and competitive, which resulted in people suggesting human cooperative behavior evolved relatively recently and is somehow distinct from cooperation observed in other species,” she says. “Our findings are a reminder that humans are animals, after all.”

Divulgative article (in Spanish) http://elpais.com/elpais/2016/08/22/ciencia/1471883542_652369.html

Original article: http://www.pnas.org/content/113/36/10215

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