A comparative study of the cooperative strategies of gibbons, marmosets, and children in response to dyadic and group situational conflict.

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Cooperation permeates all facets of human lives and societies. We cooperate to form and reach joint goals, and also in situations of competing interests. To understand the uniqueness of human cooperation and its evolution, recent research has mainly focused on the cooperative abilities of children and great apes in dyadic scenarios. However, behavioural observations in the field show that primates’ cooperative patterns are not restricted to dyadic interactions but also occur at the group level, in which individual interests may compete. The present proposal aims to close the gap between previous studies and field observations by using game theory models to develop group level paradigms resembling natural scenarios for cooperation, and broaden the current children-great ape comparison by introducing less represented primate species with varying degrees of prosocial tendencies and brain sizes. The study of these species offers the possibility to explore, in detail, the role of motivational and cognitive components in situations of conflict at both the dyadic and the group level. This is translated in two targeted experiments exploring situations in which pairs of individuals need to coordinate over an asymmetric reward distribution, and situations in which individuals can decide whether to cooperate for the greater good of the group or instead defect and obtain an immediate reward. The present proposal marshals innovative paradigms to explore the scope of humans’ and primates’ abilities to cooperate in the best possible conditions worldwide, through the support of the leading expert Dr. Rossano at the Cognitive Science Department at the University of California, San Diego and the support of Dr. Burkart at the Anthropology Department at the University of Zurich. By combining paradigms to study the emergence of cooperation at both the dyadic and the group level in different primate species, this proposal will certainly help to disentangle the precursors of human cooperation.