Like Humans, Monkeys Can be Snobs Too

Feb. 28, 2006 -- -- No question about it, in some ways we humans are very much like monkeys.

Scientists at the Duke University Medical Center have found in past research that, like some humans, monkeys will "pay" for the attention of a monkey of higher social rank, and even to see the female hindquarters of another monkey. And now they've added even more evidence of the similarity between monkey and human behavior.

Monkeys, it turns out, can be snobs.

For several years now, neurobiologists at Duke have been studying how monkeys perform in a social situation, or more specifically how the brain is wired to deal with social cognition. It's all part of ongoing research into autism, which affects more than 1 million Americans and is the fastest-growing developmental disorder.

Persons suffering from autism have much difficulty in dealing with social situations, including paying attention to what's going on. So several years ago Michael Platt and Robert Deaner began studying rhesus macaque monkeys to see if they could figure out how these cleaver animals deal with their social challenges.

In early research they found that monkeys, like humans, pay considerable attention to what others in the room are looking at. We humans see that all the time at parties. One person turns to see who just entered the room, and in a split-second the rest of us take a gander too.

The research, using sophisticated timing devices, showed that the action was almost instantaneous among monkeys as well as humans. If one monkey saw an image of another monkey looking to the right, it looked instantly to the right.

Building on that work, the researchers decided to see if monkeys would be willing to forego some of their juice for various privileges, including seeing an image of a monkey with a higher social rank, or looking at a bit of monkey porn.

Monkeys were willing to "pay" for both those treats, but they weren't willing to pay a drop of juice to see a picture of a monkey with lesser status. In fact, they wanted to be paid to look at riff-raff. Give them juice, and they'll look, but otherwise forget it.