14Dec/06Off
Experimental cultural norms in Chimpanzees
A forth-coming paper in February’s Proceedings of the Royal Society by Kristin Bonnie and friends (including the primate alpha-researchers Andrew Whiten & Frans de Waal) shows the experimental manipulation of social norms.
A high-ranking female was selected from each of two groups, and was trained to place a token into one of two repositories. The rest of the groups then watched the two females doing the task, before being allowed to do it themselves. Whilst both repositories were rewarded during this phase, the other group members tended to do the same thing as their model did. The authors argue that these results show social learning of a complex sequence of actions, as well as a strong group conformity bias.