Prestige Affects Cultural Learning in Chimpanzees

Abstract

Humans follow the example of prestigious, high-status individuals much more readily than that of others, such as when we copy the behavior of village elders, community leaders, or celebrities. This tendency has been declared uniquely human, yet remains untested in other species. Experimental studies of animal learning have typically focused on the learning mechanism rather than on social issues, such as who learns from whom. The latter, however, is essential to understanding how habits spread. Here we report that when given opportunities to watch alternative solutions to a foraging problem performed by two different models of their own species, chimpanzees preferentially copy the method shown by the older, higher-ranking individual with a prior track-record of success. Since both solutions were equally difficult, shown an equal number of times by each model and resulted in equal rewards, we interpret this outcome as evidence that the preferred model in each of the two groups tested enjoyed a significant degree of prestige in terms of whose example other chimpanzees chose to follow. Such prestige-based cultural transmission is a phenomenon shared with our own species. If similar biases operate in wild animal populations, the adoption of culturally transmitted innovations may be significantly shaped by the characteristics of performers.

Primate archaeology reveals cultural transmission in wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus)

“…Only adult group members permanently display the typical behaviour of a community. Chimpanzees in captivity were found to seek social cues preferentially from higher ranking, prestigious and older individuals, which leads to uniform group behaviour [72,74,75]. These findings might explain the fact that immigrants did not copy all group members present at a similar rate but favoured social information from resident group members over their personal knowledge only if they were considered higher ranking.…”

Spontaneous prosocial choice by chimpanzees

“…To avoid a complex apparatus that may not be intuitive, we modified a token-exchange paradigm with which the chimpanzees already were familiar (28)(29)(30) and that had worked well with capuchin monkeys (24). Actors received a bucket of 30 tokens randomly jumbled together that they could exchange with an experimenter: 15 tokens of one color that resulted in a selfish outcome (1/0) and 15 tokens of another color that resulted in a prosocial outcome (1/1).…”

Organicitatea științei

“…La animalele sociale, în general, este posibil ca aceia care pleacă din comunitatea lor, după ce au dobîndit deprinderile de acolo, să poată transmite acele elemente de cultură comunității în care se transferă, însă chestiunea ține mult de prestigiu, în mod obișnuit identitatea inventatorului fiind mai importantă decît utilitatea invenției (Kawamura, 1959;Horner et al, 2010). Deși, din motive ce țin de specificul civilizației umane, trăsătura generalității este dominantă la ființa umană, iar cea a localității la ființa non-umană, în ambele cazuri se constată-iarăși, cu ponderi foarte diferite-existența comunităților constituite pe baza mai multor tradiții, suferind interferențe care afectează continuitatea blocului de trăsături de la un moment dat 74 .…”