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Author Warneken, F.; Tomasello, M. url  doi
openurl 
  Title Altruistic Helping in Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees Type Journal Article
  Year 2006 Publication Science Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume 311 Issue 5765 Pages 1301-1303  
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  Abstract Human beings routinely help others to achieve their goals, even when the helper receives no immediate benefit and the person helped is a stranger. Such altruistic behaviors (toward non-kin) are extremely rare evolutionarily, with some theorists even proposing that they are uniquely human. Here we show that human children as young as 18 months of age (prelinguistic or just-linguistic) quite readily help others to achieve their goals in a variety of different situations. This requires both an understanding of others' goals and an altruistic motivation to help. In addition, we demonstrate similar though less robust skills and motivations in three young chimpanzees.  
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  Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 5607  
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Author Warneken, F.; Tomasello, M. url  doi
openurl 
  Title Varieties of altruism in children and chimpanzees Type Abstract
  Year 2009 Publication Trends in cognitive sciences Abbreviated Journal Trends Cogn Sci  
  Volume 13 Issue 9 Pages 397-402  
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  Abstract Recent empirical research has shed new light on the perennial question of human altruism. A number of recent studies suggest that from very early in ontogeny young children have a biological predisposition to help others achieve their goals, to share resources with others and to inform others of things helpfully. Humans nearest primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, engage in some but not all of these behaviors: they help others instrumentally, but they are not so inclined to share resources altruistically and they do not inform others of things helpfully. The evolutionary roots of human altruism thus appear to be much more complex than previously supposed.  
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  Publisher Elsevier Science, Place of Publication Editor  
  Language (down) Summary Language Original Title  
  Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title  
  Series Volume Series Issue Edition  
  ISSN 1364-6613 ISBN Medium  
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  Notes Approved no  
  Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ S1364-6613(09)00149-1 DOI - 10.1016/j.tics.2009.06.008 Serial 5608  
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Author Warneken, F.; Hare, B.; Melis, A.P.; Hanus, D.; Tomasello, M. url  doi
openurl 
  Title Spontaneous Altruism by Chimpanzees and Young Children Type Journal Article
  Year 2007 Publication PLoS Biol Abbreviated Journal PLoS Biol  
  Volume 5 Issue 7 Pages e184 EP -  
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  Abstract <p>Experimental evidence reveals that chimpanzees will help other unrelated humans and conspecifics without a reward, showing that they share crucial aspects of altruism with humans.</p>  
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  Publisher Public Library of Science Place of Publication Editor  
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  Notes Approved no  
  Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 5609  
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Author Schneider, A.-C.; Melis, A.P.; Tomasello, M. url  doi
openurl 
  Title How chimpanzees solve collective action problems Type Journal Article
  Year 2012 Publication Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume Issue Pages  
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  Abstract We presented small groups of chimpanzees with two collective action situations, in which action was necessary for reward but there was a disincentive for individuals to act owing to the possibility of free-riding on the efforts of others. We found that in simpler scenarios (experiment 1) in which group size was small, there was a positive relationship between rank and action with more dominant individuals volunteering to act more often, particularly when the reward was less dispersed. Social tolerance also seemed to mediate action whereby higher tolerance levels within a group resulted in individuals of lower ranks sometimes acting and appropriating more of the reward. In more complex scenarios, when group size was larger and cooperation was necessary (experiment 2), overcoming the problem was more challenging. There was highly significant variability in the action rates of different individuals as well as between dyads, suggesting success was more greatly influenced by the individual personalities and personal relationships present in the group.  
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  Notes Approved no  
  Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 5629  
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Author Melis, A.P.; Warneken, F.; Jensen, K.; Schneider, A.-C.; Call, J.; Tomasello, M. url  doi
openurl 
  Title Chimpanzees help conspecifics obtain food and non-food items Type Journal Article
  Year 2011 Publication Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume 278 Issue 1710 Pages 1405-1413  
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  Abstract Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) sometimes help both humans and conspecifics in experimental situations in which immediate selfish benefits can be ruled out. However, in several experiments, chimpanzees have not provided food to a conspecific even when it would cost them nothing, leading to the hypothesis that prosociality in the food-provisioning context is a derived trait in humans. Here, we show that chimpanzees help conspecifics obtain both food and non-food items—given that the donor cannot get the food herself. Furthermore, we show that the key factor eliciting chimpanzees' targeted helping is the recipients' attempts to either get the food or get the attention of the potential donor. The current findings add to the accumulating body of evidence that humans and chimpanzees share the motivation and skills necessary to help others in situations in which they cannot selfishly benefit. Humans, however, show prosocial motives more readily and in a wider range of contexts.  
