Every other week, the Outside/In team at NHPR answers a listener question about science and the natural world. This week's question comes from Kate calling from Managua, Nicaragua.
"Why do kids chant? Is this something that other animals do? Kids will just randomly start chanting all together about something."
Producer Felix Poon went to the playground to find out.
Transcript
This has been lightly edited for clarity.
Felix Poon: Let’s set the scene. A bunch of 5-year-olds are on a tire swing. A parent is pushing them.
Children chanting: Higher! Higher! Higher!
Felix Poon: You’ve heard this kind of playground chant. "Do it! Do it! Do it!" But what’s the deal? Why do kids chant?
Tal-Chen Rabinowitch: So first of all, it's just fun, isn't it? There's a lot of sensory aspects, it's harmonious. You know, it's just fun and engaging.
Felix Poon: This is Tal-Chen Rabinowitch. She’s the head of the Music and Social Development Lab at the University of Haifa. And Tal-Chen has done experiments on interpersonal synchrony. That just means doing something repetitive in unison with others. In one experiment she put pairs of 4-year-olds in swings with adults pushing them. Some pairs were swung in synchrony. Others were swung asynchronously. Then they were given cooperative tasks to do, like pushing buttons at the same time to make something pop up, or passing toys through an apparatus. The pairs that were swung synchronously were more cooperative, and accomplished their tasks faster. When kids are chanting on the playground they’re basically doing the same thing as the kids in the experiment. It’s fun, and it’s also a collaborative effort that promotes social bonding.
Tal-Chen Rabinowitch: And that allows you to be more collective. And that allows you to do stuff you may not have as an individual, right?
Felix Poon: But this isn’t just a kid thing. It’s a political thing.
Crowd: Tax the rich! Tax the rich! Tax the rich!
Felix Poon: It’s a sports thing.
Crowd: MVP! MVP! MVP!
Felix Poon: A people thing.
Crowd: One more song! One more song!
Felix Poon: And could it be an animal thing too? I called up Marta Manser. She’s an evolutionary biologist who studies Kalahari meerkats at the University of Zurich.
Marta Manser: We study the meerkats in their natural habitat. We have identified about 30 different call types.
Felix Poon: Marta is trying to understand what different calls mean for coordination and decision making among groups of meerkats, for example contact calls.
Marta Manser: The contact calls, they are just very short "bloops" like "bloop, bloop, bloop."
Felix Poon: Which basically means “I’m here, I’m here.” And sometimes they do team up, like when they bark together at a predator. But unlike kids chanting “higher, higher” on the swings, these meerkats aren’t barking in unison. I reached out to some other animal experts, one who studies hyenas, others who study primates. While they’ve seen animals vocalize together in groups, like these gibbons in Sumatra, they don’t observe them doing it in unison. So perhaps chanting together is a uniquely human trait.
Children chanting: Higher! Higher! Higher!
If you’d like to submit a question to the Outside/In team, you can record it as a voice memo on your smartphone and send it to outsidein@nhpr.org. You can also leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER.
