The human race takes a certain pride in some of its wilier traits: We’re conniving, tricky, and self-interested. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, man—and we’re the top of the food chain. Except recent research indicates we may not be as supreme in strategic shrewdness as we thought. It turns out that chimpanzees appear to be better at Machiavellian deduction than humans. Evolution, you old rat bastard, how could you allow this to happen?
Inspection Game
The findings come from Caltech behavioral economist Colin Camerer and his research team, who wanted to tap into the evolution of optimal decision-making. Humans and chimps come from the same primate family tree (to perhaps state the obvious), so they decided to compare strategic results from human and chimpanzee efforts at playing a strategic game.
Here’s how it works.
In the “Inspection Game,” two players sit back to back, each with a touch screen consisting of a right and left blue box. One player is the “hider” who wins by choosing the opposite of the partner’s chosen box. The other player is the “matcher” who wins by choosing—you guessed it—the same box as the partner.
In the experiment, each pair pounded out 200 rounds of this mind-numbing game. Humans received monetary rewards for winning each round. Chimps happily settled for apples.
Ooh, there's the rub: To achieve the most success, players should try to predict their partner’s moves, while trying to not be too predictable themselves. The ultimate limit for both players to win if they play optimally is called the “Nash Equilibrium,” named after Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Nash Jr. (you know, Russell Crowe’s character in A Beautiful Mind?). Whichever species gets closer to the Nash equilibrium wins the evolutionary prize in simplified strategic thinking.
And the Winner of Duplicity Is . . .
It turns out that various experiments (in addition to Camerer’s) have demonstrated that humans aren’t too good at veering near the Nash equilibrium, which suggests that something about human reasoning limits our ability to constantly make the most strategic decisions.
But the chimps? They owned the Nash equilibrium. Even when researchers tried to confuse the furry rascals by arbitrarily switching who was the “hider” and “matcher,” the chimps rapidly adjusted and maintained their play at optimal levels.
What’s going on here? How can chimps possibly be better at this type of thinking? Our brains are hella-bigger.
Different Survival Tactics
The researchers offer two possible explanations for this cognitive outrage.
One: The “cognitive tradeoff hypothesis.” This holds that as the human brain became uniquely specialized—like for language speaking—other cognitive abilities suffered, including short-term memory. Sure enough, humans are also decidedly behind our knuckle-walking chimp cousins in memory tasks. This advantage may pay off for the chimps in the Inspection Game in remembering player patterns. And for remembering where they put their keys.
Two: Chimps' social environment is more competitive than humans’, and this combative mentality helps them to approach the Nash equilibrium. While human life can clearly be “nasty, brutish and short,” to quote Hobbes, Chimp life is practically defined by adversity and competition. Their social lives are dominated by me vs. you activities, like predatory stalking, raiding human crops, frequent chase sequences, border patrolling (similar to the Inspection Game), and tense power plays to ascend the social hierarchy. By comparison, we humans are far more social and cooperative with each other, which is great for stockpiling village food supplies, and bad for optimal competitive reasoning.
Ok, so chimpanzees may be the ultimate Gordon Gekkos in one-on-one strategic competition, but give us a game that requires coordination and cooperation? Our language abilities would kick some serious chimp ass. In addition to our literal ability to kick chimp ass. Small victories abound.
Image: ThinkStock
