Social evaluation of skill and competence in primates

Abstract

Social life is a continuous interplay of observing and interacting with conspecifics, predicting their behavior, and responding to their actions. This review explores the concept of social evaluation, which we construe as the cognitive process of acquiring and processing social information to generate social knowledge. Social evaluation has been a topic of interest in various research streams, including behavioral ecology, behavioral economics, developmental psychology, and comparative psychology. We review studies on the attribution of prosociality and competence in humans and nonhuman animals and then outline the cognitive mechanisms invoked in social evaluation. We focus on how animals assess skill and competence, drawing on our studies of chimpanzees, macaques, and baboons. The animals used outcome-based learning and inference-based processes to evaluate others, but distinguishing between different cognitive mechanisms remains challenging. We discuss the limitations of current methodologies, including experimental constraints in both captive and wild settings. Finally, we advocate for a unified framework, emphasizing the need to integrate both proximate and ultimate perspectives in studies of social evaluation.