One for You, One for Me: Humans' Unique Turn-Taking Skills

• Published in: Psychological science Vol. 27; no. 7; pp. 987 - 996
• Main Authors: Melis, Alicia P., Grocke, Patricia, Kalbitz, Josefine, Tomasello, Michael
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.07.2016; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Animals; Behavior, Animal - physiology; Child Behavior - psychology; Child Development - physiology; Child, Preschool; Children & youth; Cognition & reasoning; Collaboration; Cooperation; Cooperative Behavior; Female; Humans; Incentives; Male; Monkeys & apes; Pan troglodytes - psychology; Primates; Problem solving; Prosocial behavior; Prototypes; Resource sharing; Species Specificity; Turntaking; chimpanzees; children; collaboration; turn taking; problem solving; Pan troglodytes; sharing; reciprocity
• ISSN: 0956-7976; 1467-9280
• DOI: 10.1177/0956797616644070

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.