The name Marc Hauser piqued my interest. He has been accused of scientific misconduct [1], and his research has been tainted. Take this article with a suitable grain of salt...
I nearly misread this for "How scientists taught monkeys the concept of monkey". That would have been an interesting self-awareness experience for the monkeys!
The writing is atrocious. "...are the two researchers who have had made the study." or "It’s exactly this selfish desires that they tried to exploit and experiment with great success..."
The experimental description also leaves out key information in understanding what they did. I linked to the real paper in this thread which seems much more readable.
Token economies are as old as the hills. It's also called "secondary reinforcement" - although cognitive psychologists will be bothered on ideological grounds if you reference any psychology from before 1950 or so
The description given is kind of weak in this particular article, but the other papers linked in this comment thread are pretty good. Apparently they're working on finding physiological mechanisms for this stuff, I was reading about it recently. Like, literally what chemicals in brains cause this sort of behavior. If I can find the link I'll post it...
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 59.0 ms ] thread[1] http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/08/harvard-de..., via Wikipedia
I barely made it through.
2. Let them loose in South America.
3. Wait a while.
4. Get some monkeys addicted to tobacco, let them loose, and wait longer.
5. Install surveillance stations in the jungle and start taxing the transactions.
Some countries could do very well out of having a sudden influx of Pan citizens.