Envious capuchin monkeys react badly to raw deals

In my last post, I wrote about two studies which showed that even bacteria cooperate towards a common goal and can be infiltrated by cheating slackers. In one of the studies, cheaters were eventually weeded out through natural selection because their rise to prominence created such havoc for the group that each individual bacterium suffered.

In this scenario, slacking wasn’t punished but merely reduced over time. But more complex creatures, like humans, have the capacity to actually recognise unfairness and punish it directly. It turns out that we’re very keen on doing that; so strong is our innate sense of justice that we’ll often punish cheaters at our own expense.

Two years ago, Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center found that brown capuchin monkeys also react badly to receiving raw deals. Forget bananas – capuchins love the taste of grapes and far prefer them over cucumber. If monkeys were rewarded for completing a task with cucumber while their peers were given succulent grapes, they were more likely to shun both task and reward.

That suggested that the ability to compare own efforts and rewards with those of our peers evolved much earlier in our history than we previously thought. Of course, animal behaviour researchers always need to be careful that they’re not reading too much into the actions of the animals they study.