How scientists taught monkeys the concept of money | Hacker News Reader

How scientists taught monkeys the concept of money

zmescience.com

70 pointssidwyn13 comments

The name Marc Hauser piqued my interest. He has been accused of scientific misconduct [1], and his research has been tainted. Take this article with a suitable grain of salt...

[1] http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/08/harvard-de..., via Wikipedia

Ah, but he wasn't involved in this study -- one of the researchers had worked with him on a previous study, and that's why his name came up.

I nearly misread this for "How scientists taught monkeys the concept of monkey". That would have been an interesting self-awareness experience for the monkeys!

The paper itself is quite readable: http://www.q-group.org/archives_folder/pdf/spring2008/ChenBe...

The writing is atrocious. "...are the two researchers who have had made the study." or "It’s exactly this selfish desires that they tried to exploit and experiment with great success..."

I barely made it through.

The experimental description also leaves out key information in understanding what they did. I linked to the real paper in this thread which seems much more readable.

Token economies are as old as the hills. It's also called "secondary reinforcement" - although cognitive psychologists will be bothered on ideological grounds if you reference any psychology from before 1950 or so

I think Santos gave a TED talk, which might be better than this article.

I saw her talk at Harvard Medical School when I was working there. She's a good speaker and gives an entertaining talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/laurie_santos.html

Fascinating. I didn't read (yet) the paper linked in the article, but was the prostitution case a male buying service from a female or something else?

I took a look and couldn't find it anywhere in there. I think this may have come from outside the paper.

The prostitution example is completely fictionalized. If an alpha male wants sex, he gets it, no questions asked.

The description given is kind of weak in this particular article, but the other papers linked in this comment thread are pretty good. Apparently they're working on finding physiological mechanisms for this stuff, I was reading about it recently. Like, literally what chemicals in brains cause this sort of behavior. If I can find the link I'll post it...

1. Teach some monkeys about money.

2. Let them loose in South America.

3. Wait a while.

4. Get some monkeys addicted to tobacco, let them loose, and wait longer.

5. Install surveillance stations in the jungle and start taxing the transactions.

Some countries could do very well out of having a sudden influx of Pan citizens.

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