Oct 5, 2026 · 42 min · 12 segments
Deep in the Dark Zone of some caves, wall art is made to move with flickering torch light. Do you steal from your friends? Maybe humans evolved to treat friends better than others. Untouched for…
Um, one of the things I did see though is this story about chimps, and you know I love a good animal story.
I mean, I'm not-- I wouldn't really steal anything from anyone, but it turns out that we're less likely, or chimps are less likely to steal from friends.
In this case, the study had to do with pineapple, and chimpanzees, they say, steal less pineapple from their buddies.
The researchers, this team of biologists, asked how likely a chimp is to steal food from another chimp, and what they realize is it depends on whether they're a friend or not.
And they're so like us that I just feel like this translates in somehow, in some way.
The team of biologists discovered chimps steal less from friends and that the relationship between the victim and the thief influenced the emotional display of both parties.
The study published in the journal Evolution & Human Behavior, and the experiments were done with chimps from Uganda's Ngamba Island Chimp Sanctuary.
But before they did the study, they had to figure out which of these chimps were friends with which other chimps and who was not a friend.
They sometimes said they, they tried to avoid describing very close relationships as similar to human friendships.
They said we as humans can't truly understand their cognitive and emotional complexity, and that we run the risk of putting our human ideas and emotions into other species, as I just did, right? But they say we are starting to see that animals do really form friendships.
They said to identify close relationships, they observed 26 chimps at the sanctuary for more than 800 hours.
They looked at grooming patterns and daily interactions and how routinely these animals were physically close to each other.
One room had three trays of pineapple pieces connected to a rope that could be pulled from the other room.
They had a victim chimp in the room with the pineapple while the thief chimp was in the other room where he or she could choose to steal the pineapple by pulling the rope.
The chimps stole from non-friends 70% of the time and from friends 61% of the time.
Now, they said 9% difference might not seem huge, but that each chimp was put in both friend and non-friend conditions gave them greater confidence that that difference is actually significant and not due to chance.
They say this study is the very first one to demonstrate that chimps can resist antisocial behavior with friends.
Um, one of the things I did see though is this story about chimps, and you know I love a good animal story.
I mean, I'm not-- I wouldn't really steal anything from anyone, but it turns out that we're less likely, or chimps are less likely to steal from friends.
In this case, the study had to do with pineapple, and chimpanzees, they say, steal less pineapple from their buddies.
The researchers, this team of biologists, asked how likely a chimp is to steal food from another chimp, and what they realize is it depends on whether they're a friend or not.
And they're so like us that I just feel like this translates in somehow, in some way.
The team of biologists discovered chimps steal less from friends and that the relationship between the victim and the thief influenced the emotional display of both parties.
The study published in the journal Evolution & Human Behavior, and the experiments were done with chimps from Uganda's Ngamba Island Chimp Sanctuary.
But before they did the study, they had to figure out which of these chimps were friends with which other chimps and who was not a friend.
They sometimes said they, they tried to avoid describing very close relationships as similar to human friendships.
They said we as humans can't truly understand their cognitive and emotional complexity, and that we run the risk of putting our human ideas and emotions into other species, as I just did, right? But they say we are starting to see that animals do really form friendships.
They said to identify close relationships, they observed 26 chimps at the sanctuary for more than 800 hours.
They looked at grooming patterns and daily interactions and how routinely these animals were physically close to each other.
One room had three trays of pineapple pieces connected to a rope that could be pulled from the other room.
They had a victim chimp in the room with the pineapple while the thief chimp was in the other room where he or she could choose to steal the pineapple by pulling the rope.
The chimps stole from non-friends 70% of the time and from friends 61% of the time.
Now, they said 9% difference might not seem huge, but that each chimp was put in both friend and non-friend conditions gave them greater confidence that that difference is actually significant and not due to chance.
They say this study is the very first one to demonstrate that chimps can resist antisocial behavior with friends.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
