2023-10-27 16:04:05
Like humans, baboons know how to develop complex “give and take” strategies to cooperate with a partner, a sign of an unsuspected capacity for adaptation in these apes known to be very social, according to a study.
The faculty of strategic cooperation has been debated for around twenty years within the scientific community, which seeks to know whether only humans possess it or whether they share it with other primates.
Typical example: a student who lends his lessons to a classmate hopes that the latter will reciprocate, a strategy of direct reciprocity commonly called “give and take.” And if the partner does not cooperate, we adapt their behavior.
To find out if monkeys were also capable of it, researchers carried out an experiment on Guinea baboons from the CNRS primatology station in Rousset, near Aix-en-Provence, described in the journal Science Advances published on Friday.
Eighteen individuals had access to touch screens placed in their enclosure: the baboons operated in pairs and were separated by a transparent plate, so that each could observe the behavior of its neighbor.
The monkeys, already accustomed to the screens for individual tasks, could freely choose to enter a device.
– “Sense of the general interest” –
When there were two of them, a “donor” individual had to choose between two images. One delivered him a reward (wheat) for himself; the other also rewarded his “receiving” neighbor.
The roles were distributed randomly, during nearly 250,000 trials over 95 days, with eight baboons – the other ten did not take part in the experiment because they did not understand the task.
Result: in almost 100% of interactions, the primates “selected the +pro-social+ image which rewarded both”, told AFP Anthony Formaux, doctoral student at the University of Aix-Marseille and first author of the ‘study.
A quasi-systematic “give and take” dynamic, without any apparent strategy, analyzes this specialist in animal psychology and comparative cognition. No doubt out of a “sense of the general interest” since in the end, everyone benefited.
Then the tests got tougher: the donor baboons no longer received anything and had to choose between one image rewarding the recipient, the other not rewarding him. A constraint which forced them to develop tactics.
“No longer able to reward themselves, they became more careful” about the behavior of their teammate, explains Anthony Formaux. With a clear tendency to reward their receiving neighbor if the latter had been generous in their role as donor.
– “Truly unbelievable!” –
Conversely, if a monkey had received nothing from its “selfish” partner, it could punish him the next time and leave the device in search of a more cooperative companion.
A sort of flexible collaboration, but not necessarily systematic from one trial to another. “We observed it from time to time, as a little reminder intended to control the partner and strengthen cooperation.”
“It was really incredible! They managed to adapt their strategy according to the difficulty and the +costs+ that we imposed on them,” says the researcher, surprised by these performances. Because baboons may be an “ultra-social” species (they live in large groups in the wild), “we expected something too complicated for them”.
This ability for strategic cooperation would have played a crucial role in human evolution, although its origins are unknown. We could have “inherited it at least 30 million years ago from our common ancestor with the baboon,” says the CNRS in a press release.
In monkeys living in the wild, such elaborate interactions are impossible to observe. But the fact that they emerged in an experimental context, within an enclosure where the monkeys lead a routine life, suggests that they appeared in humans “when they began to have a more settled life “, says Anthony Formaux.
The abandonment of nomadism would have established more regular interactions and required strategic cooperation “to attract and preserve resources”.
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