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  Notes Approved no  
  Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 5630  
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Author Hare, B.; Rosati, A.; Kaminski, J.; Bräuer, J.; Call, J.; Tomasello, M. url  doi
openurl 
  Title The domestication hypothesis for dogs' skills with human communication: a response to Udell et al. (2008) and Wynne et al. (2008) Type Journal Article
  Year 2010 Publication Anim Behav Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume 79 Issue Pages  
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  Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Hare2010 Serial 6241  
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Author Tennie, C.; Call, J.; Tomasello, M. url  doi
openurl 
  Title Untrained chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) fail to imitate novel actions Type Journal Article
  Year 2012 Publication PLoS One Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume 7 Issue Pages  
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  Notes Approved no  
  Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Tennie2012 Serial 6289  
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Author Tomasello, M. url  openurl
  Title Cultural Transmission: A View from Chimpanzees and Human Infants Type Journal Article
  Year 2001 Publication Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology Abbreviated Journal  
  Volume 32 Issue 2 Pages 135-146  
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  Abstract Human beings are biologically adapted for culture in ways that other primates are not, as evidenced most clearly by the fact that only human cultural traditions accumulate modifications over historical time (the ratchet effect). The key adaptation is one that enables individuals to understand other individuals as intentional agents like the self. This species-unique form of social cognition emerges in human ontogeny at around 1 year of age as infants begin to engage with other persons in various kinds of joint attentional activities involving gaze following, social referencing, and gestural communication. Young children's joint attentional skills then engender some uniquely powerful forms of cultural learning, enabling the acquisition of language, discourse skills, tool use practices, and many other conventional activities. These novel forms of cultural learning allow human beings to pool their cognitive resources both contemporaneously and over historical time in ways that are unique in the animal kingdom.  
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  Notes 10.1177/0022022101032002002 Approved no  
  Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 2968  
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Author Call, J.; Hare, B.A.; Tomasello, M. doi  openurl
  Title Chimpanzee gaze following in an object-choice task Type Journal Article
  Year 1998 Publication Animal Cognition Abbreviated Journal Anim. Cogn.  
  Volume 1 Issue 2 Pages 89-99  
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  Abstract Many primate species reliably track and follow the visual gaze of conspecifics and humans, even to locations above and behind the subject. However, it is not clear whether primates follow a human's gaze to find hidden food under one of two containers in an object-choice task. In a series of experiments six adult female chimpanzees followed a human's gaze (head and eye direction) to a distal location in space above and behind them, and checked back to the human's face when they did not find anything interesting or unusual. This study also assessed whether these same subjects would also use the human's gaze in an object-choice task with three types of occluders: barriers, tubes, and bowls. Barriers and tubes permitted the experimenter to see their contents (i.e., food) whereas bowls did not. Chimpanzees used the human's gaze direction to choose the tube or barrier containing food but they did not use the human's gaze to decide between bowls. Our findings allowed us to discard both simple orientation and understanding seeing-knowing in others as the explanations for gaze following in chimpanzees. However, they did not allow us to conclusively choose between orientation combined with foraging tendencies and understanding seeing in others. One interesting possibility raised by these results is that studies in which the human cannot see the reward at the time of subject choice may potentially be underestimating chimpanzees' social knowledge.  
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  Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 3165  
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Author Call, J.; Agnetta, B.; Tomasello, M. doi  openurl
  Title Cues that chimpanzees do and do not use to find hidden objects Type Journal Article
  Year 2000 Publication Animal Cognition Abbreviated Journal Anim. Cogn.  
  Volume 3 Issue 1 Pages 23-34  
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  Abstract Chimpanzees follow conspecific and human gaze direction reliably in some situations, but very few chimpanzees reliably use gaze direction or other communicative signals to locate hidden food in the object-choice task. Three studies aimed at exploring factors that affect chimpanzee performance in this task are reported. In the first study, vocalizations and other noises facilitated the performance of some chimpanzees (only a minority). In the second study, various behavioral cues were given in which a human experimenter either touched, approached, or actually lifted and looked under the container where the food was hidden. Each of these cues led to enhanced performance for only a very few individuals. In the third study – a replication with some methodological improvements of a previous experiment – chimpanzees were confronted with two experimenters giving conflicting cues about the location of the hidden food, with one of them (the knower) having witnessed the hiding process and the other (the guesser) not. In the crucial test in which a third experimenter did the hiding, no chimpanzee found the food at above chance levels. Overall, in all three studies, by far the best performers were two individuals who had been raised in infancy by humans. It thus seems that while chimpanzees are very good at “behavior reading” of various sorts, including gaze following, they do not understand the communicative intentions (informative intentions) behind the looking and gesturing of others – with the possible exception of enculturated chimpanzees, who still do not understand the differential significance of looking and gesturing done by people who have different knowledge about states of affairs in the world.  
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  Notes Approved no  
  Call Number Equine Behaviour @ team @ Serial 3176  
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