Monkeys with Money

Psychologists are forever experimenting with monkeys and apes because they regard these animals as simplified human beings. In the current issue of Natural History, Yale Professor (of psychology) Frank A. Beach tells how lower primates can learn to love money; some even turn into subhuman capitalists.

A cebus monkey in the San Diego zoo, says Beach, showed rational business aptitude by offering sticks or pebbles to visitors who were rich in peanuts or candy. The enterprise of this monkey named "Trader" was so successful that he nearly died of overeating. At last he was removed to the controlled economy of an experimental cage and given poker chips to trade with. When he paid out a red chip, he got a bit of orange. A blue chip bought a peanut; a white chip a slice of banana. Green chips were worth a slice of bread (which Trader did not like); yellow chips were worthless.

Trader learned quickly which chips had monkey value. He traded the white (banana) chips oftener than any other. Runner-up: the blue (peanut) chips.

This low finance was as high as Trader got, but chimpanzees can master a subtler money economy. At Yale's Laboratories of Primate Biology, Dr. John Wolfe confronted six young and impressionable chimpanzees with a "chimp-o-mat," a slot machine which passed out a grape when fed a white poker chip. The chimps learned quickly how to operate the contraption. They also learned that poker chips were things of value, to be cherished and scuffled for.

Then Dr. Wolfe showed his chimps the seamy side of money: work. He put in their quarters a "work-machine" with a heavy handle. When a chimp hoisted the handle, he got a poker chip (convertible into one grape). Some of the chimps went into a frenzy of work and accumulation, heaping up capital and guarding it savagely. One earned 185 power-chip coins in a single ten-minute session.

When the chimps were thoroughly accustomed to working for money, Dr. Wolfe made the currency more complicated. Blue chips dropped into the chimp-o-mat yielded two grapes instead of one. A red chip was worth a drink of water. The chimps soon mastered this system too.

The experiments were not mere fun & games for the chimps and the psychologist. The scientific purpose: to find out if chimpanzees are capable of dealing with symbols. Much of human behavior is based on symbolism. Language, for instance, is made up of words that are symbols for objects, actions, etc. Human beings use word symbols even when thinking silently. Complete lack of symbolism would make true thinking practically impossible.

The experiments with chimpanzees and the even more primitive cebus monkey proved that these animals can understand symbols representing food, water or piggyback rides. Therefore they have the basic tools for rudimentary thinking.

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