Social disappointment and partner presence affect long-tailed macaque refusal behaviour in an 'inequity aversion' experiment.

ABSTRACT: Protest in response to unequal reward distribution is thought to have played a central role in the evolution of human cooperation. Some animals refuse food and become demotivated when rewarded more poorly than a conspecific, and this has been taken as evidence that non-human animals, like humans, protest in the face of inequity. An alternative explanation-social disappointment-shifts the cause of this discontent away from the unequal reward, to the human experimenter who could-but elects not to-treat the subject well. This study investigates whether social disappointment could explain frustration behaviour in long-tailed macaques, Macaca fascicularis. We tested 12 monkeys in a novel 'inequity aversion' paradigm. Subjects had to pull a lever and were rewarded with low-value food; in

SUBMITTER: Titchener R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9974291 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature