There is an opinion piece in the NY Times by a Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist from UVA and who is doing a visiting prof gig at NYU's Stern School of Business (and, trust me, they are stern there! ;-). The article is based on a research article by Michael Tomasello and colleagues in the journal Nature that tries to determine whether human three year olds and chimpanzees will share "rewards" (in this case marbles) based on task performance where (a) both subjects appear to collaborate on a task, (b) each subject is simply given the reward and (b) when each does the same work (i.e., pulling on a rope) but one subject receives greater rewards for the same effort.
Human kids "share the wealth" when they collaborate but it is "winner keeps all/no marbles for you!" in the other conditions. Chimps show the same behavior across conditions, namely, "winner keeps all/no, I'm not going to share my marbles with you!" There is no speculation about whether the kids or the chimps felt that they were "entitled" to the greater reward in the third task and that this served as the basis for not sharing. I'll leave it to the female readers of TiPS to make the obvious extension to faculty salaries. ;-) Haidt applies these results to the question of economic inequality in the U.S. over the 20th century and compares the periods of time when U.S. citizens were all collaborating (e.g., the war effort for WWII) against the periods of time when it was all about #1 (i.e., the 1980s and later). The NY Times article can be accessed here: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/how-to-get-the-rich-to-share-the-marbles/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1 Haidt provides a reference to the Nature article and the abstract is available here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476/n7360/full/nature10278.html Access to the Nature article can probably be gotten through your institution. And, no, I don't think that wealthy conservatives are chimps. ;-) -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=16175 or send a blank email to leave-16175-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
