Chapter 4 - Social Learning in Monkeys: Primate “Primacy” Reconsidered

Abstract

The recognition that humans share many traits with other primates can have, as an unintended correlate, an uncritical willingness to ascribe human traits to other primate species. Behavioral researchers are more likely to provide higher order “cognitive” explanations for behavior in primates than members of other orders, perhaps reflecting some intuitive notion that cognitive continuity extends from humans to other primates, but not to other orders. In this chapter, it is put forward that apparently natural inclination to attribute a special character to social learning in monkeys, relative to social learning in other animals, is unwarranted. This is not to say that social influences are not important to primates, as to other orders. Rather, the comparative psychological issue is whether a different set of underlying mechanisms supports social learning in primates than in other orders. This chapter propagates that it is easy, for laymen and scientists alike, to look at nonhuman primates and to envisage human-like cognition as being behind their behavior. It is argued that this attitude has stood in the way of an objective assessment of social learning capacities in nonhuman primates, particularly monkeys. It is showed that in the case of capuchin monkeys dealing with novel or difficult food, simple social tendencies are sufficient to explain what is observed.