In "Chimps Rock at Game Theory" at Marginal Revolution, Alex Taborrak discusses a new paper which finds that chimps are actually really good at game theory:
Economics assumes that people are rational, self-interested, lightning fast calculators. Obviously a bad assumption as we are constantly told. Chimps, on the other hand, are rational, self-interested, lightning fast calculators. That is the surprising conclusion to a great paper by Colin Camerer and co-authors. Camerer had chimps play versions of the matching pennies game also called the cat and mouse game. In the cat and mouse game each player can go left or go right. The cat wins when cat and mouse choose the same strategy. The mouse wins when they choose different strategies. In the simple version the best strategy is 50:50, toss a coin. When the payoffs change, however, the optimal strategies still involve randomization but they change in surprising and nonobvious ways.
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Camerer et al. also tested humans in similar games and they found that humans often deviate from NE play and they adjust their strategies more slowly when payoffs change, i.e. they learn more slowly! The only thing that Camerer didn’t do was to play humans against chimps in the same game. That would have been awesome!
Two important paragraphs in the original paper are:
Ecological experience and development are likely to play an important role too. In the wild, great apes engage in many competitive strategic interactions such as predatory stalking, young chimpanzee wrestling, border patrolling (which is very much like the Inspection game), raiding crops from human farms, and play chasing (“tag”). Because competitive payoff games are common in chimpanzee life, evolutionary theory predicts that chimpanzees would have developed cognitive adaptations to detect patterns in opponent behavior and to create predictability in their own behavior. More generally, chimpanzees are capable of strategic thinking in cooperative hunting, sneaky copulation, future planning, and many elements of theory of mind computation. Some have argued that the capacity to randomize effectively evolved because primate predatory behavior and routine social interaction selects for unpredictability in counter-strategies. Experiments also show that chimpanzees are better at competitive tasks than at comparable cooperative ones.
In contrast, humans are relatively highly prosocial and cooperative. As human children begin to speak and acculturate, their play shifts between ages 2 to 4 from solitary and parallel play, to associative and cooperative play. While young chimpanzees continue to hone their competitive skills with constant practice, their young human counterparts shift from competition to verbally-facilitated cooperation.
We may think of human beings as great rational calculators, but what matters more to being human is the ability to cooperate. When it comes to being human, morality and the sense of duty, two factors which throw in complications to the prediction of human behavior with game theory, outweigh rational calculation. Charles Darwin even noted this in The Descent of Man when he wrote:
I fully subscribe to the judgement of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important. This sense, as Mackintosh remarks, ‘has a rightful supremacy over ever other principle of human action’; it is summed in that short but imperious word ought, so full of high significance (Darwin 1989[1877]: 101 [97]).
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