Abstract
The capacity for strategic thinking about the payoff-relevant actions of conspecifics is not well understood across species. We use game theory to make predictions about choices and temporal dynamics in three abstract competitive situations with chimpanzee participants. Frequencies of chimpanzee choices are extremely close to equilibrium (accurate-guessing) predictions, and shift as payoffs change, just as equilibrium theory predicts. The chimpanzee choices are also closer to the equilibrium prediction, and more responsive to past history and payoff changes, than two samples of human choices from experiments in which humans were also initially uninformed about opponent payoffs and could not communicate verbally. The results are consistent with a tentative interpretation of game theory as explaining evolved behavior, with the additional hypothesis that chimpanzees may retain or practice a specialized capacity to adjust strategy choice during competition to perform at least as well as, or better than, humans have.
Highlights
Chimpanzee choice rates in competitive games match equilibrium game theory predictions Christopher Flynn Martin[1], Rahul Bhui[2], Peter Bossaerts[3,4], Tetsuro Matsuzawa1 & Colin Camerer[2,4]
The chimpanzee choices are closer to the equilibrium prediction, and more responsive to past history and payoff changes, than two samples of human choices from experiments in which humans were initially uninformed about opponent payoffs and could not communicate verbally
We show that frequencies of chimpanzee choices are close to equilibrium game theory predictions, and shift as payoffs change, just as equilibrium theory predicts
Summary
Chimpanzee choice rates in competitive games match equilibrium game theory predictions Christopher Flynn Martin[1], Rahul Bhui[2], Peter Bossaerts[3,4], Tetsuro Matsuzawa1 & Colin Camerer[2,4]. Chimpanzee choices in our data are closer to the equilibrium prediction, and are more responsive to past history and to payoff changes, than human choices These results show how game theory can be consistent with evolved behavior[1], assuming that chimpanzees have a specialized capacity to adjust strategy choice during competition, which appears to be practiced in ontogenetic development. A chimpanzee-human comparison in repeated competitive games is inspired by the ‘‘cognitive tradeoff hypothesis’’ This hypothesis is that cortical growth and specialization for distinctly human cognitive capacities (such as language and categorization) conceivably reduced more basic capacities, such as detailed perception and pattern recognition, useful for tracking opponent choice during competition[3]. If both players do so, their choices form a ‘‘Nash equilibrium’’ (NE), a pattern of play in which choices optimally anticipate what others are likely to do
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