Understanding social decision-making from another species' perspective.

One challenge of studying cognition and behavior in other species is designing studies that are intuitive and motivating to the subjects; studies that lack these features may result in false negatives and other outcomes that bias our understanding of animals' abilities and choices. Here, Schmelz, Grueneisen, Kabalak, Jost, and Tomasello (PNAS, 114(28), 7462-7467, 2017) investigated prosocial behavior, in which animals may make decisions that benefit a conspecific, and found that, contrary to much earlier work, when chimpanzees are given a reason to do so, they do make prosocial choices.