It’s not just we humans who have a sense of fairness. A lot of animals do, as we can see by this experiment with capuchin monkeys. The one on the left was content to get a piece of cucumber for doing a task, as long as the other monkey got the same reward. But when the researcher gave the other monkey a grape, a much better treat, the first one wasn’t happy at all:
Have you ever felt like the monkey on the left? I have.
April 25, 2014
Oh, I have been made a monkey of any number of times alright. I doubt that you will come across anyone who has not.
That’s why the audience laughed. They had been there themselves.
oh yes!!!!!!!! fairness, or rather the lack of it, as perceived by me, is a “big thing” with me. have to learn to keep a lid on this tendency though. it can get me into trouble. ,-)
Yes, it’s easy to make things worse for ourselves! It behooves us to pick our battles.
well… LOLOL… just listen to the marine…. “nobody promised you a rose garden.”
and…
i do not like scientific experiments on that kind of thing with monkeys.
do we really have to keep them in a cage like that to find out that people have a problem with feeling things aren’t “fair?” good god.
what’s not FAIR is that the monkeys should be living out their poor pathetic lives in their natural habitat. not in a tiny cage being given a grape. sorry to rain on this parade. it just seems like more unnecessary cruelty to me by mankind… figuring out something he should observe in humans. i’m against most behavorial science studies using animals. it’s not kind. and it’s certainly not fair to the animals.
I don’t know how idyllic life would be in the wild for them. I keep thinking of Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons. As I recall he said the baboons didn’t have to spend much time getting food, so they spent the extra hours torturing one another. How do we know that in the wild the one on the left wouldn’t be a big bully? Maybe the one on the right is better off being protected from him. Who knows? From what I’ve heard, there are a lot of regulations protecting animals like these now. If so, that’s better than nothing.
“Tormenting,” not “torturing.”
I love the reaction, throw the “bl**dy” food object back at the handler 🙂 you go gal!!!
Yes!