Competition and Cooperation in Language Evolution: A Comparison Between Communication of Apes and Humans - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 92

Informing comes about because individuals often want to offer help to others
without even being requested to; they inform others of things even when they
themselves have no personal interest in the information. Informing is a way of
offering help because typically I inform you of things that I think you (not I) will find
helpful or interesting given my knowledge of your goals and interests (Tomasello
2008 : 85). This ability emerges early in ontogeny. An experiment by Liszkowski
and colleagues ( 2006 ) showed that human infants prelinguistically informed others
from as early as 12 months of age by pointing. Specifically, infants used the gesture
of pointing to inform another person of the location of an object that the person was
searching for. This result suggests that from very early on, humans are capable of
conceiving others as intentional agents with informational states and that they have
the motivation to provide such information communicatively (see also Tomasello
2009 ). On the contrary, according to Tomasello ( 2009 : 15-16):
While infants consistently demonstrate understanding of informative pointing, the same is
not true of apes. Apes do not point for one another, and when they do point for humans,
they do so mainly to get humans to fetch food for them. Indeed, in all observed cases of
apes pointing for humans, the motive is directive (imperative). Also, apes who have learned
some kind of human-centered communication use it to communicate only with humans, not
with one another, and they do so almost exclusively for directive purposes.
The reason for this lies in the fact that apes, that are our closest relatives—
chimpanzees in particular—, are extremely competitive, and their competitive
nature makes it very difficult for them to share a common goal and to participate in
collaborative activities (such as communication). Specifically, Tomasello's ( 2008 )
idea is that chimpanzees understand their own action from a first-person perspective
and that of the partner from a third-person perspective, but they don't have a bird's-
eye view of the interaction with the joint goal and complementary roles all in a
single representational format. So while humans are capable of shared intentionality,
chimps do not have the basic psychological underpinning to participate with others
in acts of shared intentionality: they are not able to understand others as cooperative
agents. As a consequence, chimpanzees are capable of only individual intentionality.
However, apes are capable to engage themselves in group activities. For example,
in the wild, chimpanzees sometimes hunt in small groups to capture the red colobus
monkey (Boesch and Boesch 1989 ; Boesch 2005 ). According to Boesch and Boesch
( 1989 ), chimps have a common goal in their hunting and play complementary roles:
one individual has to chase the prey in a particular direction, others have to climb the
trees to prevent the prey from changing direction, and so on. In Tomasello's ( 2008 ;
Tomasello et al. 2005 ) opinion, this explanation is misleading: the group activities
of chimps, such as group hunting, are only apparently collaborative activities. He
maintained that in this process, each participant is attempting to maximize its own
chances of catching the prey without any prior joint goal or establishment of roles.
In addition, he affirmed that when chimpanzees engage in group hunting, they do
not communicate intentionality about the ongoing activity, either to set a goal or
to coordinate roles. Since they are competing in this activity, they do not engage in
any intentional communication. Tomasello ( 2008 : 181-184) wrote: