S03E70 The Success and Power of Fairness: From Monkeys to Humans

Why are we humans are so obsessed with the concept of fairness? Is it a surprise that monkeys also care about fairness - a lot? Starting an experiment with capuchin monkeys, grapes and cucumbers, we unravel the reasons why we humans may be biologically hard wired to be fair, and how fairness, or the lack of it, shapes our lives and the world around us.

And for our weekly thankful, let's dip our toe into a newer music genre. So buckle up and get ready for an enlightening ride into the world of monkey behavior, human psychology, and life's everyday dramas, big and small. Remember, this journey is incomplete without your inputs and insights. Drop us your questions or comments, we can't wait to hear from you!

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S03E70 The Success and Power of Fairness: From Monkeys to Humans

[00:00:00] Sam Rhee:

Here's a famous experiment that you might have heard about. Researchers trained capuchin monkeys, you know, the kind from Marcel from Friends, or Jack the Monkey from Pirates of the Caribbean, to hand over a little rock in exchange for a cucumber slice for a reward.

Two monkeys would be sitting next to each other in cages. At first, the two monkeys would be happy just to give the researchers the rocks and to get the cucumbers. But when one of the monkeys started receiving grapes instead of cucumber slices for the rocks, the cucumber monkey would get infuriated while staring at the grape monkey, and then throw the cucumber away, refuse to hand over any more rocks, and then just shake the cage in self righteous anger.

So researchers were fascinated. If the monkeys liked the cucumbers before, what was the problem? Why would a monkey throw away the cucumber and get nothing, just because they saw another monkey get a grape?

Was it greed or envy? Maybe it was simply frustration? It turns out after followup research, Franz de Waal, Sara Brosnan, and other researchers at Yerkes National Primate Research Center, identified that it was most likely a sense of fairness that motivated the monkeys to refuse inferior rewards for the same task.

And among primates, the more socially close knit and interactive the species were, the more highly developed this sense of fairness was present. And there are many other psychology experiments that show how strong this sense of fairness is within us humans as well.

Sarah Brosnan details in her TED talk that when people are offered a hypothetical choice of getting $50,000 while others receive $25,000, or getting $100,000 but others getting $250,000? Almost half of the test subjects chose the $50,000 instead of the higher amount of $100,000 just so that they wouldn't earn less than somebody else.

It seems that we and capuchin monkeys are often willing to pay a pretty hefty price for fairness, even when it hurts us to some degree. But how does that even make any sense? Why would you be willing to make less money just so that others don't make more than you?

Let's talk a little bit about this concept of fairness and equality, why it's so important to us as humans and capuchin monkeys, and how that affects our personal, work, and global lives.

First of all, a lot of researchers believe that fairness is a concept that is biologic and hardwired into us as humans. A recent study out of UCLA used a test called the Ultimatum Game, where two people are offered an amount, such as $100. Person A decides how to split the $100, and how much will go to Person B.

Person B will see the offer and then decide either to accept it or reject it. If person B accepts the offer, it is divided the way person A decides, no negotiations allowed. If person B rejects the offer, then nobody gets any money.

Analyzing the study from a purely rational setting, person B should accept almost any amount of money, because monetarily, they would at least receive something, whereas if they reject the offer, they will receive nothing.

But when the researchers carried out this study, they found the following results. Usually, most person A's would offer 40 to 50 percent of the money, which was almost always accepted by person B. But in the instances where the offer started to approach more of an 80-20 split about half of the person B's would reject the offer and no one would get any money.

And if the offer was even worse, say 10 percent or lower, the acceptance rate was even worse. Researchers at UCLA were able to use functional MRI machines to scan the brains of the person B's during the experiment while they were considering these offers.

And when the offer was considered fair, the ventral striatum was activated. This is the part of the brain which releases dopamine when humans have rewarding experiences. It's a positive state of mind. When the offers were unfair, the anterior insula was activated, which is part of the brain that processes negative emotions.

So the biologic capability to understand fairness develops as our brain develops. It's shown that three to four year olds generally do not play fair. They prefer to keep possessions to themselves, while 7 to 8 year olds will naturally play fair. The prefrontal cortex, which helps to coordinate activity between these two regions, develops significantly during this time.

Okay, we see higher order primates, the ones with close social organization, especially humans, have well developed concepts of fairness.

But how would promoting fairness be helpful for a species to be more successful from an evolutionary perspective?

Researchers think the concepts of fairness and cooperation are linked. The first observation, which seems obvious, is that a species can be more successful as a whole if the individuals within the species cooperate rather than compete with each other. We can see this across many or even most species, from ants to fish to deer.

However, most species limit this concept of cooperation amongst themselves within small groups, usually their relatives, thus increasing the survival advantage for groups of individuals that are genetically similar. However, it also makes sense that a species could benefit even more if larger, even unrelated groups could cooperate with each other.

But how could such a complex behavior, such as a large group cooperation, develop and evolve?

Researchers have hypothesized that the concept of fairness evolved in order that unrelated individuals could successfully cooperate with each other and thus increase their survival advantage for the entire species.

The first level of fairness which we could see in lower primates, such as the capuchin monkeys, is where they will refuse to participate in interactions where they feel the situation is unfair to them. This is called first order inequity aversion, where they understand that they are receiving less than their partner and they protest in some way, such as throwing the cucumber slice away and yelling.

