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This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Steve Mirsky . Got a minute ?

Even monkeys know when they’re getting a bad deal, said primatologist Frans de Waal at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement¹ of Science in Chicago on February 16th: “We found that our monkeys were sensitive to the distribution of rewards.”

Give two side-by-side monkeys a piece of cucumber for performing a simple task and there’s no problem. But if one sees his neighbor get a more desirable grape—“now grapes are far better than cucumber and the monkeys know that”—for doing the same thing, “they become agitated². They don’t like this experiment anymore, even though they get exactly the same food as before. But the partner is now getting grapes. And if you give the partner a grape without any task, then they really don’t like it anymore. So this is, I usually call it an egocentric sense of fairness, it’s like resentment³ or envy. It’s very similar actually to the response that we have currently to Wall Street bonuses. I always say we live in Cucumberland and they live in Grapeland, basically.”

Thanks for the minute for Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Steve Mirsky .