COMPARING HUMANS TO PRIMATES IS LIKE ORANGES TO APPLES, CLOSER THAN YOU MIGHT THINK

Game theory uses deceptively simple challenges to provide insights into human decision making and cooperation. Many of the challenges force players to choose between (for example) taking a small but guaranteed payoff or a big payoff that will be lost unless another individual cooperates. The games themselves are often simple enough that they can be adapted to work with other primates so that researchers can determine which human behaviors are shared with our closer relatives. But that adaptation can significantly change the appearance of the game, raising questions about whether the results are actually comparable. So, to avoid this problem, a group of researchers attempted to test humans and primates using a single game that was largely the same for all species tested. ARS