考研英语阅读命题思路透析和真题揭秘(58)

Everybody loves a fat pay rise. Yet pleasure at your own can vanish if you learn that a colleague has been given a bigger one. Indeed, if he has a reputation for slacking, you might even be outraged. Such behaviour is regarded as "all too human", with the underlying assumption that other animals would not be capable of this finely developed sense of grievance. But a study by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, which has just been published in Nature, suggests that it is all too monkey, as well.

The researchers studied the behaviour of female brown capuchin monkeys, which have all the necessary ingredients to capture the public imagination. They look cute. They are good-natured, co-operative creatures, and they share their food readily. Above all, like their finicky female human counterparts, they tend to pay much closer attention to the value of "goods and services" than males (although why this is so remains a mystery).

Such characteristics make them perfect candidates for Dr Brosnan's and Dr de Waal's study. The researchers spent two years teaching their monkeys to exchange tokens for food. Normally, the monkeys were happy enough to swap pieces of rock for slices of cucumber. However, when two monkeys were placed in separate but adjoining chambers, so that each could observe what the other was getting in return for its rock, their behaviour became markedly different.

In the world of capuchins, grapes are luxury goods (and much preferable to cucumbers). So when one monkey was handed a grape in exchange for her token, the second was reluctant to hand hers over for a mere piece of cucumber. And if one received a grape without having to provide her token in exchange at all, the other either tossed her own token at the researcher or out of the chamber, or refused to accept the slice of cucumber. Indeed, the mere presence of a grape in the other chamber (in the absence of an actual monkey able to eat it) was enough to induce sullen behaviour in a female capuchin.

Dr Brosnan and Dr de Waal report that such behaviour is unusual in their trained monkeys. During two years of bartering prior to these experiments, failure to exchange tokens for food occurred in fewer than 5% of trials. And what made the behaviour even more extraordinary was that these monkeys forfeited food that they could see-and which they would have readily accepted in almost any other set of circumstances.

The researchers suggest that capuchin monkeys, like humans, are guided by social emotions. In the wild, they are a co-operative, group-living species. Such co-operation is likely to be stable only when each animal feels it is not being cheated. Feelings of righteous indignation, it seems, are not the preserve of people alone. Refusing a lesser reward completely makes these feelings abundantly clear to other members of the group. However, whether such a sense of fairness evolved independently in capuchins and humans, or whether it stems from the common ancestor that the species had 35m years ago, is, as yet, an unanswered question.

每个人都喜欢大幅加薪，但是如果你知道你同事薪水涨得比你多，那么恐怕加薪带给你的喜悦感就会烟消云散了。事实上，如果他有一个懒散的坏名声的话，你甚至可能勃然大怒。这种行为被认为是"人之常情"，也就说假定了其他动物没有这样高度发达的不满情绪。但是佐治亚州亚特兰大市Emory大学的Sarah Brosnan和Frans de Waal进行的一项研究表明，猴子也有类似的"猴之常青情" ，这项研究成果刚刚发表在《自然》期刊上。

研究人员对两只棕色的雌性卷尾猴的行为进行了研究。它们的样子非常可爱、性格温顺、原意合作并乐于分享食物。最重要的是，就像女人们一样，它们往往比雄性猴子更注重商品和服务的价值。

正是由于这些特性让它们成为Brosnan博士和de Waal博士最理想的研究对象。研究者们花了两年时间教会这些猴子们用东西换取食物。在正常情况下，猴子很愿意用几块石头换几片黄瓜。但是，当把两只猴子分别关在相邻的两个房间里，它们能够互相看见对方用石头换回来什么东西时，猴子的行为就会变得明显不同。

在卷尾猴的世界里，葡萄是奢侈品(比黄瓜受欢迎得多)。因此，当一只猴子用东西换回一颗葡萄时，另一只猴子就不愿意自己的东西只换回一片黄瓜。如果其中一只猴子根本无需用东西就能够得到一颗葡萄的话，那么另一只猴子就会把自己的东西扔向研究人员或扔出房间外，或者拒绝接受黄瓜。事实上，只要看到对方的屋子里出现了葡萄(就算没有看见猴子真正在吃它)，这就足以引起另一只雌性卷尾猴的强烈不满。

研究人员指出，卷尾猴与人类一样也受社会情感的影响。在野外，它们是相互合作的群居动物。但这种合作只有在每只猴子感到自己没有受到欺骗时才可能稳定。合理的愤怒这种感觉似乎不是人类的专利。拒绝接受一个较少的酬劳可以让这些情绪准确无误地传达给其他成员。但是，这种公平感是在卷尾猴和人类身上各自独立演化而成的，还是来自于三千五百万年前他们共同的祖先，这个问题至今还没有答案。