Chimpanzees Are Vengeful but Not Spiteful.
From: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany. jensen@eva.mpg.de
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Publish Date: Aug 2007
- ISSN: 0027-8424
- Volume: 104
- Issue: 32
- Pages: 13046-50
- Medium: Print
- Language: English
- Citation (JAMA): Jensen Keith, Call Josep, Tomasello Michael, et al. Chimpanzees Are Vengeful but Not Spiteful.. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. Aug 2007;104:13046-50
Abstract
People are willing to punish others at a personal cost, and this apparently antisocial tendency can stabilize cooperation. What motivates humans to punish noncooperators is likely a combination of aversion to both unfair outcomes and unfair intentions. Here we report a pair of studies in which captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) did not inflict costs on conspecifics by knocking food away if the outcome alone was personally disadvantageous but did retaliate against conspecifics who actually stole the food from them. Like humans, chimpanzees retaliate against personally harmful actions, but unlike humans, they are indifferent to simply personally disadvantageous outcomes and are therefore not spiteful.
Mesh Headings (Keywords): Animals, Behavior, Animal, Cooperative Behavior, Female, Male, Motivation, Pan troglodytes, Punishment
Check for Full Text / PubMed Unique Identifier (PMID): 17644612
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