Self-Control in Chimpanzees Relates to General Intelligence

For humans, there appears to be a clear link between general intelligence and self-control behavior, such as sustained delay of gratification [1–9]. Chimpanzees also delay gratification [10–12] and can be given tests of general intelligence (g) [13–15], but these two constructs have never been compared within the same sample of nonhuman animals. We presented 40 chimpanzees with the hybrid delay task (HDT) [16, 17], which measures inter-temporal choices and the capacity for sustained delay of gratification, and the primate cognitive test battery (PCTB), which measures g in chimpanzees [13–15]. Importantly, none of the sub-tasks in the PCTB directly assesses self-control or other forms of behavioral inhibition. Rather, they assess areas of physical cognition (e.g., quantity discrimination) or social cognition (e.g., gaze following). In three phases of testing, we consistently found that the strongest relation was between chimpanzee g scores and efficiency in the HDT. Chimpanzee g was not most closely related to the proportion of trials the chimpanzees chose to try to wait for delayed rewards, but rather most closely related to how good they were at waiting for those rewards when they chose to do so. We also found the same strong relation between HDT efficiency and those factors in the PCTB that loaded most strongly on chimpanzee g. These results highlight that, as with humans, there is a strong relation between chimpanzees’ self-control and overall intelligence—a relation that likely reflects the role of successful inhibitory control during cognitive processing of information and intelligent decision-making. In humans, there is a consistent relation that has been reported between self-control and general intelligence. Beran and Hopkins report the same relation in chimpanzees that were given a test of delay of gratification and a battery of social and cognitive tasks that measure general intelligence.