Skip to main content

Yale-New Haven Hospital’s Monkeys

 


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.

PS. This is powered by #BlogchatterA2Z

Previous post in this series: Xenophanes’s God

Tomorrow, the last: Zorba’s Secret

 

Comments

  1. A very interesting post discussing some very interesting experiments...

    ReplyDelete
  2. A 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.
    Deepika Sharma

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The social system alters people's behavior significantly. Memes, in Dawkins' sense, are as strong as genes.

      Delete
  3. The '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 ?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We are evolving only at the intellectual level,probably. The heart belongs to the ape still.

      Delete
  4. This post was entertaining and disheartening in equal measure.

    The 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.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 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.

      Delete
  5. It'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.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The evolution gave us heaven in the next life at least 😅

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Country where humour died

Humour died a thousand deaths in India after May 2014. The reason – let me put it as someone put it on X.  The stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra called a politician some names like ‘traitor’ which made his audience laugh because they misunderstood it as a joke. Kunal Kamra has to explain the joke now in a court of justice. I hope his judge won’t be caught with crores of rupees of black money in his store room . India itself is the biggest joke now. Our courts of justice are huge jokes. Our universities are. Our temples, our textbooks, even our markets. Let alone our Parliament. I’m studying the Ramayana these days in detail because I’ve joined an A-to-Z blog challenge and my theme is Ramayana, as I wrote already in an earlier post . In order to understand the culture behind Ramayana, I even took the trouble to brush up my little knowledge of Sanskrit by attending a brief course. For proof, here’s part of a lesson in my handwriting.  The last day taught me some subhashit...

Lucifer and some reflections

Let me start with a disclaimer: this is not a review of the Malayalam movie, Lucifer . These are some thoughts that came to my mind as I watched the movie today. However, just to give an idea about the movie: it’s a good entertainer with an engaging plot, Bollywood style settings, superman type violence in which the hero decimates the villains with pomp and show, and a spicy dance that is neatly tucked into the terribly orgasmic climax of the plot. The theme is highly relevant and that is what engaged me more. The role of certain mafia gangs in political governance is a theme that deserves to be examined in a good movie. In the movie, the mafia-politician nexus is busted and, like in our great myths, virtue triumphs over vice. Such a triumph is an artistic requirement. Real life, however, follows the principle of entropy: chaos flourishes with vengeance. Lucifer is the real winner in real life. The title of the movie as well as a final dialogue from the eponymous hero sugg...

Abdullah’s Religion

O Abdulla Renowned Malayalam movie actor Mohanlal recently offered special prayers for Mammootty, another equally renowned actor of Kerala. The ritual was performed at Sabarimala temple, one of the supreme Hindu pilgrimage centres in Kerala. No one in Kerala found anything wrong in Mohanlal, a Hindu, praying for Mammootty, a Muslim, to a Hindu deity. Malayalis were concerned about Mammootty’s wellbeing and were relieved to know that the actor wasn’t suffering from anything as serious as it appeared. Except O Abdulla. Who is this Abdulla? I had never heard of him until he created an unsavoury controversy about a Hindu praying for a Muslim. This man’s Facebook profile describes him as: “Former Professor Islahiaya, Media Critic, Ex-Interpreter of Indian Ambassador, Founder Member MADHYAMAM.” He has 108K followers on FB. As I was reading Malayalam weekly this morning, I came to know that this Abdulla is a former member of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind Kerala , a fundamentalist organisation. ...

56-Inch Self-Image

The cover story of the latest issue of The Caravan [March 2025] is titled The Balakot Misdirection: How the Modi government drew political mileage out of military failure . The essay that runs to over 20 pages is a bold slap on the glowing cheek of India’s Prime Minister. The entire series of military actions taken by Narendra Modi against Pakistan, right from the surgical strike of 2016, turns out to be mere sham in this essay. War was used by all inefficient kings in the past in order to augment the patriotism of the citizens, particularly in times of trouble. For example, the Controller of the Exchequer taxed the citizens as much as he thought they could bear without violent protest and when he was wrong the King declared a war against a neighbouring country. Patriotism, nationalism, and religion – the best thing about these is that a king can use them all very effectively to control the citizens’ sentiments. Nowadays a lot of leaders emulate the ancient kings’ examples enviabl...

Violence and Leaders

The latest issue of India Today magazine studies what it calls India’s Gross Domestic Behaviour (GDB). India is all poised to be an economic superpower. But what about its civic sense? Very poor, that’s what the study has found. Can GDP numbers and infrastructure projects alone determine a country’s development? Obviously, no. Will India be a really ‘developed’ country by 2030 although it may be $7-trillion economy by then? Again, no is the answer. India’s civic behaviour leaves a lot, lot to be desired. Ironically, the brand ambassador state of the country, Uttar Pradesh, is the worst on most parameters: civic behaviour, public safety, gender attitudes, and discrimination of various types. And UP is governed by a monk!  India Today Is there any correlation between the behaviour of a people and the values and principles displayed by their leaders? This is the question that arose in my mind as I read the India Today story. I put the question to ChatGPT. “Yes,” pat came the ...