7: Deception

In this film, an experiment is designed to see if chimpanzees engage in deceptive behaviours.

The chimps are offered a choice of 2 food resources they can take. Warm up trials had earlier been completed to familiarise the chimps to the competitive component of the setup — the experimenter would take the food on offer if the chimp did not, making the experimenter a competitor for the food resource.

Chimpanzees do not usually take food from dominant competitors, so what would their reaction be to an available food resource if seen, or unseen, by a competitor?

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Dr Brian Hare, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.