The nature of hyper-competitiveness in children and chimpanzees

人类是“超级合作”的。我们与不相关的个体进行大规模的合作活动，这使我们成为地球上最成功的物种。然而，我们的社会性和合作性并不总是一种积极的力量。人类心理学中一个重要的、但却相对不为人所知的方面——无论好坏——是超级竞争力。人类会为了竞争而竞争，我们可能是地球上唯一心怀恶意的物种。为了更好地理解超级竞争力的本质，探索其个体发生和系统发生是很重要的，即它是如何在儿童中发展的，以及它是如何在我们最亲近的亲戚中进化的。关于合作的发展和演变有大量的文献，但关于竞争力的文献却很少。竞争在多大程度上塑造了认知，以及它如何影响其他社会行为，这仍有待研究。例如，孩子们非常合作，能够认识到别人的目标，并有动力看到这些目标的完成。人们认为黑猩猩在社会认知领域（如换位思考和心理理论）表现不佳，因为它们的竞争欲望干扰了本质上典型的合作任务。然而，黑猩猩不像人类那样好胜。例如，人类会为让他人损失而付出代价，而黑猩猩的行为更像是“理性的最大化者”，只关注自己的结果。这个博士项目将使用比较和发展的方法来检验人类具有独特的超竞争力的假设。第一个系列的研究将使用满足延迟范式来探索竞争对抑制控制的影响程度。第二个系列的研究将检验儿童是喜欢竞争还是喜欢合作，以及竞争对合作的影响。最后一项研究将考察黑猩猩的竞争。

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.