Recent studies have shown that chimpanzees possess many of the cognitive prerequisites necessary for humanlike collaboration. Cognitive abilities, however, might not be all that differs between chimpanzees and humans when it comes to cooperation. Researchers from the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the MPI for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen have now discovered that when all else is equal, human children prefer to work together in solving a problem, rather than solve it on their own. Chimpanzees, on the other hand, show no such preference according to a study of 3-year-old German kindergarteners and semi-free ranging chimpanzees, in which the children and chimps could choose between a collaborative and a non-collaboration problem-solving approach.
Human societies are built on collaboration. From a young age, children will recognize the need for help, actively recruit collaborators, make agreements on how to proceed, and recognize the roles of their peers to ensure success. Chimpanzees are cooperative too, working together in border patrols and group hunting, for instance. Still, humans might have greater motivation to cooperate than chimpanzees do." A preference for doing things together instead of alone differentiates humans from one of our closely related primate cousins," says Daniel Haun of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. "We expected to find differences between human and chimpanzee cooperation, because humans cooperate in a larger variety of contexts and in more complex forms than chimpanzees."
