I stumbled upon this
intriguing article in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof, entitled “What Monkeys Can Teach Us About Fairness” in which the author tells us about an
experiment in which monkeys were taught to hand over pebbles in exchange for
cucumber slices. They were happy with this deal. He goes on:
"Then the researcher randomly offered one monkey
— in sight of a second — an even better deal: a grape for a pebble. Monkeys
love grapes, so this fellow was thrilled. The researcher then returned to the
second monkey, but presented just a cucumber for the pebble. Now, this offer
was insulting. In some cases the monkey would throw the cucumber back at the
primatologist in disgust. In other words, the monkeys cared deeply about
fairness. What mattered to them was not just what they received but also what
others got."
If Kristof had stopped
there, that would have been an interesting account - when monkeys receive something
but see other monkeys receiving something better they react dissonantly. That
in itself is fascinating.
Unfortunately, Kristof uses
this to propound the theory that what monkeys care about here is income disparities,
and that this has parallels with the wider human concern about income
inequalities. This is a step too far, and takes the conclusions into illogicality,
because interpretations of income distribution are based on something
fundamental that is missing from the monkey experiment - and that is, what people
do to earn what they received.
If the teacher gives
little Johnny 2 chocolate bars and little Freddy 1 chocolate bar, it might be
that she has treated Johnny better than Freddy. But if beforehand she
stipulated that there will be a classroom maths test, and the person who scores
top marks will get 2 chocolate bars, and the runner-up 1 chocolate bar, then
nothing she has done has been unfair, because Johnny and Freddy's chocolate
bars were given based on merit. Their rewards were commensurate with what they
did to earn those rewards.
The same is true of wages
- they are not arbitrarily distributed like the cucumber and grapes in the
monkey experiment - they are based on what people produce for their employer. Monkeys
may suffer dissonance at income disparities irrespective of how those incomes
came about, but humans generally do not - they recognise the source of the
variance in the incomes.
