Not only does the New York Times’ Adam Cohen read way too much into a new study of monkeys (covered here by Tyler Cowen), he completely misinterprets the results of the study in order to get at his political screed. He writes:

Give a capuchin monkey a cucumber slice, and she will eagerly trade a small pebble for it. But when a second monkey, in an adjoining cage, receives a more-desirable grape for the same pebble, it changes everything. The first monkey will then reject her cucumber, and sometimes throw it out of the cage. Monkeys rarely refuse food, but in this case they appear to be pursuing an even higher value than eating: fairness.

The capuchin monkey study, published last week in Nature, has generated a lot of interest for a scant three-page report buried in the journal’s letters section. There is, certainly, a risk of reading too much into the feeding habits of 10 research monkeys. But in a week when fairness was so evidently on the ropes — from the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancún, which poor nations walked out of in frustration, to the latest issue of Forbes, reporting that the richest 400 Americans are worth $955 billion — the capuchin monkeys offered a glimmer of hope from the primate gene pool.

Cohen then goes on to point out how a better sense of fairness would square the injustice he sees in a number of policy debates, some of which I agree with him on, some of which I don’t. But that’s not the point. The point is that I’m not sure how the monkey study shows that we’re wired with a sense of “fairness.”

I’d say that if the capuchin monkeys really had the innate sense of fairness Cohen ascribes to them, the monkey getting the grape would refuse it until the monkey getting a mere cucumber also got a grape. Or he’d refuse the grape his neighbor was denied, and accept a cucumber instead, owing to fairness.

That one monkey sees another monkey get a grape, where he merely got a cucumber, then refuses the cucumber out of spite, shows me that we’re wired with an innate sense of greed. Or envy. To the point of self-destruction — the monkey would rather go hungry then take a cucumber with the knowledge that the other monkey got a grape.

It’s fairness in that the monkey recognizes he’s getting screwed, but it certainly isn’t Cohen’s conception of fairness, which reads more like egalitarianism.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2003 at 2:14 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.