That's Not Fair!
You know how it felt when you found out your boss was paying a co-worker more money than you for doing the same job? In this excerpt from a TED Talk, Frans de Waal presents a classic experiment in which capuchin monkeys were confronted with such unfairness. You'll get a kick out of the way the monkey reacts. You can see the full talk called Moral Behavior in Animals, which covers empathy, reciprocity, and cooperation, as well as fairness, at the TED site. Link -via Viral Viral Videos
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You forgot the grape-receiving monkey would have colluded with a cabal of fraud-perpetrating monkeys to take polonium 210 and tamper with its appearance to make it appear like perfectly good rock, carefully handed that radioactive time-bomb to the researcher in exchange for many, many grapes and then hid out with a huge corporation of gorillas that was "too big to fail".
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This is not exactly the wall street protests. The wall street protests would be if the 'Grape Capuchin', after getting grapes 25 times while the other one gets only cucumber, would throw the stone out the door of the lab, reach out of the cage and toss the bowl of grapes on the floor and then grab the bowl of cucumbers and eat them. If the 'Cucumber Capuchin' then shook it's cage in protest, that would be like the wall street protests.
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we are less special than we think, are we not?
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