When people have an audience watching them, it can change their performance for better or worse. Now, researchers have found that chimpanzees' performance on computer tasks is influenced by the number of people watching them.
When people have an audience watching them, it can change their performance for better or worse. Now, researchers have found that chimpanzees' performance on computer tasks is influenced by the number of people watching them. The findings suggest that this 'audience effect' predates the development of reputation-based human societies, the researchers say.
The researchers, including Shinya Yamamoto and Akiho Muramatsu, wanted to find out if the audience effect, often attributed in humans to reputation management, might also exist in a non-human primate. People, they knew, pay attention to who is watching them, sometimes even subconsciously, in ways that affect their performance. While chimps live in hierarchical societies, it wasn't clear to what extent they, too, might be influenced by those watching them.
The researchers note that it remains unclear what specific mechanisms underlie these audience-related effects, even for humans. They suggest that further study in non-human apes may offer more insight into how this trait evolved and why it developed.
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