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Chimps or children – who is better at sharing resources?

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have conducted a series of experiments to investigate how adult chimpanzees and 6-year-old children behave when using a limited resource with another conspecific.

This experiment is suitable for introducing a number of basic concepts regarding sustainability science and the sustainable use of shared resources. Moreover, reflection on the results of these experiments may highlight possible misconceptions of students (and educators?) about the causes of human sustainability issues. Many students and teachers predict that chimpanzees would fare better in this experiment than children, and tend to give reasons such as “Chimpanzees need to live in harmony with nature”, “Chimpanzees live in groups and depend on each other”, or “they need to share resources in their group”, while children “are greedy and selfish”. In fact, humans are a much more cooperative species compared to chimpanzees and other primates, and they are able to coordinate, communicate, and share resources much more easily and fairly among their group than chimpanzees. Humans also depend much more on cooperation with their conspecifics for survival, than chimpanzees.

The experiment can also be used both throughout a unit on Sustainability as well as in a unit on human evolution. In a lesson on sustainability, further concepts regarding shared resource use, user behavior, conditions, and interactions between them can be developed. In a lesson on human evolution, further concepts about the causes of our human behaviors, and the similarities and differences to chimpanzees can be elaborated.

The lesson plan linked here lists a range of possible materials and ways to drive reflection around this experiment, but they don’t all have to be done in one lesson but can be reintroduced later in the unit.

Link to teaching material

Teaching material type Analogy mapping, Causal map, Experiment, Full lesson plan

Subject Areas Biology, Social Studies

Learning Goals Evolutionary Thinking, Interdisciplinary Thinking, Systems Thinking

Suitable Grade Levels 6-8, 9-12

Concepts Cooperation, Development of behavior, Fairness, Sustainable resource use

Content Anchors Child development, Common-Pool Resource management, Cross-species

Author: Susan Hanisch

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike [CC BY-NC-SA]

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Related Literature

Chimpanzees overcome the tragedy of the commons with dominance

Read now

Koomen, R., & Herrmann, E. (2018). Chimpanzees overcome the tragedy of the commons with dominance. Scientific Reports, 8(10389). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-28416-8

Competition over common-pool resources (CPR) is a ubiquitous challenge for social animals. Many species face similar dilemmas, yet our understanding of the evolutionary trajectory of CPR social strategies remains unexplored. Here, we provide a first look at the social strategies of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), in two novel resource dilemma experiments. Dyads of chimpanzees were presented with renewable resource systems, collapsible at a quantity-dependent threshold. Dyads had to continuously resist overconsumption to maximize collective gains. In study 1, dyads of chimpanzees sustained a renewing juice source. Inequality of juice acquisition between partners predicted sustaining success, indicating that one individual dominated the task while the partner inhibited. Dyads in study 2 fed together on accumulating carrot pieces but could end the accumulation any time by grabbing an immediate selfish source of carrots. Dyads with low tolerance were more successful at collectively sustaining the resource than highly tolerant dyads. Further, the dominant individual was more likely to cause collapse in dyads with low tolerance than dyads with high tolerance. These results indicate that chimpanzees use a dominance-based monopolisation strategy moderated by social tolerance to overcome the tragedy of the commons.

Are humans a cooperative species? Challenges and opportunities for teaching the evolution of human prosociality.

Read now

Hanisch, S. & Eirdosh, D. (2021). Are humans a cooperative species? Challenges and opportunities for teaching the evolution of human prosociality. The American Biology Teacher, 83 (6). https://doi.org/10.1525/abt.2021.83.6.356

Evolutionary anthropologists commonly describe humans as a highly cooperative species, based on our evolved socio-cognitive capacities. However, students and the general public may not necessarily share this view about our species. At the same time, fostering our ability to cooperate is considered a key foundation for achieving sustainable development, and students’ understanding of the conditions that enable or hinder cooperation is therefore an important learning goal in sustainability education. In this article, we describe a small classroom activity that explored students’ and preservice biology teachers’ preconceptions about the human capacity to cooperate around shared resources in comparison to the capacity of our closest relative, the chimpanzee. Results indicate that students and teachers had limited knowledge about the evolved human capacity for cooperation around shared resources in small groups, most often viewing chimpanzees as more capable of cooperation and sustainable resource use. Based on the results of this classroom intervention, we highlight important learning opportunities for educators in biology on teaching human evolution and human behavior, particularly as related to current challenges of sustainable development.

An investigation of children’s strategies for overcoming the tragedy of the commons

Read now

Koomen, R., & Herrmann, E. (2018). An investigation of children’s strategies for overcoming the tragedy of the commons. Nature Human Behaviour, 2, 348–355.

Common-pool resource (CPR) dilemmas are pervasive challenges to overcome. We presented six-year-old children with an experimental CPR paradigm involving a renewable water resource, which children could collect to win individual rewards. To maximize water collection, children had to wait for water to accumulate, without collapsing the resource. We explore the social strategies children used to overcome the dilemma together. Like adults, six-year-old children were challenged by the dilemma: resource sustaining was more successful in a parallel condition in which children worked independently compared with the col- lective CPR condition. However, children were capable of collectively preventing resource collapse by spontaneously generating inclusive rules, equally distributing the rewards and distracting one another from the delay-of-gratification task. Children also learned to sustain the resource longer in repeated interactions with the same partner. Already by the age of six, children are capable of CPR social strategies resembling those of adults.

OpenEvo is an educational innovation project from the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

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