Quoting Michael Giesbrecht [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
So, can anybody tell me economic school of thought monkeys adhere to? ;-)
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/scitech/SciTechRepublish_948138.htm
Unequal pay makes monkeys go ape
Thursday, 18 September 2003
Monkeys, like humans, are acutely aware of injustice, which suggests that a
sense of equality is an ancestral trait among primates, a study says.
In an unusual two-year experiment, animal behaviourists Sarah Brosnan and
Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, taught brown capuchin
monkeys to receive tokens as a reward and to barter them for food.
The monkeys were usually quite content to swap the tokens for cucumber but if
the researchers gave one of the monkeys a grape, a more eagerly-sought food,
the other animals would become jealous.
Some of them refused to hand over their tokens. Others would still exchange
their token for the cucumber but scornfully decline to eat it.
cut
Note that (IN THE VERY FIRST SENTENCE) the writer labels the differential
trades as an instance of *injustice*. Nothing like a walloping touch of bias in
science reporting, especially when comparing humans to apes.
Getting *away* from that ancestral sense of equality is probably what got man
out of the trees in the first place.
Scornfully decline? How could the researcher or the reporter possibly know
such a thing?
--
Susan Hogarth
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.tribeagles.org
