The nature of hyper-competitiveness in children and chimpanzees

人类是“超合作”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，我们的社会和合作性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知之甚少的方面将有助于我们的社会性质-无论是好是坏-是超级竞争力2，3。人类将为了竞争而竞争，我们可能是地球上唯一恶意的物种。为了更好地理解超竞争性的本质，重要的是要探索它的个体发生和生殖发生，即它如何在儿童中发展，以及它如何在我们最近的亲属中进化。关于合作的发展和演变的文献很多，但关于竞争力的文献很少。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，这还有待证明。例如，孩子们非常合作，能够识别他人的目标，并有动力看到这些目标的完成。黑猩猩被认为在社会认知领域表现不佳（例如，观点采择和心理理论），因为他们的竞争驱动干扰了本质上通常是合作的任务。然而，黑猩猩不像人类那样具有竞争力。例如，人们会付出代价，使别人失去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的方法来检验人类是唯一的超级竞争力的假设。第一个系列的研究将使用延迟满足范式，探讨有多少竞争影响抑制控制。第二个系列的研究将探讨儿童是否喜欢竞争或合作，以及竞争对合作的影响。最后一项研究将研究黑猩猩的竞争。

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.