Collaborative Research: Impacts of social context and ecology on strategic decisions in dynamic interactions

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Understanding how individuals manage or fail to coordinate their behavior in social settings where coordination is beneficial is a fundamental objective of social science. To the extent such understanding informs our ability to promote or impede coordination it is also of great practical importance for improving the performance of teams or disrupting the performance of adversaries. Recent research has investigated the underpinnings of strategic interactions in social settings between humans using simple economic games drawn from game theory as models for human decision-making. Even more recently, these methods have been used to look at strategic behavior more broadly across primate species, allowing for inter-species comparisons. Much of this work, however, in both humans and other primates, has involved only pairs of individuals, whereas in the real world such decisions take place within the rapidly changing dynamics of larger social groups. The current research project will study the decisions made by two species of non-human primates, capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees, while they are interacting in their social groups. The research will focus on how these species solve coordination problems depending on the social context and ecological conditions in which the interactions occur. The research will also examine how human subjects behave in virtual environments matched to those in which the non-human primates have been studied. The research has two primary objectives. The first is to examine who participates and doesn't in situations where individuals can coordinate (or not) to acquire a reward, how participation varies with payoffs, and how it varies with changes in social context. Two species - chimpanzees and capuchins - are selected for this part of the study because there is evidence that both cooperate, exhibit variation in success in cooperating, and are available for study in sufficiently large social groups. The second aim is to use humans to examine the influence of ecological conditions and variation in such conditions on the manifestation of strategic behavior. Subjects will make decisions in a virtual environment with specific ecological conditions and in which benefits of cooperation or anti-cooperation can be varied. The characteristics of the virtual environment will match features of environments in which behavior of capuchins and chimpanzees has already been observed to enable interspecies comparison. This part of the study will shine light on the question of how important language is to humans' remarkable ability to come to pareto optimal solutions in social interactions