Fair and square

Some monkeys seem to have a highly developed sense of fairness

EVERYBODY loves a fat pay rise. Yet pleasure at your own can vanish if you learn that a colleague has been given a bigger one. Indeed, if he has a reputation for slacking, you might even be outraged. Such behaviour is regarded as “all too human”, with the underlying assumption that other animals would not be capable of this finely developed sense of grievance. But a study by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, which has just been published in Nature, suggests that it is all too monkey, as well.

The researchers studied the behaviour of female brown capuchin monkeys, which have all the necessary ingredients to capture the public imagination. They look cute. They are good-natured, co-operative creatures, and they share their food readily. Above all, like their finicky female human counterparts, they tend to pay much closer attention to the value of “goods and services” than males (although why this is so remains a mystery).

Such characteristics make them perfect candidates for Dr Brosnan's and Dr de Waal's study. The researchers spent two years teaching their monkeys to exchange tokens for food. Normally, the monkeys were happy enough to swap pieces of rock for slices of cucumber. However, when two monkeys were placed in separate but adjoining chambers, so that each could observe what the other was getting in return for its rock, their behaviour became markedly different.

In the world of capuchins, grapes are luxury goods (and much preferable to cucumbers). So when one monkey was handed a grape in exchange for her token, the second was reluctant to hand hers over for a mere piece of cucumber. And if one received a grape without having to provide her token in exchange at all, the other either tossed her own token at the researcher or out of the chamber, or refused to accept the slice of cucumber. Indeed, the mere presence of a grape in the other chamber (in the absence of an actual monkey able to eat it) was enough to induce sullen behaviour in a female capuchin.

Dr Brosnan and Dr de Waal report that such behaviour is unusual in their trained monkeys. During two years of bartering prior to these experiments, failure to exchange tokens for food occurred in fewer than 5% of trials. And what made the behaviour even more extraordinary was that these monkeys forfeited food that they could see—and which they would have readily accepted in almost any other set of circumstances.

The researchers suggest that capuchin monkeys, like humans, are guided by social emotions. In the wild, they are a co-operative, group-living species. Such co-operation is likely to be stable only when each animal feels it is not being cheated. Feelings of righteous indignation, it seems, are not the preserve of people alone. Refusing a lesser reward completely makes these feelings abundantly clear to other members of the group. However, whether such a sense of fairness evolved independently in capuchins and humans, or whether it stems from the common ancestor that the species had 35m years ago, is, as yet, an unanswered question.

總體介紹

這是2003年9月18日刊登在《經(jīng)濟學家》（The Economist）雜志上的一篇科技類文章。文中主要論述猴子的公平感---像人一樣，對不公平待遇有怨恨。從文章的題材上講，科技類的文章是考研英語閱讀的四大題材之一(另外三類是經(jīng)濟評論、文化教育和社會生活)，而且這篇文章談論的是較新的科學研究成果（《自然》雜志剛發(fā)表的文章），以簡介的形式出現(xiàn)于《經(jīng)濟學家》雜志，自然很適合做考研英語閱讀的出題文章。從體裁上看，這是一篇典型的說明文，屬于考研英語閱讀的常見體裁之一。這篇文章共有6段，520詞，如果用作考研英語閱讀理解的一篇，則段落和字數(shù)都有些偏多。因為該部分的文章一般要求將字數(shù)控制在400詞左右；文章段落數(shù)一般為4-5段，便于出題。

這篇文章被用于2005年的考研英語閱讀理解部分第一篇，距發(fā)表時間僅一年多，試題序號為21-25。文中加下劃線的部分是被刪除的內(nèi)容。改編后的文章共5段，426詞。