Give What You Get: Capuchin Monkeys (Cebus apella) and 4-Year-Old Children Pay Forward Positive and Negative Outcomes to Conspecifics

Abstract

The breadth of human generosity is unparalleled in the natural world, and much research has explored the mechanisms underlying and motivating human prosocial behavior. Recent work has focused on the spread of prosocial behavior within groups through paying-it-forward, a case of human prosociality in which a recipient of generosity pays a good deed forward to a third individual, rather than back to the original source of generosity. While research shows that human adults do indeed pay forward generosity, little is known about the origins of this behavior. Here, we show that both capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) and 4-year-old children pay forward positive and negative outcomes in an identical testing paradigm. These results suggest that a cognitively simple mechanism present early in phylogeny and ontogeny leads to paying forward positive, as well as negative, outcomes.

Correlated pay-offs are key to cooperation

“…Generalized reciprocity has been found to generate evolutionarily stable levels of cooperation in theoretical models assuming a wide range of conditions, such as small group size, population viscosity, the existence of interaction networks, the possibility to opt out contingent on social experience, or the application of simple updating rules in response to previous interactions [41,42,44,46,48,49,[52][53][54]. Several animals have been shown to apply this simple rule in experiments controlling for alternative mechanisms (Norway rats: [51]; domestic dogs: [55]; capuchin monkeys: [56]), and it has been shown to be readily used by humans (e.g. [50,57,58]).…”

“…The identity of the individual providing or withholding help is irrelevant, as is the identity of future interaction partners. Hitherto, this mechanism has been tested experimentally in humans [50,57], including small children [56], in Norway rats [51,111], domestic dogs [55], capuchin monkeys [56] and long-tailed macaques [128]. While humans, dogs, capuchin monkeys and Norway rats have been found to apply this mechanism when enabled to help an anonymous social partner, long-tailed macaques were not shown to act upon this decision rule.…”

Evolutionary Dynamics of Coordinated Cooperation

“…A driving force of evolution of generalized reciprocity is assortment of cooperative strategies (Rankin and Taborsky, 2009) based on contingent movement of individuals between groups (Hamilton and Taborsky, 2005), a small group size (Pfeiffer et al, 2005) (but see Barta et al (2011), where random drift helps generalized reciprocity to overcome initial disadvantage in a large group), or network structure (van Doorn and Taborsky, 2012). Generalized reciprocity has been proposed as a mechanism that does not require high cognitive ability, and hence is applicable to cooperation by non-human animals (Rutte and Taborsky, 2007;Schneeberger et al, 2012;Leimgruber et al, 2014;Gfrerer and Taborsky, 2017) as well as empathy-based cooperation by humans (Bartlett and DeSteno, 2006;Stanca, 2009). In contrast, a driving force of cooperation in my model is coordination of behavior based on negotiation and pre-commitments.…”

Promotion of cooperation in social dilemma games via generalised indirect reciprocity

“…reciprocity Leimgruber et al, 2014), has been investigated. Generalised reciprocity differs from direct and indirect reciprocity in that the individual who helps others does not necessarily receive help in return (see Table 1).…”