Well, it isnā??t ā??fairā?!

This reminds me of an amusing childhood incident I had some 40-odd years ago. My younger sister and I were with our parents near Rockefeller Center, in NYC, when we were about 5 and 7 years old. Our parents had bought us both helium balloons. As we were walking along, my sister accidentally let go of the string on her balloon, and it floated up above the skyscrapers. She looked over at my balloon, and immediately grabbed the string from my hand and released it into the air.

I think that this is interesting, and related:

Experiments involving apes show that giving better, or bigger, portions of food as rewards causes animosity and unwillingness to participate by the creatures because they have an instinct for "fairness". If they see their fellow critters getting ā??betterā? rewards for doing the same tasks, they resent it ā?? and will make no bones about letting the researchers know that they feel it unfair.

The capuchin monkeys in this research are, I believe, the little ā??organ grinderā? type.

ā??In a series of 100 trials, when a pair of capuchins were both rewarded with cucumber bits for their work, they each were satisfied and did their work by exchanging the granite tokens with Brosnan 95 percent of the time.
But if one member of the pair observed her companion getting a grape instead of cucumber for the same work, the aggrieved partner completed the token exchange only 60 percent of the time, Brosnan said.
And then, if one partner did little or no work but still got rewarded with a tasty grape, the other monkey went on what any human union member might call a work slowdown, or even a kind of one-monkey strike, stopping work altogetherā?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...yfairness.html
http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news.cfm?art=524
http://lists.envirolink.org/pipermai...15/006683.html
Breukelen advocaat Reviewed by Breukelen advocaat on . What to do???? Get ready....this is going to be long.... Okay--so I've told some of you before about mr. irie...sometimes he'll smoke, it'll be great, and he's done...just doesn't smoke for weeks, months, years, whatever. And when HE'S done, he expects ME to be done. Well, I don't ever hide the fact that I smoke. In fact, I ONLY smoke when he's here (if the kids are here). I never smoke in front of my kids--or while I am home alone with them. So anyhow, last night, I smoked, all was well. Get up Rating: 5