Keith Jensen, Josep Call, Michael Tomasello
Chimpanzees are rational maximizers in an ultimatum game.
Science, October 5, 2007
This article describes a chimp version of a human experiment where a subject is offered cash who must split it with a second person. If the second rejects it, then neither gets to keep the reward. If the subject offers much less than 50%, human beings often reject the offer.
Two Chimpanzees, when offered two drawers of raisins, will accept nearly any split, the second only rejecting a 10/0 split reliably.
The article calls these people social actors and chimps 'economic' actors, which is to say that they are laid back and don't worry about fairness in the same way people do. In practice, if chimps are so laid back, then I bet that in practice, they share more evenly in their native environment, something people are definitely not so inclined to do..
Link via (Cognews)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment