Deception of Primates

Using Social skills to deceive 

The primates as well as us humans have undergone natural selection in order to deceive others in order to gain something.

In baboons it was noticed that when another baboon was chasing them, they stood up in the alert position in order to seem like they had noticed a predator. The chasing baboon didn't resume the chase in order to look for the predator, even though there was no predator present. This is called tactical distraction deception (Byrne and Whiten, 1992).

Another type of deception would be concealment. This is when the individual hides something from the other individual. For example if a Chimp has found food, it will attempt to keep it behind his back and out of view of other chimps(Byrne and Whiten, 1992) .

This behaviour could be due to operent conditioning which is when an individual receives reinforcement for their behavior (McLeod, 2015) . Therefore the Chimpanzee may have discovered that by putting the food behind his back stops other chimps from taking the food from them.
A different learning method could have been more cognitive and this could be that be behaviour was observed and learnt from older primates (Byrne and Whiten, 1992) .

References

Byrne, R. and Whiten, A. (1992). Cognitive Evolution in Primates: Evidence from Tactical Deception. Man, 27(3), p.609.

McLeod, S. (2015). B.F. Skinner | Operant Conditioning | Simply Psychology. [online] Simplypsychology.org. Available at: http://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html [Accessed 8 May 2015].