April 25, 2007

Fairness and monkey business

The Frontal Cortex: Inequality and the Perception of Fairness. I love the experiments psychologists come up with.

One of the more powerful examples of this behavior comes from Franz Waals and Sarah Brosnan, who trained brown capuchin monkeys to give them pebbles in exchange for cucumbers. Almost overnight, a capuchin economy developed, with hungry monkeys harvesting small stones. But the marketplace was disrupted when the scientists got mischievous: instead of giving every monkey a cucumber in exchange for pebbles, they started giving some monkeys a tasty grape instead. (Monkeys prefer grapes to cucumbers.) After witnessing this injustice, the monkeys earning cucumbers went on strike. Some started throwing their cucumbers at the scientists; the vast majority just stopped collecting pebbles. The capuchin economy ground to a halt. The monkeys were willing to forfeit cheap food simply to register their anger at the arbitrary pay scale.

Posted by Johnnie Moore at 19:50 in Collaboration , Facilitation
Technorati tags: , , ,
Bookmark: del.icio.us Digg it ma.gnolia Yahoo MyWeb Google StumbleUpon
Permalink
Trackbacks
URL for Trackbacks: http://www.johnniemoore.com/mt/minotaur.cgi/1676.

Comments (3)

Comment feed (Site comment feed)
Armin says

Hi, after your good (funny?) experiences with Google Translation you should try this one:
http://www.karge.biz/?p=84

Six weeks ago I also wrote about Monkey Business. You will like it ;-)

If the translation fails, enjoy the video.

Armin: Thanks, that's a funny video and even in Google translation another fascinating experiment.

Lamar Cole says

There is a middle ground called
fairness that people can find in
most situations if they look hard
enough.

Post a comment