Ethologists and anthropologists from the two Max Planck universities have shown that chimpanzees treat the suffering of their fellows differently depending on whether the suffering is deserved - and in this they are like children.
Children were shown puppet theater scenes with the participation of "good" and "evil" characters. The first gave the children their favorite toy, the second took it for himself. Then a third character would appear and beat one of the first two with a stick. Children could continue watching the show by dropping a coin into the receiver, or stop watching and exchange the coins for something else. When a “good” character was hit, children six and older most often refused to look further, but if the “evil” was punished, they tended to “pay” to watch and even experienced visible pleasure. This pattern was not observed in children under six.
A similar experiment was conducted with adult chimpanzees. The role of "good" and "evil" subjects in front of animals was played by the caretakers of the Leipzig Zoo; the former fed the chimpanzees regularly, the other took food. The third person depicted "beating" the caretakers with a stick. Like children over six, chimpanzees enjoyed watching their unloved character “punished”; in order to see this, they had to open a heavy door and enter the room, from where a view of the "performance" was opened. If the person who was feeding them was "beaten" with a stick, the chimpanzees preferred not to waste their energy on fighting the tight spring and even expressed their dissatisfaction with what was happening.
The survival of a community depends on the ability of its members to cooperate; in many groups, cooperation is encouraged and refusal is punished. Punishment is not limited to humans: previous research has shown that rhesus monkeys punish members of their community for cheating.
When a person or other animal is punished, the witnesses are forced to observe the suffering of the relative. Normally, such a sight evokes empathy (empathy) and the desire to protect, help and comfort. For the community to encourage punishment, there must be a psychological mechanism to separate the normal empathy response from the desire to punish the offender; this reaction is called "altruistic punishment."
The experiments of German scientists have shown that children become capable of such a division at the age of about six years; adult chimpanzees are capable of the same division. The results of the study shed light on the evolutionary origin of the difference in responses to the suffering of the innocent and the suffering of the guilty; Apparently, altruistic punishment either existed in the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, who lived 7 million years ago, or developed in humans and chimpanzees later and independently.
The research is published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
Ksenia Malysheva
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