Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

Humans routinely confront situations that require coordination between individuals, from mundane activities such as planning where to go for dinner to incredibly complicated activities, such as multi-national agreements. How did this ability arise, and what prevents success in those situations in which it breaks down? To understand how this capability evolved across the primates, my lab uses the methodology of experimental economics. This is an ideal mechanism for the comparative approach as it is a well-developed methodology for distilling complex decision-making in to a series of simple choices, allowing these decisions to be compared across species and contexts using identical methodologies. We have investigated coordination in New World monkeys, Old World monkeys, and great apes, including both chimpanzees and humans. We find that there are remarkable continuities of outcome across the primates, including humans, however there are also important differences in how each species reaches these outcomes. For