Brosnan is interested in social learning in nonhuman primates. In 2003, she published a paper in Nature suggesting that capuchin monkeys possessed a notion of fairness, a social concept usually associated exclusively with humans.{33} Her experiments on fairness work like this. Two capuchins will sit in cages next to each other. Their names are Liam and Logan. Liam can see what Logan is up to, and vice versa. Brosnan has taught the monkeys to play a kind of game. She hands them a granite token, and they have to hand it back to her to get a food reward. It’s a pretty simple game.
Here’s where it gets tricky. There are two food rewards: one is a highly desirable grape, and the other is a considerably less desirable piece of cucumber. In one condition of the experiment, Brosnan hands Liam a token, she holds up a grape, and he hands the token back and gets the grape. Then she hands Logan the token, but instead of the grape, she holds up the piece of cucumber. More often than not, Logan won’t hand back the token if he knows his partner got the better reward. Brosnan says that when Logan and his fellow capuchins find themselves in this position of being treated unfairly, their body language lets you know they find this unpleasant. “They tend to turn away—literally turning their backs on you—and move away if they can,” says Brosnan.
Since her initial publication in 2003, Brosnan has retreated somewhat from calling the behavior she sees in her capuchins “fairness.” Still, she considers the situation analogous to the feeling that humans get when they see someone else getting more pay for doing the same job.
“What we’re really testing is how do you respond when you’re the one who gets the lower salary,” she says, “not how do you respond when you hear there’s a discrepancy between salaries in the environment. So the monkeys don’t necessarily have to have an ideal of fairness or an idea of the way the world should work. All they have to care about is that they got less than someone else.”
Even that interpretation of the result goes too far down the path of anthropomorphizing for some animal behaviorists. Clive Wynne is a psychologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He says there’s another explanation for what Brosnan is seeing. “There’s an older concept, a more basic concept of frustration that humans share with many other species,” says Wynne. “It’s the tendency to act up if something they were expecting to receive is not given to them.” Just as Lucy Fitz Gibbon expects an A to sound like 440 Hz or a conservative listener expects music to sound a certain way, if the monkey expects a better reward and doesn’t get it, he’s frustrated. “That kind of frustrative behavior is seen in any number of different species,” says Wynne. “It was shown back in the 1920s in monkeys.”
That work was done by a psychologist at Yale University who had the delicious name of Otto Leif Tinklepaugh. He worked with a species of monkey known as cynomologous and with a particular cynomologous monkey named Psyche. Tinklepaugh’s experiment went like this. Psyche would sit in a chair with a board in front of her, preventing her from seeing two cups on a table across the room. When the board was lowered, Psyche could see what the experimenter (Tinklepaugh) was doing. This is how Tinklepaugh recorded the experiment in his notes:
The experimenter displays a piece of banana, lowers the board and places the banana under one of the cups. The board is then raised, and working behind it, with his hands hidden from the view of the monkey, the experimenter takes the banana out and deposits a piece of lettuce in its place. After the delay, the monkey is told to “come get the food.” She jumps down from the chair, rushes to the proper container and picks it up. She extends her hand to seize the food. But her hand drops to the floor without touching it. She looks at the lettuce, but (unless very hungry) does not touch it. She looks around the cup and behind the board. She stands up and looks under and around her. She picks the cup up and examines it thoroughly inside and out. She has on occasions turned toward observers present in the room and shrieked at them in apparent anger.{34} [Emphasis in the original.]
Unpredictable, temporary, and unpleasant—the monkey must be annoyed, right? Brian Hare is an anthropologist who is willing to consider the possibility. He leads the Hominoid Psychology Research Group, which compares the psychology of hominoids (human and nonhuman apes). Hare’s graduate student Alexandra Rosati has found another activity that reveals what appears to be a tendency in our primate cousins to become annoyed.
She has done a series of experiments with chimpanzees. She offers the chimpanzee a choice. Option A is a guaranteed couple of peanuts. Chimpanzees are fond of peanuts but not that fond. Not as fond as they are of bananas. It’s a cliché, but Rosati says that chimpanzees love bananas. Option B is a chance at a piece of banana—but it’s only a chance. There’s also a chance that they’ll get a chunk of cucumber. Chimpanzees appear to like cucumbers as much as capuchins do; in other words, not much.
No one likes to lose a bet, and chimps, Rosati found, are no exception. When they lose, they try to change their choices, and when they aren’t allowed to, they appear to get annoyed. You could call it anger, but it’s very different from the anger you see when a chimp is attacked.
Rosati has conducted a similar experiment with bonobos. They, too, appear to get annoyed when they choose the gambling option and lose the bet, and getting a bad outcome made them less likely to choose the risky option on the next trial. The individual bonobos who got most upset at losing were the least likely to choose the risky option overall.
Chimpanzees, on the other hand, didn’t seem deterred by losing. They pick the risky option again and again. It seems that for some species, or at least some individuals, the drive to gamble trumps the annoyance of losing.
When you think about what’s bothering these primates, it can appear, at first glance, to be the road-block kind of annoyance. They have a goal—getting the grapes or the bananas—and the researchers (or bad luck or whatever) are temporarily preventing them from achieving it. Yet there’s more to it than that. In the case of the capuchins, they were happy with the cucumbers until the grapes came along. This isn’t like being stuck in a traffic jam when you have somewhere else to be. It’s more like being cut off by another motorist when you’re out for a leisurely drive. Instead of having their plans thwarted, their sense of what was acceptable behavior was thwarted. It was an injustice, albeit minor.
People (and some animals, apparently) face different kinds of annoyances—based on various kinds of unpleasantness. There are annoyances that are physically unpleasant: a skunk smell, fingernails on a chalkboard, flies buzzing in your ear. Another type of annoyance happens when your plans are thwarted: from delayed flights and forms to fill out in triplicate to birds chirping loudly when you’re trying to sleep to endless automated phone messages thwarting your desire to talk to your doctor. The third and possibly largest category is made up of annoyances we bring on ourselves, either because they violate certain social rules or conflict with our value system or destroy a reasonable expectation. (Of course, some special annoyances fall into multiple categories—cell phone chatter is a social rule violation and botches your plan to read while you’re commuting on the bus.)
An example of this final category comes from Sarah Brookhart, the deputy director of the Association for Psychological Science:
For me, public transportation is teeming with annoyances. Like bacteria on the handrails, the loud one-sided phone conversations about what to have for dinner are part of the deal when you’re in a subway car at rush hour. Put on headphones and tune it out. But I could probably ignore a colony of deadly microbes more easily than I can ignore the guy sitting next to me clipping his fingernails. Cranking up the iPod doesn’t help. Time stands still. Agonizing suspense after each clip. Has he stopped? Or will there be another click of the teeny guillotine? Then, that unmistakable sound, and a half-moon sliver sails through the air in slow-motion. Worse, I can see it land on the arm of the woman across the aisle; she has no clue, but my skin is crawling with disgust.{35}