This makes sense that this first order level of fairness helps an individual protect themselves from allowing another individual to benefit constantly and gain an advantage over them.

However, researchers have also identified a second order of fairness which is more complex and this is where an individual will willingly accept a short term imbalance or an inequality in order to maintain a longer term cooperative relationship with a partner.

For example, in the cucumber and grape example, it would mean that the monkey that was offered the grape would have to have the ability and knowledge to refuse the grape knowing the cucumber monkey would get upset.

This cognitive ability to defer a short term gain in order to stabilize a long term relationship, which would be more advantageous, requires a significant amount of behavioral control, one that is only seen with significant neurologic development. Only humans and their closest relatives, the great apes and the chimpanzees, not capuchin monkeys, have demonstrated this second order of fairness.

This higher level of fairness where you don't take advantage of someone even when you could is what allows a group of individuals to cooperate with each other and succeed more than what each individual could have done by themselves.

For example, the researcher Sarah Brosnan uses this example of a workplace environment where you have a co-worker who may be having a hard time for whatever reason.

You help out that co-worker even if it means more work for you at the same pay for a short period of time, because there is an expectation in the future if you were in that situation your co-worker would assist you in the same way.

However, if that co-worker is constantly asking you to do their work, and never reciprocating, or even worse, receiving higher pay than you while you're still working harder than they are, it is that sense of fairness that might lead you to find a way of correcting this persistent inequality.

Or, if you can't do that, then ultimately you would leave to find better employment. And as we well know from experience, that sense of fairness is certainly connected to the emotional centers of our brain. Having the cognitive ability to identify individuals that are able to cooperate with you and accomplish more than you could alone, certainly seems like an advantage in regards to survival evolutionarily.

And that is what developing fairness has done for us. Now, this concept of fairness and cooperation doesn't mean that all humans are great about cooperating and we are all extraordinarily fair with each other. Like all traits, there is a great deal of variability in terms of how strong it is expressed in each individual or groups of individuals.

You probably know at least one person who's worse than a capuchin monkey. Plus, there are many other factors which add complexity to fairness and cooperation such as environmental factors and cultural differences. But realizing that the concept of fairness and cooperation may be deeply hardwired in us can help us understand why we have such emotional reactions to many of the conflicts that we face today.

It may be as simple as recognizing that person at work or at the gym who is selfish and unwilling to cooperate with others.

But humans as a whole are even more cooperative and interconnected than any primate or other animal which has allowed our species to become arguably the most successful on the planet. Our legal and economic systems in society exist solely on the basis of fairness and cooperation amongst all of us.

And these complex systems require us, in total, to agree to participate in them for them to function properly. When a significant number of people feel that these systems are unfair, that is when major problems and conflict can occur. And we have seen that time and again, both now and in the past.

When we see these protests and uprisings around the world, it is because of our innate sense of fairness that causes us to act out to address perceived injustices within a system.

It is also a strong reminder that even if we happen to be on the other end and we are the beneficiaries and others are not, we should certainly take a moment and understand that being fair and not taking advantage of a situation to the detriment of others is extremely meaningful, especially if we care about our own long-term successes as well.

Because ultimately, being fair with each other in this world is what will allow us to survive and succeed. If fairness were ever to fail, we will probably fail as a species as well. Remember the movie Planet of the Apes? I hope it would never come to that.

My weekly thankful is K pop, which is short for Korean popular music. It is a genre of music from South Korea. You probably heard of Oppa Gangnam Style from the artist Psy, one of the early breakout K pop hits back in 2012.

The more recent K pop supergroups include BTS, one of the world's top selling musical acts. Now, my daughter is a huge K pop fan, and be careful driving with her. She will subject you to all of the latest K pop hits and overwhelm you with a running commentary of K pop knowledge. Now, I don't listen to K pop regularly, but I do like a few bands, including ITZY.

Anyway, I got my car back from the shop this week, and the stereo is working again, thankfully, if you heard me talk about it being on the fritz on a previous episode. Flipping the channels on SiriusXM, I found channel 14 was playing a K pop song from a group named Blackpink, which was not completely unusual since they are kind of mainstream in the U. S.

But then the next song was also K pop from Stray Kids, my daughter's favorite group. I then realized the channel was playing all K pop, and I listened to it for a couple days and I really liked it. It also made me feel closer to my daughter, who's away in college right now.

Listening to new music is a good way not to feel like I'm getting old and decrepit. So I am thankful for this dose of K pop, which is pretty catchy if you like upbeat pop and hip hop music. Unfortunately, the K pop was a temporary run and SiriusXM recently announced that very soon Channel 14 will stop playing K pop and become a new permanent channel called Life with John Mayer, which will be a mix of his original music and the music he loves, "as well as his thoughts and insights."

Now, John Mayer's music isn't awful. But ever since I read what he said in interviews in the past, particularly about his past relationships, including Jessica Simpson, and how is private part is "sort of like a white supremacist," ( hey, look it up), I have thought he was personally a massive rhymes with Magoosh.

So I won't be listening to Channel 14 soon, but I will be listening to some more K pop when the mood hits me.

What's your favorite new music? How fairly do you think you're treated at home, at work, or in life?

As always, DM me at @BotoxAndBurpeesPodcast on Instagram or leave a comment at YouTube.com/@BotoxAndBurpees. Thank you.