Chimps like a quiet night watching TV

Sometimes the simplest socialising is best: gather around the TV, sit in silence and watch a film. Well, it works for chimpanzees.

Sometimes the simplest socialising is best: gather around the TV, sit in companionable silence and watch a film. Well, it works for chimpanzees.

That is the conclusion of a study that has found that great apes, like humans, like to bond by watching TV. After sitting side by side and being shown the same video, chimpanzees went on to spend more time together. If, however, only one of the pair saw the video, they were comparatively less friendly.

Wouter Wolf, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, conducted the study because he was interested in the mysteries of human behaviour rather than that of chimpanzees.

“Humans have a whole spectrum of very odd social activities,” he said. “One of the oddest things we do is going to the movie theatre together. You are not doing anything. You are sitting side by side, in the dark, and are not supposed to talk. It is not ­interactive at all.

“But if your friend takes out their phone and does something else, then you get frustrated. You’re like, ‘We’re watching this together, what are you doing?’ It’s very strange, but somehow we connect through these shared ­experiences, even if they are minimal.”

In past research he has shown that when humans share an experience, however mundane, they feel more comfortable together. He decided to see whether this behaviour extended to our closest evolutionary cousins.

To his surprise, the experiment, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, showed that even this oddity is something we share with ­chimpanzees.

The study involved showing the animals videos and he said that it was a delicate balancing act to choose the right footage. “If you give them something they don’t find interesting at all, they will disengage. If it is something very arousing, they might get nervous or start doing dominance displays.”

The perfect compromise, eliciting neither arousal nor aggression, turned out to be the equivalent of a chimpanzee home video — footage of chimpanzee juveniles playing. In the first part of the study, involving 19 animals, he paired each chimpanzee with a human. Either they both watched the video, or just the chimpanzee could see it — and could see that the human could not.

In the second part of the study, involving 21 chimpanzees, the set-up was the same but the chimpanzees were paired with each other, not humans.

The scientists measured how long the chimpanzees spent close to each other or, with the human pairing, how eagerly they approached their viewing partner. The results were the same for both: they were keener on being together if they had watched TV together.

It seemed like the simple act of having the same experience was enough to give them a shared basis for friendship.

Mr Wolf, who is studying for a PhD, said that realising chimpanzees did this too could give us a better understanding of our own socialising. “Sharing experiences is fundamental in human social relationships. You create common ground.”

The Times