Abstract
Practical and ethical constraints limit our ability to experimentally test socioecological theory in wild primates. We took an alternate approach to model this, allowing groups of humans to interact in a virtual world in which they had to find food and interact with both ingroup and outgroup avatars to earn rewards. We altered ratios and distributions of high- and low-value foods to test the hypothesis that hominoids vary with regards to social cohesion and intergroup tolerance due to their feeding ecology. We found larger nesting clusters and decreased attacks on outgroup competitors in the Bonobo condition versus the Chimpanzee condition, suggesting a significant effect of feeding competition alone on social structure. We also demonstrate that virtual worlds are a robust mechanism for testing hypotheses that are impossible to study in the wild.
Highlights
Practical and ethical constraints limit our ability to experimentally test socioecological theory in wild primates
One hypothesis suggests that these differences emerged due to differences in their feeding ecology that selected for reduced aggression
While there is substantial variation in the feeding ecology of Pan, and bonobos reside within the range of habitats seen across chimpanzee subspecies[3], there are broad differences
Summary
Practical and ethical constraints limit our ability to experimentally test socioecological theory in wild primates. We report the results of an immersive virtual world experiment that tested the impact of different food values, availability, and distribution on social behavior.
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