![]() ![]() For example, enculturation of chimpanzees leads to increased cognitive abilities, such as symbolic communication and enhanced imitative abilities. Prior experience may play a dramatic role in cognition. This represents a far more natural situation for chimpanzees and thus provides a greater understanding of chimpanzee barter behavior. To more explicitly examine barter behavior in chimpanzees, we studied costly exchange behavior, in which subjects could barter food items with human experimenters to obtain other food items. They lack the extensive experience with such behavior that humans have. Given that chimpanzees do not use money in the wild, it is not surprising that chimpanzees do not use these tokens in the same way that humans do. In these studies, the tokens represented a sort of “money” for the chimpanzees. Moreover, in situations in which tokens are given at the beginning of the trial and are not replenished, these primates return the tokens associated with higher value rewards first, thus ultimately limiting their acquisition of high-value foods (since they no longer possess the tokens necessary to acquire them). Thus, they apparently focus on obtaining higher value rewards to the detriment of obtaining more rewards of all quality. They show a strong preference for the token worth the greater reward (this association is taught via basic conditioning) and return it in all situations, whether or not the appropriate–higher value–food is available. Instead, chimpanzees (and capuchin monkeys) seem to focus on preferred rewards. ![]() ![]() Moreover, even in these token barter experiments, chimpanzees do not always trade to obtain the greatest level of reward possible (perhaps indicating that they do not understand the concept of ‘money’). However, these interactions are noncostly for the chimpanzees, as the tokens have no use value if retained. In laboratory settings, chimpanzees do exhibit token-based exchange behavior with humans. Yet despite this, spontaneous exchange between chimpanzees is almost unknown. Our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, shares many social and cognitive behaviors with humans, including reciprocal behavior –, the use of token economies –, and prototypic economic behaviors, , (as do several other ape, and monkey – species).įor instance, chimpanzees participate in reciprocal interactions that span many hours to weeks or months. In order to fully understand the foundations of human economic behavior, it is critical to understand the development of basic behaviors, such as barter. In an autarkic society (that is, a society without barter), economic specialization cannot occur because each individual must self-produce all commodities consumed, or else rely on sporadic gifts. Yet for all its benefits, barter is rarely seen outside of humans and we know little about its development. Although it is costly to each individual to give up something valuable (a bushel of wheat) in order to get back another valuable commodity (a pound of meat), in the end both individuals are better off for bartering because (economists believe) it is cheaper to produce just one commodity than all the different commodities one consumes. The LRC colony was supported by NICHD HD-38051 and the College of Arts and Sciences, Georgia State University.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Īdam Smith famously argued that barter is the foundation of economic specialization, whereby one individual becomes a farmer, another becomes a hunter, and both get richer. The Bastrop colony was supported by NIH/NCRR. MJB was supported by NICHD grant HD-38051, and NSF grants BCS-0634662 and SES 0729244. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: SFB was supported by NSF grant SES 0729244 and an NIH/NIGMS IRACDA grant awarded to Emory University. Received: NovemAccepted: DecemPublished: January 30, 2008Ĭopyright: © 2008 Brosnan et al. PLoS ONE 3(1):Īcademic Editor: Paul Zak, Claremont Graduate University, United States of America Citation: Brosnan SF, Grady MF, Lambeth SP, Schapiro SJ, Beran MJ (2008) Chimpanzee Autarky. ![]()
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