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Even Monkeys Understand Economic Justice

Nobody likes getting screwed over. Take Wall Street for an obvious example. Lecherous bankers dream up some too good to be true financial products, trade them on the open market even though they know they're defective, fill their coffers and shrug when...

Nobody likes getting screwed over. Take Wall Street for an obvious example. Lecherous bankers dream up some too good to be true financial products, trade them on the open market even though they know they’re defective, fill their coffers and shrug when the economy implodes. They tuck themselves away in mansions as everyday scrubs like you and me lose their jobs and get kicked out of their homes. No wonder we saw thousands of people descend upon Wall Street last year swinging signs and naming names. (“Banks got bailed out! We got sold out!”)

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Monkeys know what’s up. A years-old experiment on inequity aversion by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal is getting a fresh look in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street. The set up is super straight forward. Two capuchin monkeys in neighboring cages are given a basic task like handing a rock to a lab technician and are rewarded with a piece of food. At first, it’s just a slice of cucumber — crisp, refreshing, but not exactly an amazing treat. But then the technician changes things up and gives one of the monkeys a grape — grapes are delicious to all God’s creatures. The grapeless monkey apparently does not like getting snubbed. Researchers found that when they tried giving the other monkey a cucumber after he’d seen his neighbor get a grape, he’d throw it right back.

However simple, the “monkeys reject unequal pay” experiment offers some frankly philosophical conclusions. In his Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume quite famously suggested that human beings have an innate sense of fairness. It would appear that the trait is more universal than that. Capuchins are a unique example, since they’re such social creatures. In the wild, they go hunting as a group and divide up the spoils afterward. You can imagine from the reaction to the cucumber-grape scenario that they’re not pleased if they get a lesser share than others.

When you get down to it, this is simply evolution at work. If you consider the fact that we’re all competing for survival, it’s understandable that some animals are hard-wired to reject being put at a disadvantage. “[S]ince evolution favors whatever maximizes relative fitness, it smiles not only upon those who do well, but also upon those who frown on competitors poised to do better,” explains David Barash at the Chronicle of Higher Education. “One way to achieve the approval of natural selection, therefore, is not only to strive to maximize one’s own payoff but also to monitor that of others, and to complain loudly if it seems too high, especially if such a complaint is at all likely to better the situation of those who act as Robin Hood or who cheer him on in the name of fairness.”

In conclusion, the ultimate explanation for the rage that became Occupy Wall Street lies in evolutionary biology. If only, the monkeys had joined the fight…

Image via Flickr