We can learn a lot from a monkey.

Last week’s Science edition of the New York had an interesting column by Carl Zimmer: Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don’t. The article’s not available for free viewing online anymore, but if you have access to a LexisNexis account you can acquire your own copy. The column discusses a Yale research project seeking to understand how we learn:

His study would build on a paper published in the July issue of the journal Animal Cognition by Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten, two psychologists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten described the way they showed young chimps how to retrieve food from a box. The box was painted black and had a door on one side and a bolt running across the top. The food was hidden in a tube behind the door. When they showed the chimpanzees how to retrieve the food, the researchers added some unnecessary steps. Before they opened the door, they pulled back the bolt and tapped the top of the box with a stick. Only after they had pushed the bolt back in place did they finally open the door and fish out the food. Because the chimps could not see inside, they could not tell that the extra steps were unnecessary. As a result, when the chimps were given the box, two-thirds faithfully imitated the scientists to retrieve the food.

The team then used a box with transparent walls and found a strikingly different result. Those chimps could see that the scientists were wasting their time sliding the bolt and tapping the top. None followed suit. They all went straight for the door.

The researchers turned to humans. They showed the transparent box to 16 children from a Scottish nursery school. After putting a sticker in the box, they showed the children how to retrieve it. They included the unnecessary bolt pulling and box tapping. The scientists placed the sticker back in the box and left the room, telling the children that they could do whatever they thought necessary to retrieve it. The children could see just as easily as the chimps that it was pointless to slide open the bolt or tap on top of the box. Yet 80 percent did so anyway.

…Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn…We don’t appreciate just how automatically we rely on imitation, because usually it serves us so well.

If learning by imitation is hard-wired in us, and young children don’t understand that some pointless (or ineffective) behaviors get in the way of achieving a goal, then there’s incredible power in what we teach our children, through our actions, about doing conflict. Too often, we may be teaching them our ineffective conflict behaviors, the ones that get in the way of better problem-solving and healthier relationships. This study suggests they’re not thinking, Mom’ doesn’t really need to do that behavior to fix this problem; they may be thinking, So that’s how I need to act when I want or need something.

For more on what primates might help us learn about ourselves, visit Diane Levin’s most recent blog, No More Monkeying Around: Evolutionary Tendency in Primates to Prefer Loss Avoidance over Maximizing Gain. Here’s a snippet from her post about a different piece of research:

This article describes studies of primate behavior which seem to indicate we humans possess an evolutionary tendency to prefer avoiding loss over acquiring gain. In a study conducted by two Yale professors, Keith Chen, an economist (who also teaches a course on negotiating strategy), and Laurie Santos, a psychologist, capuchin monkeys were taught how to use money—in this case, metal tokens which could be used as a medium of exchange.

In one experiment, monkeys were given the option to buy one grape, with a 50/50 chance of receiving a second grape. For the same amount of money, monkeys were given another option of buying two grapes, but would face a 50/50 chance of losing one of them. The odds and cost were identical for each option, but most monkeys went with the first option, not the second, demonstrating that they were much more interested in avoiding loss than maximizing gain.

If we are hard-wired by evolution to prefer avoiding loss over acquiring gain, then there are real implications for negotiation strategy.