You may have thought things like currency or money are concepts known solely by man – something which differentiates humans from animals. Some might have a sense of ownership, besides of course territory, but trading and the likes haven’t been observed in any other species besides homo sapiens. However, in 2005, an economist/psychologist duo from Yale managed to teach seven capuchin monkeys how to use money, and I’m pretty sure from here on some of you might be able to guess what happened from there on.
The most interesting part comes about at the time when researchers paced the game a bit harder. Now, they instructed a monkey to always pull the lever (mindless altruist), and another to never pull it (ego-monkey). The two were then inserted into the game with other monkeys.
At first, the mindless altruist was pulling the lever every time, never missing a cage for its food, while the other tamarins responded in the same way 50 percent of the time. The other monkeys soon understood, though, that the mindless altruist was just pulling the lever anyway, indifferently of whether it was reciprocated or not – their response dropped to 30 percent of the time. The ego-monkey was exposed to the harshest treatment, as expected – very harshly. “[The other tamarins] would just go nuts,” Chen recalls when she was introduced with all the other. ”They’d throw their feces at the wall, walk into the corner and sit on their hands, kind of sulk.”
Read the full article: zmescience.com
