Study Shows Monkeys Are Emotional, and Empathetic Creatures

Okay!! I really want to vent about Monkeys. I was in a place between Ogun and Lagos State in Lagos Ibadan Express Way and I didn't know that there were monkeys in the area. The person I was walking with didn't give me the memo and I guess it was because we were lost in talks. You see the story of Alibaba and the 40 thieves, that's just how they were.

I was going peacefully when my handbag was dragged from me and I wanted to shout for help that i was being robbed when she made the comment "Not again". I was in shock but she told me not to worry that I was going to get it back soon. She asked me not to chase after them but rather go buy bananas, corn, and some fruits. When we came back, the monkeys were already going through my stuff in the handbag and luckily for me, my phone or anything precious wasn't inside. She asked that I give it to the biggest of them, then share with the other ones. When I gave them the bananas, I then served the other fruits which they took, made noises like they were laughing and left my bag on the ground for me. One by one they dropped the contents in the bag including my spectacle that they broke already.

commons.wikimedia

It is no doubt that this animals are clever but it is like this cleverness of them is what they use for their little evil. This experience got me to ask myself if monkeys actually have any form of morality in them since they are social animals just like us. I do not know if my bag was returned because I knew how to bribe them or because they were just compassionate enough. These things leave me questioning the morality of monkeys.

With the understanding of fairness comes morality because if we are not able to determine what is fair then how do we come to conclude that something is right or wrong. It is what helps us to know when something is fair or not fair, when we are being cheated or when we are being treated with respect. To understand if monkeys also understood this, I surf the internet and stumbled on a research in 2003 where two monkeys were rewarded to 2 different fruits as treat when they gave a token to the human giving the treat.

Flickr.com

The treat were grape and cucumber with one monkey receiving grape and the other receiving cucumber. When the game began they were both cooperative until the monkey fed cucumber noticed that it wasn't served a fair reward since grape was sweeter than cucumber, and he decided to not accept the treat and request for a better reward. Further research showed that just like females are more emotionally attached and sensitive to being unfair, female monkeys were more sensitive to unfair acts than male ones.

Now I get it that monkeys understand fairness, so it is possible that they are able to empathize with one another thereby feeling the need to be there for one another? Another test was done where monkeys were given two types of tokens, a selfish token and a helpful token. They were going to get rewarded alone when they released the selfish toke to the person while both monkeys will be rewarded if they released the helpful token. The researchers noticed that the monkey released the helpful tokens more as they didn't mind that they both got rewarded while one person did the job. The researchers noticed that the result of this was determined by how well the monkey knew or interacted with themselves.

So, is it possible that monkeys punish themselves because I wish the monkey that broke my eyeglass got punished. While I didn't see any study that showed that they could be punished for breaking ones property, I saw a study that explains how monkeys punish other monkeys who stole food by destroying their table with the food making sure they didn't eat it, they would also throw away a partner's food if they notice the food given ti the neighbor is more than theirs.

Okay, now I understand why I needed to get fruit for the monkeys although I wasn't happy buying them the fruit in a transactional way. I would have preferred to buy them fruits and watch them enjoy it without a transaction in between.

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Post Reference

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^{https://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/publications/articles/Brosnan_deWaal_2003.pdf
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1504454112
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/aug/26/animalbehaviour.medicalresearch
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513815001221}