Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Chimps Found to Conform to Cultural Norms

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Chimps Found to Conform to Cultural Norms: "We humans aren't the only ones who want to fit in. Researchers have discovered that chimpanzees, too, preferentially adopt their fellow chimps' way of doing things.

Andrew Whiten of St. Andrews University in Fife, Scotland, and his colleagues studied three groups of captive chimpanzees and the ways in which they assumed different techniques for obtaining food. The first group contained a high-ranking female that had been taught to retrieve food from an apparatus by using a stick to push a blockage away, thus freeing the food item. The second group also contained a female expert, but one that had been instructed to lift the blockage with the stick in order to release the treat. The third group was a control group and did not have a local expert. When the experts were reunited with their respective groups, the other chimps watched their activities at the food apparatus intently and learned to apply either the poking or lifting technique themselves. Members of the third group, lacking an expert to guide them, failed to figure out the contraption on their own."