The nature of hyper-competitiveness in children and chimpanzees

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Humans are "hyper-cooperative" 1. We engage in large-scale cooperative activities with unrelated individuals and this has allowed us to be the most successful species on the planet. However, our social and cooperative nature is not always a positive force. An important, but relatively poorly understood aspect of human psychology that will contribute to our social nature - for better and for worse - is hyper-competitiveness 2,3. Humans will compete for the sake of competition and we may be the only spiteful species on earth. To better understand the nature of hyper-competitiveness, it is important to probe its ontogeny and phylogeny, namely how it develops in children and how it evolved in our closest living relatives. There is a large body of literature on the development and evolution of cooperation, but little on competitiveness. It remains to be shown how much competition shapes cognition and how this influences other social behaviours. For example, children are remarkably cooperative, able to recognise the goals of others and motivated to see those goals completed 4. Chimpanzees have been suggested to perform poorly in social cognitive domains (e.g., perspective-taking and theory of mind) because their competitive drive interferes with tasks that are typically cooperative in nature 5. However, chimpanzees are not competitive in the way that people are. For example, people will pay a cost to make others lose 6 whereas chimpanzees behave more like "rational maximisers", focussing on their outcomes alone.This PhD project will examine the hypothesis that humans are uniquely hyper-competitive using the comparative and developmental methods. The first series of studies will use a delay of gratification paradigm to explore how much competition influences inhibitory control. The second series of studies will examine whether children prefer competition or cooperation and the influence that competition has on cooperation. The final study will examine competition in chimpanzees.