Chimpanzees are vengeful but not spiteful
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Communicated by Raghavendra Gadagkar, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, June 15, 2007 (received for review January 3, 2007)
Abstract
People are willing to punish others at a personal cost, and this apparently antisocial tendency can stabilize cooperation. What motivates humans to punish noncooperators is likely a combination of aversion to both unfair outcomes and unfair intentions. Here we report a pair of studies in which captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) did not inflict costs on conspecifics by knocking food away if the outcome alone was personally disadvantageous but did retaliate against conspecifics who actually stole the food from them. Like humans, chimpanzees retaliate against personally harmful actions, but unlike humans, they are indifferent to simply personally disadvantageous outcomes and are therefore not spiteful.
Footnotes
- *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jensen{at}eva.mpg.de
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Author contributions: K.J., J.C., and M.T. designed research; K.J. performed research; K.J. analyzed data; and K.J., J.C., and M.T. wrote the paper.
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The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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↵ †We use synonyms for punishment, such as retribution, retaliation, and vengeance, to avoid confusion with the various uses of punishment in evolutionary biology, social psychology, and experimental psychology.
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↵ ‡True spite, in which there are no direct future fitness benefits to the actor, can theoretically evolve but only in very limited circumstances (5, 6).
- © 2007 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
