Interesting study. The performance increase on the difficult task as audience size increases is counterintuitive at first, but it makes sense when you consider how many humans excel at performing in front of large audiences.
Yet for some of us the stress of being observed and scrutinized is crippling regardless of the task difficulty. I've bombed so many interviews because of this. :(
The people watching were familiar to the chimps, so desire to please or pride may have overcome fear of failure.
It was also only 6 chimps and the experiments were run over many years. I bet replication is going to be troublesome.
Checks out with what I read in "Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel."
Man, I read that book to my kids so many times I can probably still recite it in it's entirety.
I miss having little kids.
So the chimps will be the ones to finally bring open office plans to an end?
Because they think they're getting treats for it, from the humans.
I don't think they see any value in computer tasks other than getting treats.
They do the task because they know that they will get a good reward from an automatic feeder, with or without an audience. They might perceive them as competition, better get the treat before one of the hairless ones takes it. In private, just randomly mashi f the screen until the feeder is cooperative might be good enough, even if it takes a little longer.
Doesn't sound so different from a lot of jobs...
The scene from Groundhog's Day with the two drunk guys.
Stuck in the same day over and over again. Yep, sounds about right.
This might be why I do so well at a coffee shop sometimes.
mean reversion to the level of available feedback seems like the principle at play.
Chimps' prompt engineering.
Maybe they're quantum chimpanzees
Pretty soon the apes in charge are going to be using this study to demand that the chimps return to the office 5 days per week.
That's why I've a manager