Chimps show unfair dealing
Frodo the chimp was unwilling to share the raisins
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Friday, 05, Oct 2007 02:28
Chimpanzees do not have the same sense of fairness as humans do, a new study has revealed.
Studies have shown that humans are self-interested but will take into account the interests of others for the sake of cooperation and fairness.
Despite chimps being humans' closest-living relatives, a study published in the journal Science today says that they act to maximise their own interests and are not sensitive to fairness.
Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany used the ultimatum game - widely accepted as a valid experimental measure of fairness across ages and cultures in humans - to test how chimps respond to the ability to share raisins.
The game offered the animals a variety of distribution choices: equally; hyper-fairly; unfairly; or hyper-unfairly.
Chimps showed little desire to make generous offers, even though they could discriminate between the quantities available to themselves and their partners.
"It thus would seem that in this context, one of humans' closest living relatives behaves according to traditional economic models of self-interest, unlike humans, and that this species does not share the human sensitivity to fairness," the researchers conclude.