Chimpanzees can be forgiving when wronged if they know it was unintentional

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2022-02-23 11:01

International

Photo by satya deep on Unsplash

Chimpanzees may be able to consider the intentions of someone who has wronged them when deciding whether to be angry, according to international research. The team conducted two studies in which a human experimenter tried to give a chimpanzee food in exchange for a tool, but of two food options they had, they gave the chimpanzee the less appetising option. The researchers say the chimpanzees were less likely to have a negative emotional response to being handed the wrong snack if they could see the human experimenter physically could not access the better food, rather than the experimenter choosing the less delicious treat. In a second experiment, the researchers say there was no difference in response from the chimpanzee if it appeared as though the experimenter simply didn't know where the better snack option was hidden in the experiment room.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

Judgments of wrongdoing in humans often hinge upon an assessment of whether a perpetrator acted out of free choice: whether they had more than one option. The classic inhibitors of free choice are constraint (e.g. having your hands tied together) and ignorance (e.g. being unaware that an alternative exists). Here, across two studies, we investigated whether chimpanzees consider these factors in their evaluation of social action. We found that chimpanzees, like humans, judge intentional negative social actions more harshly than unintentional ones. These results suggest that chimpanzees assess others' social interactions in complex ways.

Attachments

Note: Not all attachments are visible to the general public. Research URLs will go live after the embargo ends.

Research The Royal Society, Web page The URL will go live after the embargo ends

Journal/
conference: Biology Letters

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: University of California, Berkeley, USA

Funder: We thank the Leibniz Science Campus Primate Cognition Göttingen (funded by the Leibniz Association) for awarding us a Seed Fund and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale for awarding us a Faculty Research Grant. Jan Engelmann was funded by a DAAD P.R.I.M.E. Fellowship.

Media Contact/s

Contact details are only visible to registered journalists.