• Question: Do animals have feelings like jealousy?

    Asked by karlaandtasha to Ed, Katie, Sam, Steve, Vera on 19 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Steven Daly

      Steven Daly answered on 18 Jun 2011:

      That is an interesting question. I think there have been experiments done on chimps to see if this they do, and I hope someone else can recall better than I can. I think they did in the end show that they do have emotions like jealousy. I know that they react angrily when they are treated unfairly, so for example I think they rewarded two chimps differently for the same task, and the one who recieved the worse reward reacted in a negative manner.

      I do not know about other animals though.

    • Photo: Ed Morrison

      Ed Morrison answered on 18 Jun 2011:

      This is a controversial issue among psychologists. Some people believe some animals exhibit jealousy, and there are some experiment with dogs and apes showing they whine and get agitated when someone else is given food and they are not. Is this because they are jealous, or just because they want food and aren’t getting any?

      I would say it’s very hard to say what another animal does and doesn’t feel. WIthout language to tell you what they are feeling, I think the scientific approach should be to say we just don’t know.

    • Photo: Vera Weisbecker

      Vera Weisbecker answered on 18 Jun 2011:

      I wouldn’t be surprised if they did feel jealousy. This is a feeling of competition with someone else, and that can be an advantage – for example when there isn’t enough food available, you want to have an inbuilt competitive drive to ensure that you get more than the others. But that’s just me making things up as I go along…

    • Photo: Katie Marriott

      Katie Marriott answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      I don’t know. All good answers and I have learnt a lot!

    • Photo: Sam Tazzyman

      Sam Tazzyman answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      Emotions must have some evolutionary benefit to humans, probably related to living in groups. So one might expect Chimps and other group animals to feel something broadly similar, although exactly how much they do would depend on whether they can feel such things (i.e. whether their brain is complicated enough).

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