Five-Year Olds, but Not Chimpanzees, Attempt to Manage Their Reputations

Virtually all theories of the evolution of cooperation require that cooperators find ways to interact with one another selectively, to the exclusion of cheaters. This means that individuals must make reputational judgments about others as cooperators, based on either direct or indirect evidence. Humans, and possibly other species, add another component to the process: they know that they are being judged by others, and so they adjust their behavior in order to affect those judgments – so-called impression management. Here, we show for the first time that already preschool children engage in such behavior. In an experimental study, 5-year-old human children share more and steal less when they are being watched by a peer than when they are alone. In contrast, chimpanzees behave the same whether they are being watched by a groupmate or not. This species difference suggests that humans' concern for their own self-reputation, and their tendency to manage the impression they are making on others, may be unique to humans among primates.

[1]  Tetsuro Matsuzawa,et al.  The Mind of the Chimpanzee: Ecological and Experimental Perspectives , 2010 .

[2]  J. Silk.  Social Components of Fitness in Primate Groups , 2007, Science.

[3]  V. Smith,et al.  Social Distance and Other-Regarding Behavior in Dictator Games: Reply , 1999 .

[4]  E. Goffman.  The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , 1959 .

[5]  Ian C. Gilby,et al.  Meat sharing among the Gombe chimpanzees: harassment and reciprocal exchange , 2006, Animal Behaviour.

[6]  S. Gächter,et al.  The Long-Run Benefits of Punishment , 2008, Science.

[7]  David G. Rand,et al.  Why We Cooperate , 2014 .

[8]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Direct and Indirect Reputation Formation in Nonhuman Great Apes and Human Children , 2012 .

[9]  R. Kurzban,et al.  Evolutionary origins of stigmatization: the functions of social exclusion. , 2001, Psychological bulletin.

[10]  S. Levinson,et al.  Roots of Human Sociality , 2006 .

[11]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Chimpanzees Recruit the Best Collaborators , 2006, Science.

[12]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Spontaneous Altruism by Chimpanzees and Young Children , 2007, PLoS biology.

[13]  J. Hamlin,et al.  Social evaluation by preverbal infants , 2007, Nature.

[14]  M. Bateson,et al.  Cues of being watched enhance cooperation in a real-world setting , 2006, Biology Letters.

[15]  Carol M. Lauer,et al.  Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior , 2001 .

[16]  Keise Izuma.  The social neuroscience of reputation , 2012, Neuroscience Research.

[17]  Redouan Bshary,et al.  Cleaner Wrasses Labroides dimidiatus Are More Cooperative in the Presence of an Audience , 2011, Current Biology.

[18]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Chimpanzees help conspecifics obtain food and non-food items , 2011, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[19]  C. Boesch.  Cooperative hunting in wild chimpanzees , 1994, Animal Behaviour.

[20]  R. Banerjee,et al.  Children's reasoning about the self-presentational consequences of apologies and excuses following rule violations. , 2010, The British journal of developmental psychology.

[21]  G. Roberts,et al.  Cooperators benefit through reputation-based partner choice in economic games , 2010, Biology Letters.

[22]  M. Nowak,et al.  Evolution of indirect reciprocity by image scoring , 1998, Nature.

[23]  Gordon P. D. Ingram,et al.  "Princess Alice is watching you": children's belief in an invisible person inhibits cheating. , 2011, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[24]  Michael Tomasello,et al.  Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation , 2012, Current Anthropology.

[25]  R. Banerjee.  Children's Understanding of Self-Presentational Behavior: Links With Mental-State Reasoning and the Attribution of Embarrassment , 2002 .

[26]  Satoshi Hirata,et al.  The Mind of the Chimpanzee: Ecological and Experimental Perspectives , 2010 .

[27]  D. Fessler,et al.  Nobody's watching? Subtle cues affect generosity in an anonymous economic game. , 2005 .

[28]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? 30 years later , 2008, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[29]  P. Aloise-Young,et al.  The development of self-presentation: Self-promotion in 6- to 10-year-old children. , 1993 .

[30]  A. Harcourt.  The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Patterns of Behavior, Jane Goodall. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachussets (1986), xii, +671. Price $30 , 1988 .

[31]  R. Banerjee,et al.  Children's reasoning about self-presentation following rule violations: the role of self-focused attention. , 2012, Child development.

[32]  Helen Tager-Flusberg,et al.  Preschoolers can attribute second-order beliefs , 1994 .

[33]  M. Tomasello.  Origins of human communication , 2008 .

[34]  N. Sadato,et al.  Please Scroll down for Article Social Neuroscience the Roles of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex and Striatum in Reputation Processing the Roles of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex and Striatum in Reputation Processing , 2022 .

[35]  C. Frith,et al.  Meeting of minds: the medial frontal cortex and social cognition , 2006, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[36]  Gordon P. D. Ingram,et al.  Children's Tattling: the reporting of everyday norm violations in preschool settings. , 2010, Child development.

[37]  J. Vonk,et al.  Do chimpanzees learn reputation by observation? Evidence from direct and indirect experience with generous and selfish strangers , 2008, Animal Cognition.

[38]  C. Hauert,et al.  Punishment and reputation in spatial public goods games , 2003, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences.

[39]  Dirk Engelmann,et al.  Indirect Reciprocity and Strategic Reputation Building in an Experimental Helping Game , 2002, Games Econ. Behav..

[40]  M. Milinski,et al.  Reputation helps solve the ‘tragedy of the commons’ , 2002, Nature.

[41]  Robin I. M. Dunbar,et al.  Image scoring in great apes , 2008, Behavioural Processes.

[42]  Michael Tomasello,et al.  Reply to comments. Two Key Steps in the Evolution of Human Cooperation: The Interdependence Hypothesis , 2012 .

[43]  M. Tomasello,et al.  Engineering cooperation in chimpanzees: tolerance constraints on cooperation , 2006, Animal Behaviour.

[44]  V. Smith,et al.  Social distance and other-regarding behavior in dictator games , 2000 .