Are animals as stupid as human beings? Will they
indulge in trading if trained? Will a dog exchange a bone with another dog for some
favour like sex? Keith Chen, a professor of behavioural economics, wanted to
know. So he conducted an experiment which came to be known as the Yale-New
Haven Hospital’s monkey experiment. He was shocked by the results. And the
hospital had to ask him to leave the monkeys alone.
Chen conducted his research on a group of monkeys. His
choice was the capuchin, which is a cute, little, brown monkey with a small brain
that is highly focused on food and sex. (Not very unlike many human beings, you
are tempted to think.)
Chen, along with Venkat Lakshminarayanan, worked with
seven capuchins at a lab set up by psychologist Laurie Santos at Yale-New Haven
Hospital. The monkeys lived together in a large cage. At one end of the cage
was a smaller cage which was the testing chamber, where one monkey at a time
would enter to take part in experiments.
First, Chen and his colleagues taught the monkeys to
use money. They gave them silver coins which they could use for buying food.
Give the coin back to the researcher and the monkey gets the goodies. The monkeys
learnt to buy the food of their choice by giving the coins to the particular
researcher holding their choice food.
Then Chen experimented with price variation. How would
the monkeys behave if he raised or lowered the prices of food items? To Chen’s
surprise, the monkeys behaved quite like human beings. When the price of a
particular food rose the monkeys bought less of it and when the price fell they
bought more. The monkeys were rational enough.
What about their irrationality? To test that, Chen set
up two gambling games. Coin toss was the gamble. Head or tail? A very common
human gamble. The monkey was shown a grape first. Depending on the coin flip,
the monkey would get that grape or a bonus one as well. In the second game, the
capuchins were shown two grapes and if the coin flip went against him one grape
would be taken away.
In the first game, a bonus is won. In the second,
something is lost. Actually there is no difference in the final outcome. In the
both the gambles, the final average number of grapes won by each monkey would
be more or less the same. Yet we all have a natural aversion to loss and an
equally natural preference for gain. What about the monkeys? Yes, they behaved
just like us again. The monkeys abandoned the two-grape gamble and gathered
around the one-grape researcher. The capuchins behaved as if the pain from
losing a grape was greater than the pleasure from gaining one. That is quite
irrational if you understand that there is no real gain or loss in the game.
Yet ‘loss aversion’ is a strong economic behaviour of human beings. And of
monkeys too!
Similar experiments were actually carried out with men
before Chen came to the conclusion. He studied the behaviour of intra-day
traders at stock markets and concluded that the data generated by the capuchin
monkeys “make them statistically indistinguishable from most stock-market
investors.”
The biggest surprise for Chen came soon enough. One
morning the alpha male of the group did something unique. He scurried into the
testing chamber as he had done many times, but on this day, instead of taking
his 12 coins and going to buy food, he flung his coins into the main cage and
ran after them. All the capuchins rushed to grab the coins. Each one, behaving
just like normal humans, grabbed what he or she could. Chen and his colleagues were
unsuccessful in their attempts to retrieve the coins from the monkeys. They had
to give food in return for the coins the capuchins had grabbed illegally. The
monkeys learnt that crime pays.
What shocked Chen, however, was not this. He watched
one male capuchin going to a female with the coin he had grabbed. He offered
the coin to her which she accepted and then immediately he had sex with her.
What Chen originally construed as altruism was in fact “the first instance of
monkey prostitution in the recorded history of science.” [The quote is from Super
Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner which is the source
of this entire post.]
As soon as the copulation was over, the female monkey
which had received the illegal coin went to Chen to buy grapes with it.
The hospital to which the capuchins belonged called a
halt to the experiments. They did not want to irreparably damage the social
structure of the capuchins.
The social structures are artificial constructs and
they inescapably affect our behaviour patterns. Just imagine, for the sake of
momentary delight, a social system in which people supported one another with
understanding and empathy. Wealth wouldn’t be a major value there. Greed wouldn’t
be a dominating vice. Selfishness and jealousy would be suppressed since they
would make you look like hideous gargoyles on a majestic edifice. Not practical,
you would say. Why? Because we have already been thoroughly corrupted by our
existing social constructs with their warped notions.
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Previous post in this series: Xenophanes’s
God
Tomorrow, the last: Zorba’s Secret
A very interesting post discussing some very interesting experiments...
ReplyDeleteWe are indeed descendants of apes😂
DeleteA very interesting experiment. Having a society with empathy and no wealth would as you say be unimaginable because yes we have been corrupted far too much.
ReplyDeleteDeepika Sharma
The social system alters people's behavior significantly. Memes, in Dawkins' sense, are as strong as genes.
DeleteThe 'system' corrupts us morally and we let that happen. Nothing can be more sad than this. In the above experiment , the monkeys seem so intelligent but when we extrapolate the behavior to humans, have we really stopped evolving and lost sense of rationality ?
ReplyDeleteWe are evolving only at the intellectual level,probably. The heart belongs to the ape still.
DeleteThis post was entertaining and disheartening in equal measure.
ReplyDeleteThe more I read about the experiment, the more human-like the capuchins behaved.
Maybe we are all capuchins in a giant lab--like the dragonflies you mentioned in a comment on my blog once.
I live with the hope (very faint and appearing like a delusion) that one day human beings will realise their folly and correct their systems.
DeleteIt's true that we are manipulated by our societies, i remember my dad telling me " it would have been good if we didn't evolve." Your writing tells me why he had that different look on his face while saying it.
ReplyDeleteThe evolution gave us heaven in the next life at least 😅
Delete