How scientists taught monkeys the concept of money. Not long after, the first prostitute monkey appeared
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 capuchin has a small brain, and it’s pretty much focused on food and sex,” said Keith Chen, a Yale economist who along with Laurie Santos, a psychologist, are the two researchers who have had made the study. ”You should really think of a capuchin as a bottomless stomach of want,” Chen says. ”You can feed them marshmallows all day, they’ll throw up and then come back for more.”
It’s exactly these selfish desires that they tried to exploit and experiment with great success after teaching capuchins to buy grapes, apples, and Jell-O. The economist wanted to study the incentives that motivated specimens to behave in a way, while the psychologist analyzed the behavior itself.
Chen’s monkey correlations to human economics attempts go from further back when he was a Harvard graduate, and additionally shows some more interesting facts. He worked there with Marc Hauser, a psychologist, on a project which studied altruism behaviors in monkeys. They chose cotton-top tamarins for this. At first, they put two monkeys in different cages, each with a lever. When the lever was pulled, the neighboring monkey would receive food. If not altruism, it was still a form of cooperation which was put to the test – the typical tamarin pulled the lever about 40 percent of the time.
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.”
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 capuchin has a small brain, and it’s pretty much focused on food and sex,” said Keith Chen, a Yale economist who along with Laurie Santos, a psychologist, are the two researchers who have had made the study. ”You should really think of a capuchin as a bottomless stomach of want,” Chen says. ”You can feed them marshmallows all day, they’ll throw up and then come back for more.”
It’s exactly these selfish desires that they tried to exploit and experiment with great success after teaching capuchins to buy grapes, apples, and Jell-O. The economist wanted to study the incentives that motivated specimens to behave in a way, while the psychologist analyzed the behavior itself.
Chen’s monkey correlations to human economics attempts go from further back when he was a Harvard graduate, and additionally shows some more interesting facts. He worked there with Marc Hauser, a psychologist, on a project which studied altruism behaviors in monkeys. They chose cotton-top tamarins for this. At first, they put two monkeys in different cages, each with a lever. When the lever was pulled, the neighboring monkey would receive food. If not altruism, it was still a form of cooperation which was put to the test – the typical tamarin pulled the lever about 40 percent of the time.
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.”
