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

合作渗透到人类生活和社会的各个方面。我们合作形成并达到共同的目标，也在竞争利益的情况下。为了理解人类合作的独特性及其进化，最近的研究主要集中在儿童和类人猿在二元情景下的合作能力。然而，实地的行为观察表明，灵长类动物的合作模式并不局限于二元互动，也发生在群体层面，在群体层面上，个体利益可能会相互竞争。本研究旨在利用博弈论模型建立类似于自然合作场景的群体水平范式，缩小前人研究与实地观察之间的差距，并通过引入具有不同程度亲社会倾向和脑容量的代表性较少的灵长类物种，拓宽目前儿童与类人猿的比较。对这些物种的研究提供了一种可能性，可以详细探索动机和认知成分在二元和群体层面的冲突情境中的作用。这在两个有针对性的实验中得到了体现，在两种情况下，一种是成对的个体需要在不对称的奖励分配中进行协调，另一种是个体可以决定是为了群体的更大利益而合作，还是背叛并立即获得奖励。在加州大学圣地亚哥分校认知科学系的顶尖专家Rossano博士和苏黎世大学人类学系的Burkart博士的支持下，本提案汇集了创新的范例，探索人类和灵长类动物在全球最佳条件下的合作能力范围。通过结合研究不同灵长类物种在二元和群体水平上合作的出现，这一建议必将有助于理清人类合作的起源。

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.