Comparing Social Skills of Children and Apes

@article{deWaal2008ComparingSS,
  title={Comparing Social Skills of Children and Apes},
  author={Frans B. M. de Waal and Christophe Boesch and Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten},
  journal={Science},
  year={2008},
  volume={319},
  pages={569 - 569}
}
A recent Research Article by E. Herrmann et al. (“Humans have evolved specialized skills of social cognition: The cultural intelligence hypothesis,” 7 September 2007, p. [1360][1]) claims that compared with 2-year-old human children, great apes have equivalent technical skills but inferior 
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38 Citations
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Results Citations
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38 Citations

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Citation Type

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Although difficult, with appropriate methodological care, experimental cross-species comparisons may be validly made.
Incomparable Methods Vitiate Cross-Species Comparisons
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The differences that Haun et al. found between children and apes are highly likely to reflect methodological confounds as much as, or more than, they reflect species differences.
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In this article, I recount my history of research with great apes. From the beginning, the idea was to compare apes to human children, with an eye to discovering facts relevant to describing and…
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TLDR
Exposing assumptions about the history of the two research traditions and on questionable notions such as the idea of a species' natural environment lets us more readily examine the current evidence for early rearing influence on ape cognition and the measures currently taken in laboratories to address biases in the studies.
Evolution, Development, and Human Social Cognition
Explaining the causal origins of what are taken to be uniquely human capacities for understanding the mind in the first years of life is a primary goal of social cognitive development research, which…
Primate Sociality to Human Cooperation
  • K. Hawkes
  • Psychology, Biology
    Human nature
  • 2014
TLDR
The novel rearing environments set up by helpful grandmothering can explain why natural selection escalated preferences and motivations for interactivity in the authors' lineage in the first place, and why, unlike other aspects of infant development, social sensitivities are not delayed in humans compared with genus Pan.
A comparison of temperament in nonhuman apes and human infants.
TLDR
This study compared the reaction of bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans, and 2.5-year-old human infants to novel objects and people - as a measure of their shyness-boldness, a key temperamental trait.
What’s Special about Human Imitation? A Comparison with Enculturated Apes
TLDR
It is argued that differences are best explained by distinct, specialized mechanisms that have evolved for copying rules and responses in particular content domains, which may represent adaptations for learning novel communicative gestures and complex tool-use.
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