title: One for You, One for Me: Humans' Unique Turn-Taking Skills.
abstract: Long-term collaborative relationships require that any jointly produced resources be shared in mutually satisfactory ways. Prototypically, this sharing involves partners dividing up simultaneously available resources, but sometimes the collaboration makes a resource available to only one individual, and any sharing of resources must take place across repeated instances over time. Here, we show that beginning at 5 years of age, human children stabilize cooperation in such cases by taking turns across instances of obtaining a resource. In contrast, chimpanzees do not take turns in this way, and so their collaboration tends to disintegrate over time. Alternating turns in obtaining a collaboratively produced resource does not necessarily require a prosocial concern for the other, but rather requires only a strategic judgment that partners need incentives to continue collaborating. These results suggest that human beings are adapted for thinking strategically in ways that sustain long-term cooperative relationships and that are absent in their nearest primate relatives.
authors.affiliation: Warwick Business School (Behavioural Science), The University of Warwick alicia.melis@wbs.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Alicia P
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Melis
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
authors.forename: Patricia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Grocke
authors.affiliation: Johann-Friedrich Blumenbach Institut für Zoologie und Anthropologie, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.
authors.forename: Josefine
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kalbitz
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tomasello
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal / Q000502:physiology*; D002652:Child Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D002679:Pan troglodytes / Q000523:psychology*; D013045:Species Specificity
keywords: Pan troglodytes; children; chimpanzees; collaboration; problem solving; reciprocity; sharing; turn taking