Such a strange question to ask!  Here’s what brought it on.  Yesterday, I attended a lecture by Sarah Brosnan, a post-doc who works with Frans de Waal at Emory University (I’ve written about de Waal’s work several times).  Brosnan’s lecture, “Fairness and Prosocial Behavior in Non-Human Primates,” was sponsored by the Washington University School of Business, which illustrates the extent to which primate research is no longer just for primatologists.

Brosnan’s task was to measure the extent to which two highly social species (Chimpanzees and Capuchins) recognize and/or deal with inequity.  The experiment was designed to see how pairs of animals react to situations where one animal of the pair received a relatively substantial payment (a grape) for completing a simple task while the other got a less valuable payment (a cucumber) or no payment at all, though accomplishing the same task. 

The videos of the experiments were entertaining, some of slighted animals putting on intense displays of frustration or sulking.  It reminded me of my own young children whenever one of them perceives that I’ve treated the other one even a little better. I’ll always get an earful from the slighted daughter, even (especially!) when the payoff is a relatively worthless trinket.  And it seems that I never learn . . .

What Brosnan and De Waal set out to measure sounds simple, but it became clear that the task was fraught with potential confounding factors.  For example, how do you parse out greed versus envy?  How …