Great apes get a kick out of 'playfully teasing' each other, study finds
CBC
What do you call it when a chimpanzee offers his buddy a delicious piece of fruit only to pull his hand away at the last second?
Or when a bonobo repeatedly pokes, prods and pulls on the hair of an older relative not hard enough to hurt, but just enough to be annoying?
It's not quite play, argues anthropologist Erica Cartmill, but it's not quite aggression either. It's "playful teasing." And, according to a new study, it's a very popular activity among juvenile great apes.
"A lot of the behaviours that we saw, I think, will be very familiar to anyone who has parented a toddler," Cartmill, a cognitive scientist at UCLA and Indiana University, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
"And perhaps to those people who grew up with siblings."
Their findings were published this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
In the study, Cartmill and her colleagues define playful teasing as something that's "mutually enjoyable, occurs in close relationships, requires the anticipation of another's response and involves creating unexpected moments that deviate from expected interaction norms."
"These are the kinds of behaviours where one individual, the teaser, will do something that's mildly irritating," Cartmill said.
While reviewing 75 hours of footage from zoos in San Diego, Calif., and Leipzig, Germany, they documented 142 clear instances bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans teasing their compadres.
Most often, it was young apes doing the taunting, and grown-ups were frequent targets. The study says humans also exhibit these behaviours in early childhood, noting that babies start playfully teasing as young as eight months old, often before they even start saying words.
The scientists categorized 18 distinct "teasing behaviours," including offering a body part or an object only to withdraw, pulling on hair or body parts, hitting with objects, stealing when there's no reason to, tickling, swinging an object in someone's face, and — Cartmill's personal favourite — violating personal space.
"Sometimes you end up with a juvenile ape with their face, like, right up in front of an adult who's like, 'I'm trying to ignore you. I'm trying to ignore you,'" she said.
"That's one of the things that really characterizes these behaviours.... They're hard to ignore."
None of these teasing tactics are novel discoveries, Cartmill said.
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