Transcript for:
Capuchin Monkeys and Fairness Experiments

so final experiment that I want to mention to you is our fairness study uh and so this this became a very famous study and there's now many more because after we did this about 10 years ago uh it became very well known and we did that originally with kuchin monkeys and I'm going to show you the first experiment that we did it has now been done with dogs and with birds and with chimpanzees um but we s BR and we started out with kuch and WKYS so what we did is we put two capuchin monkeys side by side again these animals they live in a group they know each other we take them out of the group put them in a test chamber and there's a very simple task that they need to do and if you give both of them cucumber for the task the two monkeys side by side they're perfectly willing to do this 25 times in a row so cucumber even though it's really only water in my opinion but cucumber is perfectly fine for them now if you give the partner grapes the food preferences of my capucha monkeys correspond exactly with the prices in the supermarket and so if you give them grapes that's a far better food uh then you create inequity between them so that's the experiment we did recently we videotaped it with new monkeys who had never done the task thinking that maybe they would have a stronger reaction and that turned out to be right the one on the left is the monkey who gets cucumber the one on the right is the one who gets grapes the one who gets cucumber note that the first piece of cucumber is perfectly fine the first piece he eats uh then she sees the other one getting grape and you will see what happens so she gives a rock to us that's the task and we give her a piece of cucumber and she eats it the other one needs to give a rock to us and that's what she does and she gets a grape and she each the other one sees that she gives a rock to us now gets again cucumber [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] [Laughter] she tests The Rock now against the wall she needs to give it to us and she gets cucumber again so this is basically the Wall Street protest that you see here