Chimp or chump?
One of the recurring, albeit underlying, themes in my plays is the examination of human behavior: Can people change? Because we are animals, must we at root behave like animals? Are we to some degree naturally moralistic, or are these morals constructs created by us to civilize behavior? I don’t usually set out to write about these things. Usually I set out to write about people in conflict in some way, or sometimes (rarely) I have a beginning notion or perhaps some latest outrage in the news gets my juices flowing, but often this central question of “what does it mean at core to be human” comes up.
I was reminded of this again the other day when I got an email from a friend who had seen my play “Next Time” in Fullerton on an evening I happened to be there. (And, if she’s reading this, I apologize for not responding yet to the email. But I will.) Among other things, she said she was glad to see another one of my plays that deals with ethics. I hadn’t realized this was another of my plays that deals with ethics, so to speak, but upon reflection I’ve realized she’s right; at one point the protagonist’s inner self (and, therefore, himself) questions all the behavioral systems he’s set up, pointing out that there’s no proof that anyone or anything else exists. (That point of view, it occurs to me as I’m writing this, is the perspective of a sociopath; I’ve written a few of them, too.) In my play “Animals,” a character named Social Realist gives us a tour of mankind’s base brutality through the prism of four interconnected lives (a man, a woman, a “Bad Friend” who may have had an affair with the man, and a contract killer), as well as his own experience when young of seeing a dog eat all her own pups.
Given my subconscious interest in this topic, this news story jumped off the web at me. In essence, according to this research as reported in the current issue of Science, humankind is more ethical and less self-interested than its closest cousin, the chimpanzee.
Key finding #1:
Economists used to say that people are self-interested and rational, maximizing whatever payday is within reach. But recent studies have blown that idea to smithereens. When people are given the choice of accepting or rejecting the split of some spoils that a partner offers—say, how to divide the $10 that researchers have given them in an experiment—they reject offers perceived as unfair. So if you offer me $2 and propose to keep $8 for yourself, I’ll walk away and leave us each with nothing—stupid, considering that I’m rejecting $2 in free money, but consistent with the emerging idea that humans have a strong, evolved sense of fairness that trumps immediate self-interest. Something like this probably underlies people’s tendency to punish cheaters, free-riders and noncooperators. The game has been played uncounted times in labs, and the basic finding is that proposers typically offer 40 to 50 percent of the pot, and responders walk away from any offer less than 20 percent.
I find this true in my own life, as I’m sure you do. Today we had some work done at our office by a professional firm and, before leaving, their workers subtly shared with my business partner that if we ever needed more work of the same sort done these guys would gladly come without telling their employers and charge us less. When I heard this, I was outraged. Not only are they moonlighting as direct competitors to the people who employ them, they’re doing it within their employers’ customer base. That’s doubly, or triply, cheating. Is it in my self-interest to be outraged? No, because the value proposition they offered would save us money. Nevertheless, I would never call these guys privately to come work for me, and I’m thinking about how to anonymously alert their employers.
Evidently, chimps see this sort of thing differently:
In a study being reported today in Science, researchers had 11 chimpanzees at the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in Germany play this “ultimatum” game. One chimp, the “proposer,” sat beside the “responder.” The proposer pulled out a tray as far as he could. The tray held two dishes with raisins, separated by a see-through divider: one for the proposer and the other for the responder. The proposers first chose which tray to pull out; if the responder liked what he saw—and he could see how many raisins he and the proposer would each get, by seeing how many raisins were on each side of the divider—he accepted the offer by pulling the tray the rest of the way out. Both chimps would then chow down. If the responder did not like the offer, he refused to pull the tray the rest of the way out, and neither chimp got a snack.
If the dishes held the same number of raisins, the responder chimp almost always accepted a 50-50 offer and rejected a 100-0 offer. Unlike people, though, they rarely rejected 80-20 offers—only 5 to 14 percent of the time. And unlike people, who fume when confronted with unfair offers, the chimps almost never took umbrage, throwing a tantrum at an unfair offer a mere 2 percent of the time.
There has long been a debate over whether chimps are able to sense fairness, much less tolerate unfairness. These results suggest that chimps behave “according to traditional economic models of self-interest, unlike humans, and that this species does not share the human sensitivity to fairness,” the scientists write. As scientists find fewer and fewer fundamental human traits to be unique (see the previous post on tool-using animals), at least we can keep hold of this one.
There are two lessons for me in all this:
- I guess there’s more hope for humankind after all, because chimp wars are truly vicious and the issue of fairness never intrudes.
- Economists think people act like chimps (but we don’t). Now I better understand the origin of Reaganomics and its present-day ilk.