Abstract

Intertemporal choices involving tradeoffs between benefits and time costs are ubiquitous in both human and animal lives. Several proposals argue that nonhumans are stuck in the ‘now’, whereas future-orienting cognition allows humans to think ahead and make adaptive decisions. What is the ultimate function of high levels of patience, and why do such abilities emerge? I will argue that a suite of decision-making capacities including inter-temporal choice and future planning evolved in the context of foraging behaviors, and vary with ecological complexity across species. Then, I will examine how these capacities for self-control can be generalized from foraging contexts to solve new but evolutionarily-important problems, like cooking food. Finally, I will present work testing the hypothesis that low levels of self-control constrain cooperation in primates, and therefore may explain human-unique forms of ultra-sociality.