Do you know that monkeys know how to cooperate and being fair?
Don’t think so?, check out the video below:
[youtube aAFQ5kUHPkY]A pair of capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) show very compelling signs of cooperation and a sense of fairness, by working together to solve a problem using tools, and then sharing the reward.
They also show signs of understanding fairness: when unequal rewards are given to one monkey and not another, the monkey receiving the lesser treat would rather go hungry than accept anything less than an equal reward.
The token exchange from the latter half of the video is interesting in and of itself; I’m sure it took a lot of training. There is another example of its usage by the same experimenter here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=aAFQ5kUHPkY
Isn’t this amazing? I suppose if you understand the concept of evolution, this does not come at all as a surprise.
This sense of cooperation and fairness does not only apply to monkeys; it is common for any species that live in group. We, human, for instance, build our society with a foundation of justice for all. From this experiment, we can learn that not only intelligent people like us know how to be fair and work together, so does many other creatures we know (like dogs).
Never-mind how much we think how smart we are, there are much things we can learn from less intelligent beings like monkeys. Moneys’ thoughts and feelings are much more straight forward than us, thus, they always look for the most effective way of achieving their goals. In this case, the one monkey needs the other for tool, and the other monkey needs the one monkey for the nuts; instead of cheating on the other monkey by not giving it the nuts and destroy the trust and cooperation between them, they simply share fairly.
Now, you have to agree that many animals are smarter than what we give them credit for. And for that, you must pay the respect to the monkeys (lol…).
