"Monkeys reject unequal pay" by Brosnan, S. and Waal, F. in the study that we read for our presentation. Presentation in group is another piece of work that will be added to the overall mark from the module Judgement an Decision Making. My presentation is tomorrow and I am quite confident as the group of girls that I have been working with for the last couple of weeks is hard working and dedicated.
The authors of the paper that I have mentioned above conducted a series of experiments on capuchin monkeys to prove that animals as well as humans tends to be inequality aversive. It is well known that humans cooperate with one another however there was no evidence that highly evolved animals such as brown capuchin monkeys are guided by the outcome of the cooperation.
While conducting experiments the authors used 2 new conditions;
-equality- monkeys exchanged tokens with experimenter for cucamber
-inequality-one monkey exchanged token for cucumber and the other one for grape-which monkeys prefer.
They found that monkeys refused to participate if they witnessed a situation whenthe other monkey was awarded with preferred item for smaller effort.
This study is enjoyable and I highly recommend it. I found it striking how intelligent capuchin monkeys are.
