When individuals know they have an audience, their performance can be affected positively or negatively. Recent research published in the Cell Press journal iScience on November 8 indicates that the performance of chimpanzees on computer tasks is impacted by how many people are observing them. This suggests that the so-called “audience effect” existed before humans formed reputation-based societies, according to the researchers.
When individuals know they have an audience, their performance can be impacted, either positively or negatively. New findings reported in the Cell Press journal iScience on November 8 reveal that chimpanzees’ execution of computer tasks is affected by the number of viewers present. These results imply that this “audience effect” predates the emergence of reputation-driven human societies, the researchers claim.
“We were quite astonished to discover that chimpanzees’ task performance could be swayed by observers, particularly human ones!” stated Christen Lin from Kyoto University in Japan. “One might not anticipate that a chimp would be concerned about another species watching them, but the fact that their performance fluctuates depending on human observers and task difficulty indicates a more intricate relationship than we initially thought.”
The team, which included Shinya Yamamoto and Akiho Muramatsu, aimed to investigate whether the audience effect, commonly tied to reputation management in humans, exists among non-human primates as well. They understood that people often consider who is observing them, sometimes even unconsciously, influencing their performance. While it’s known that chimpanzees live in structured social hierarchies, it was uncertain to what degree they would be affected by external observers.
“The location of our research is unique because chimpanzees here frequently engage with and even enjoy human interaction, taking part almost daily in various touchscreen tasks for food rewards,” noted Muramatsu. “This presented an opportunity to explore potential similarities in audience-related effects within a context that highlights the unique relationships chimps have with humans.”
The researchers made their discovery by analyzing thousands of sessions where chimpanzees completed touchscreen tasks over a span of six years. They found that in three different tasks involving numbers, the chimpanzees showed improved performance on the hardest task as the number of observers increased. Conversely, for the simplest task, their performance declined when more experimenters or familiar individuals were present.
The researchers acknowledge that the precise mechanisms driving these audience-related effects, even in humans, remain uncertain. They propose that further exploration in non-human apes may provide greater insight into how these traits have evolved and their reasons for development.
“Our results indicate that the importance humans place on witnesses and audience members might not be exclusive to our species,” Yamamoto noted. “These traits are fundamental to the reputation-based societies we constructed, and if chimpanzees also give special attention to their observers during task execution, it suggests that these characteristics may have evolved long before reputation-based communities emerged in our great ape ancestry.”