Miss Ashley Pants

Is acting catty and cliquey a vestigial monkey-mind thing?

We’ve (“We” as a unified people who share data. Not me, personally) looked at chimps before to see how well they cooperate when working toward a common goal. Sometimes they were kinda douchey about it (can you blame them, when they’re stuck in captivity?) but now an Emory study took it a step further. By replicating a setup that was a lot more like their natural habitat, we’ve gotten them to perform like… well… monkeys! (or apes – whatever).

By putting the creatures in a more familiar situation, researchers were able to observe a bit more cooperation from the furry primates – but it was rank specific. Basically, what the test involved was a food reward for cooperation. The eleven chimps would have to bring on a buddy or two to help remove an obstacle while the other went and got the snack. Because the task couldn’t be accomplished solo, cooperation was crucial if they wanted their noms. And over 3,500 times out of over 100 hour long seshes, they did indeed team up. But what was noted is that they were more willing to share this work with chimps of a similar rank – so they’d specifically recruit their homeboys to get the job done.

It might sound sorta snotty.

But it totally reminds me of that first lab class of the semester in high school – when they tell you to partner up with someone to dissect something dead. You know you want whoever’s easiest to ask (why risk meeting someone you don’t know when you do know you might be stuck with them all year?) So usually you go partner with a preexisting pal or go out on a limb by asking someone with something visible you have in common. If you’re a cheerleader, you might partner with your cheer friend. If you were a stoner, you might wait for whoever’s left over after waking from your nap. Or if you were me, you might have chosen your friend from Spanish class over your real friend because you knew she’d get you an A… while you spent half the lab talking to your real friend about your fake I.D. anyway.

So, what can chimps teach us about getting along?

It seems like the most important thing being overlooked here is the experiment before the experiment. The chimps acted super different when the setting was unnatural versus more natural to them. In an unnatural setting, they knew human caretakers would be around to feed them eventually. There wasn’t the same “fend for ourselves” mentality or that “there may not be enough for everyone so I’mma help the ones I want to survive the most with me” tendency. In artificial constructs, threat o’ death lessens. In the wild, it’s always an imminent possibility.

And we don’t live in the wild. So, while one could argue that it’s our biology and thus natural for us to separate into ranks of “our own kind”, we could just as easily argue – well then why not just regress six million years back into monkeys? Really – why would we have bothered evolving higher consciousness or trust hormones if not to transcend acting like animals?

Even Karen and her boobs know that shiz.