Social disappointment explains chimpanzees' behaviour in the inequity aversion task

Engelmann, Jan M.; Clift, Jeremy B.; Herrmann, Eva; Tomasello, Michael

doi:10.1098/rspb.2017.1502

Cited by 39 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…The children co-operated in several experimental setups, and it was shown that the common goal is so important that individual children who reached their goals early did not stop their actions until all the others had reached their goals. Similar behavior could not be observed in great apes (Tomasello 2008;Bohn et al 2016;Engelmann et al 2017).…”

Section: Humans and Their Ancestorssupporting

confidence: 65%

“…Although great apes understand many aspects of social interactions in their lifeworlds, including causal and intentional relationships, there is a crucial difference from human understanding: In contrast even with human infants, great apes cannot participate in shared intentionality or cooperative communication (Tomasello 2008;Bohn et al 2016;Engelmann et al 2017).…”

Section: Humans and Their Ancestorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Communication as the Main Characteristic of Life

Witzany¹

2018

Handbook of Astrobiology

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With an expertise in the philosophies of science and language, I turned my focus to the philosophy of biology and life sciences in the mid-1980s. I found it interesting that the results of the philosophy of science debates did not reach any biological discipline, although philosophy of science is the essential discipline for the foundations and justifications of scientific theory building and methodology. At the center of these more than half a century lasting debates: After 2000 years of metaphysical theories and concepts, in the early twentieth century, a group of empiricists wanted to establish "exact science" by using strictly "scientific" sentences and clearly delimitate scientific research and knowledge from non-scientific sentences of metaphysics, theology, or poetry. "Scientific" meant empirically based, experimentally testable, and theoretically formalizable, because mathematics was assumed to be the only exact science that could depict material (physical and chemical) reality (Whitehead and Russel 1910-1913; Goedel 1931; Carnap 1939). The crucial question remained how to construct sentences that are scientific and not metaphysical, that is, the question how to define language, the ultimate prerequisite of any human utterance. The debate lasted from 1920 to 1980, with its most prominent proponents such as early Wittgenstein,

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Section: Humans and Their Ancestorssupporting

confidence: 65%

Section: Humans and Their Ancestorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Communication as the Main Characteristic of Life

Witzany¹

2018

Handbook of Astrobiology

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“…Generally, testing procedures involve two conspecifics facing a food distribution task that may potentially trigger phenomena such as inequity aversion (eg. Brosnan & de Waal, 2003; but see Engelmann, Clift, Herrmann, & Tomasello, 2017), no cost prosociality (eg. Horner, Carter, Suchak, & de Waal, 2011), food sharing (Silk, Brosnan, Henrich, Lambeth, & Shapiro, 2013) or reciprocity (eg.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bargaining in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): The effect of cost, amount of gift, reciprocity, and communication.

Guerra

Völter

Heras

et al. 2019

Journal of Comparative Psychology

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“…In humans, both forms can already be observed in 3 year old toddlers (Ulber et al, 2017). Inequity aversion has also been reported in a variety of primate species (reviewed in Talbot et al, 2016;Ulber et al, 2017; but see Engelmann et al, 2017), but only in the egocentric form (but see Brosnan et al, 2010).…”

Section: Social Norms I: Universal Biologically Anchored Contentsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Insights From Non-human Primates

2018

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The aim of this contribution is to explore the origins of moral behavior and its underlying moral preferences and intuitions from an evolutionary perspective. Such a perspective encompasses both the ultimate, adaptive function of morality in our own species, as well as the phylogenetic distribution of morality and its key elements across primates. First, with regard to the ultimate function, we argue that human moral preferences are best construed as adaptations to the affordances of the fundamentally interdependent hunter-gatherer lifestyle of our hominin ancestors. Second, with regard to the phylogenetic origin, we show that even though full-blown human morality is unique to humans, several of its key elements are not. Furthermore, a review of evidence from non-human primates regarding prosocial concern, conformity, and the potential presence of universal, biologically anchored and arbitrary cultural norms shows that these elements of morality are not distributed evenly across primate species. This suggests that they have evolved along separate evolutionary trajectories. In particular, the element of prosocial concern most likely evolved in the context of shared infant care, which can be found in humans and some New World monkeys. Strikingly, many if not all of the elements of morality found in non-human primates are only evident in individualistic or dyadic contexts, but not as third-party reactions by truly uninvolved bystanders. We discuss several potential explanations for the unique presence of a systematic third-party perspective in humans, but focus particularly on mentalizing ability and language. Whereas both play an important role in present day, full-blown human morality, it appears unlikely that they played a causal role for the original emergence of morality. Rather, we suggest that the most plausible scenario to date is that human morality emerged because our hominin ancestors, equipped on the one hand with large and powerful brains inherited from their ape-like ancestor, and on the other hand with strong prosocial concern as a result of cooperative breeding, could evolve into an ever more interdependent social niche.

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Social disappointment explains chimpanzees' behaviour in the inequity aversion task

Cited by 39 publications

References 57 publications

Communication as the Main Characteristic of Life

Communication as the Main Characteristic of Life

Bargaining in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): The effect of cost, amount of gift, reciprocity, and communication.

Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Insights From Non-human Primates

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