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February 22, 2010

Monkey Business


Most of us can understand how we feel if someone else gets a better reward for doing the exact same work we did. Researchers are studying how these feelings of inequity evolved and if primates have the same sense of inequity. Sarah Brosnan, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Georgia State, has released a study helping to prove that primates share similar feelings of inequity as humans, and she will extend the research with a five year National Science Foundation grant. In the next round of research Brosnan will work with Bart Wilson at Chapman University to do similar hands-on and computer game-like experiments on both humans and primates. The idea is to better understand how economic decision making strategies evolved and which if any are uniquely human.

Credit: National Science Foundation


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