Chimpanzee Altruistic Behavior

Many studies showed that altruistic behavior can be heavily influence by the task as well as the reward. In a context that involves food, chimpanzees are not typically as altruistic. (Yamamoto, S. and Tanaka, M. 2009). Chimpanzees often compete over food, which is likely to block their ability to act on behalf of others. In a study analyzing chimpanzee anticipation of food return, research investigated the abilities of five chimpanzees to cope with increasing waiting duration in exchange tasks. Much like the Marshmallow Test in humans, subjects had to keep a small cookie before returning it to a human partner to obtain a larger piece. The results aimed to suggest that the chimpanzee’s decision to wait was based on a trade-off theory. The trade-off …show more content…
Altruism in non-human primates has been characterized by many researchers to be uniquely human. Although humans exhibit great levels of altruism, even as infants, this behavior does not directly translate to some of our closet related primates. Humans show more motivation when asked to help rather than chimpanzees. Although there is some evidence to argue that chimpanzees behave in a reciprocal manner, many conclusions have been made throughout the last decade that chimpanzees are much more competitive in a wild setting, than they are cooperative. It can be concluded that our closest evolutionary relatives do possess the ability to exhibit some altruistic behavior, although when examining more specific circumstances such as food sharing within non-kin members, reciprocal altruism is significantly less likely. There were not many significant differences between altruistic levels in chimpanzees when comparing the relations of kin and non-kinship. In many findings, animals are not typically expected to demonstrate any reciprocation towards non-kin members. Interesting enough, chimpanzees did exhibit much altruism even with relatives. Experimental studies showed that much of the behavior recorded of the chimpanzee population was task dependent. Altruism was not exhibited on its own, but occasionally was followed by a request or dependent on object. In fact, in several studies, chimpanzees were much more likely to help each other upon request than voluntarily. This evidence underlines the comparison between human children and our non-human primates, such as chimpanzees. Humans, even at extremely young ages, were much more eager to help an experimenter in a variety of