The nature of hyper-competitiveness in children and chimpanzees

儿童和黑猩猩过度竞争的本质

• 批准号: 2760776
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Manchester
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2760776
• 关键词: nature; hyper; competitiveness; children; chimpanzees

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.

人类是“超级合作的”1。我们与无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，我们的社会和合作本质并不总是一种积极的力量。人类心理学的一个重要但相对而言了解较少的方面是过度竞争性，它将对我们的社会本性做出贡献（无论好坏）2,3。人类会为了竞争而竞争，我们可能是地球上唯一充满恶意的物种。为了更好地理解过度竞争的本质，重要的是探究它的个体发育和系统发育，即它如何在儿童中发展以及它如何在我们现存的近亲中进化。关于合作的发展和演变的文献有很多，但关于竞争力的文献却很少。竞争对认知的影响程度以及这如何影响其他社会行为仍有待证明。例如，儿童非常合作，能够认识到他人的目标，并有动力看到这些目标的完成4。有人认为黑猩猩在社会认知领域（例如，观点采择和心理理论）表现不佳，因为它们的竞争动力干扰了本质上通常合作的任务5。然而，黑猩猩不像人类那样具有竞争性。例如，人们会付出代价让别人失去 6，而黑猩猩的行为更像是“理性最大化者”，只关注自己的结果。这个博士项目将使用比较和发展方法来检验人类具有独特的超级竞争性的假设。第一系列研究将使用延迟满足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探讨孩子们更喜欢竞争还是合作，以及竞争对合作的影响。最终研究将考察黑猩猩的竞争。