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And suddenly, monkeys everywhere.

Dootzkie Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Philosophy through music will be reserved to be released from Sunday onwards because then is when I will be out of town. So before that, I will share some info with you about two monkey experiments.

Enjoy

This will be the part one of two part post about monkeys. This one will be dedicated to a cage, a banana, some electricity and three groups of monkeys. Actually they are apes, but monkey sounds much better.

Once upon a time there was this cage and the first group of monkeys and a banana on the top of the stairs in the cage. What our little monkeys are about to find out is that when ever a monkey gets up and takes a banana from the top of the cage the rest that are one the lower levels get electrocuted. And we all know monkeys don't want to be electrocuted. Ofcourse, after a while they understood a patter and developed a new social behaviour that was there to protect the group. Who ever tried to go to the banana was attacked and killed. No one was to even approach the stairs. After a while, when enough monkeys were killed, the first group of monkeys settled down and no one even tried to get up there. All was well.


Touch me! I know you want to.

And for a time, it was good. But then the malicious scientists introduced a new group of monkeys to this first one. New, young monkeys that were let into the cage. The young monkeys had to learn fast how did the first group function for they wanted to be integrated. Everything was as they expected except that everyone would go berzerk and into a killing frenzy when a new monkey would try to answer to call of the curved yellow goodness that stood atop the stairs in the cage. After a while, the new monkeys learned not to go to that section of the cage and everything was well. As with every great story, as soon as things get calmer, you need to shake the pot again. That is exactly what scientists did. But this time ther removed the first group from the cage. The group that knew why was it killing it's members if they gave out a sign that they might go up the stairs. Only then they introduced a new group of apes into the cage.

What do you think happened?

Simple - the second group of monkeys maintained the status quo of killing monkeys even when they didn't know why they should do that. The scientists turn off the electicity and monkeys still persisted in their behaviour...

Status quo needed to be maintained no matter what, and those that questioned why were killed on the spot.
Are we still talking about monkeys in a cage?

10 comments:

JuX said...

lawl. Monkeys. This is a bit inhumane, making monkeys try and kill each other.

R.C said...

Always with the status quo. Society demands it, even TV shows demand it like the Simpsons or Family guy...very interesting article.

Blk Jesus said...

nice they didnt even know why they were killing each other makes no sense.

Nope said...

Haha oh man, that's a great experiment. People will continue with a behavior even if they don't know why exactly, it's just what society expects and thus the future generations will also expect this.

Unknown said...

Sounds exactly like human society.

mikkello said...

thats true, it is how human society is

lol said...

I hate monkey experiments :( this is quite sad.

Wandering said...

Great posts man. Everything you write is very intuitive and interesting. Glad I found this blog

Jay said...

it's unfortunately true for humans as well..

GwenMcBride said...

Does anyone know where i could find an acedemic link st this study please??

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