The brown capuchin inequitable payment experiment

[2pac Shakur]

In a famous capuchin monkey experiment in 2003, Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal showed that these social primates would prefer receiving nothing to receiving a reward awarded inequitably. The experiment went like this:

1. A group of female capuchins learned to pay for cucumber 'rewards' with rock 'tokens' from a researcher.
2. The exchange of token for reward was done in pairs of monkeys.
3. After receiving a cucumber slice for a rock the first monkey would witness the second passing her token to the researcher.
4. This second monkey would sometimes get the same thing (a cucumber slice) but would sometimes get something better (a grape).
5. The experiment monitored the first capuchin's response to the payment the next received.

Monkeys who saw their counterpart getting the same deal as they had done happily ate their cucumber. However, monkeys who witnessed the next monkey 'unjustly' receiving a better exchange rate for their rock had some dramatic negative reactions:

* Cucumber recipients wouldn't eat when they saw another monkey get a grape.
* They often refused to exchange their tokens for anything in future sessions.
* They sometimes hurled the cucumber back at the researcher.

http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/Inequity_aversion

Neat stuff.
My buddy who told me about this experiment said the monkeys didn't get so upset as long as they had some sort of social relationship with the other monkey. He said that's why management tries to get the members of their team to bond at work and away from work.
He's as as me.