Hindustan Times, New Delhi, Monday, August 22, 2005
Learning from others and doing the same as your group or society may be a tendency not restricted to humans, with new psychological research revealing socially conformist behaviour in chimpanzees, the science magazine Nature reported on Sunday.
Andrew Whiten of the St Andrews University of Scotland and the University of Emory in Atlanta in the United States and his colleagues made this finding after studying three groups of chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre in Atlanta.
For two of the groups, they privately taught several high-ranking females to use different methods to extract a morsel of food from a feeding apparatus made up of a series of tubes and blocked by a stopper.
The leading female, Erika, in the first group was taught the "poking method" where she used a stick to push the stopper towards the end of the tube to make the fruit fall into another smaller interior tube and roll out.
A second group, led by Georgia, was taught to obtain the fruit with the "lifting method" where the stopper could be lifted out by putting the stick in a hook which also made the fruit fall out.
A third control group was given no training by humans in either technique.
The researchers then allowed each chimpanzee group access to the feeding apparatus. The other chimps observed their senior female's technique and were generally quick to copy, showing that they can learn skills in the absence of direct human tuition.
The "poke" method was more effective as several members of the "lift" group independently discovered and adopted the "poke" technique. But, despite this, the "lift" group retained its overall bias towards the "lift" technique.
The third group, who had no single "teacher" in their group, failed to resolve the problem of how to obtain the food from the apparatus.
Whiten and his colleagues, Victoria Horner and Frans de Waal, said this result showed chimpanzees copy those in their group and in this way develop "cultural" traditions, suggesting that social conformity in humans has ancient evolutionary roots.
Learning from others and doing the same as your group or society may be a tendency not restricted to humans, with new psychological research revealing socially conformist behaviour in chimpanzees, the science magazine Nature reported on Sunday.
Andrew Whiten of the St Andrews University of Scotland and the University of Emory in Atlanta in the United States and his colleagues made this finding after studying three groups of chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre in Atlanta.
For two of the groups, they privately taught several high-ranking females to use different methods to extract a morsel of food from a feeding apparatus made up of a series of tubes and blocked by a stopper.
The leading female, Erika, in the first group was taught the "poking method" where she used a stick to push the stopper towards the end of the tube to make the fruit fall into another smaller interior tube and roll out.
A second group, led by Georgia, was taught to obtain the fruit with the "lifting method" where the stopper could be lifted out by putting the stick in a hook which also made the fruit fall out.
A third control group was given no training by humans in either technique.
The researchers then allowed each chimpanzee group access to the feeding apparatus. The other chimps observed their senior female's technique and were generally quick to copy, showing that they can learn skills in the absence of direct human tuition.
The "poke" method was more effective as several members of the "lift" group independently discovered and adopted the "poke" technique. But, despite this, the "lift" group retained its overall bias towards the "lift" technique.
The third group, who had no single "teacher" in their group, failed to resolve the problem of how to obtain the food from the apparatus.
Whiten and his colleagues, Victoria Horner and Frans de Waal, said this result showed chimpanzees copy those in their group and in this way develop "cultural" traditions, suggesting that social conformity in humans has ancient evolutionary roots.
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