ArticleScience advances2021
Chimpanzees behave prosocially in a group-specific manner.
Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Freedom of choice supports social complexity in chimpanzees.iScience · 2026Article
- Despotism promotes dyadic cooperation through enhanced interdependencies in non-human primate societies.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Chimpanzee decisions in the prosocial choice paradigm depending on the position of tokens in the feeder.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Chimpanzee groups achieve sustainable resource use in a common-pool resource dilemma.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- The perception of prosocial agents by chimpanzees and humans.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Exploring the drivers of inter- and intraspecific differences in prosociality in four parrot species.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Do goats exhibit prosocial motivation? Insights from a novel food-giving paradigm.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Personality heterophily and friendship as drivers for successful cooperation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Article
- Group-level signatures in bonobo sociality.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Prosociality in a despotic society.iScience · 2023Article
- Chimpanzee communities differ in their inter- and intrasexual social relationships.Learning & behavior · 2023Article
- Zhuangzi and collaboration in animals: a critical conceptual analysis of shared intentionality.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
- Empirical challenges from the comparative and developmental literature to the Shared Intentionality Theory - a review of alternative data on recursive mind reading, prosociality, imitation and cumulative culture.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
- Why help others? Insights from rodent to human early childhood research.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Review
- Self-interest precludes prosocial juice provisioning in a free choice group experiment in bonobos.Primates; journal of primatology · 2022Article
- Adult bonobos show no prosociality in both prosocial choice task and group service paradigm.PeerJ · 2022Article
- Carrion Crows and Azure-Winged Magpies Show No Prosocial Tendencies When Tested in a Token Transfer Paradigm.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Chimpanzees act cooperatively in the wild, but whether they afford benefits to others, and whether their tendency to act prosocially varies across communities, is unclear. Here, we show that chimpanzees from neighboring communities provide valuable resources to group members at personal cost, and that the magnitude of their prosocial behavior is group specific. Provided with a resource-donation experiment allowing free (partner) choice, we observed an increase in prosocial acts across the study period in most of the chimpanzees. When group members could profit (test condition), chimpanzees provided resources more frequently and for longer durations than when their acts produced inaccessible resources (control condition). Strikingly, chimpanzees' prosocial behavior was group specific, with more socially tolerant groups acting more prosocially. We conclude that chimpanzees may purposely behave prosocially toward group members, and that the notion of group-specific sociality in nonhuman animals should crucially inform discussions on the evolution of prosocial behavior.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.