What happens when you pay two monkeys unequally?

What happens when two monkeys are paid unequally? Fairness, reciprocity, empathy, cooperation -- caring about the well-being of others seems like a very human trait. But Frans de Waal shares some surprising videos of behavioral tests, on primates and other mammals, that show how many of these moral traits all of us share.

Uranus (social awareness, scientific (behavioral tests)) trine Okyrhoe (mental attitude programs). Venus (cooperative) & Mercury (researcher, Frans de Waal, says that if both monkeys are given cucumber, "they're perfectly willing to do this 25 times in a row") conjunct Pholus (attentive, conscious of choice) opposite Chaos (+ goes with the flow, mellow and non-stressed, - worked up, paranoid (things change when one monkey is paid more than the other)). Echeclus (swift decision making criteria (after seeing his neighbor get a grape for doing the same task, the monkey flat out rejects cucumber)) trine Pelion (demanding, infantile in work relationships).

Recently, we videotaped it with new monkeys who'd 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 she eats. 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 eats it. The other one sees that. She gives a rock to us now, gets, again, cucumber.

She tests a rock now against the wall. She needs to give it to us. And she gets cucumber again. (Laughter) So this is basically the Wall Street protest that you see here.

Frans de Waal studies primate social behavior — how they fight and reconcile, share and cooperate https://www.ted.com/speakers/frans_de_waal

Minor planet keywords developed by Philip Sedgwick, used with permission http://philipsedgwick.com/

Source: ted.com/