Give what you get: capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) and 4-year-old children pay forward positive and negative outcomes to conspecifics.
The breadth of human generosity is unparalleled in the natural world, and much research has explored the mechanisms underlying and motivating human prosocial behavior. Recent work has focused on the spread of prosocial behavior within groups through paying-it-forward, a case of human prosociality in which a recipient of generosity pays a good deed forward to a third individual, rather than back to the original source of generosity. While research shows that human adults do indeed pay forward generosity, little is known about the origins of this behavior. Here, we show that both capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) and 4-year-old children pay forward positive and negative outcomes in an identical testing paradigm. These results suggest that a cognitively simple mechanism present early in phylogeny and ontogeny leads to paying forward positive, as well as negative, outcomes.
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America.
Kristin L
KL
Leimgruber
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.
Adrian F
AF
Ward
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America.
Jane
J
Widness
Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.
Michael I
MI
Norton
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America.
Kristina R
KR
Olson
Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States of America.
Kurt
K
Gray
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America.
Laurie R
LR
Santos
D000374:Aggression / Q000523:psychology*; D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D026686:Beneficence; D002428:Cebus / Q000523:psychology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D011581:Psychological Tests