The "5 Monkey Experiment" is a very common story told as a way to try to understand human behaviour... but it is usually presented as a way to say that humans are "flawed". If you do a Google search, you'll find many tellings of the story... here's one:
The story talks about understanding behaviour by explaining how a group of monkeys behaves in an experiment... but there is one critical thing missing from it... the experiment does not account for the presence of the experimenter and the impact this has on the outcome.
In the experiment, a group of monkeys is treated with some negative experience (ie. sprayed with cold water when they try to get some bananas). This negative experience is just accepted as the foundation of the experiment and there is no attempt to see THAT part of it as critical to the entire story. The monkeys behaviour BEGINS with a negative experience... and their natural behaviour is what simply passes it on efficiently. If the initial experience was positive, or neutral, instead of negative... THAT is what would be passed on.
This is in line with "Early Childhood Development" in psychological science. The BEGINNING of any behavioural development is the most important... because it sets the stage for how everything that comes after it will be formed.
The 5 Monkey Experiment may or may not have actually taken place... but there IS a similar experiment that did. Scientists were able to get monkeys to participate in an "economy" similar to the way humans do... making the same mistakes that humans do. While the final summary of this experiment is much more positive than the 5 Monkey Experiment, it still finishes with the suggestion that humans are flawed and must correct the flaws in order to redeem themselves as a "Noble Species".
Again, the part that the experiment fails to recognize as critical is the impact that the scientists themselves have on the entire experiment... it begins with a flaw, and so the outcome is flawed. The monkeys learned what they learned because their teachers were teaching it to them. Monkeys... and humans... are learning machines. When they are innocent... "blank slates"... there is no such thing as morality at that point... they simply absorb whatever lesson is being taught. With the Monkey Economy experiment, the entire exercise is only made possible by the fact that the scientists first had to teach the monkeys what economics is by training them to trade goods and services in a very basic way. This is the flaw. The monkeys were trained to be selfish... then they are tested on how well they learned the lesson... and then the results are judged as if the behaviour displayed is inherently flawed. It's not flawed... the monkeys are behaving exactly as they have been trained to behave. It's the lesson that's flawed... not the behaviour. The monkeys were simply very good students of a flawed lesson... which is a concept that Real Love material uses to describe how people learn unloving behaviours.
