2007-07-04 Angry Monkeys

This is the story of an experiment Mario told me about when we were still in school. It is often referred to as the Angry Monkey Experiment. It teaches a pretty obvious lesson, but the experiment itself is also very interesting.
Take a cage with five monkeys in it, a stalk of bananas and a hose that squirts cold water. Put the stalk in the cage, but don't let the monkeys get to it. Whenever one monkey tries to get a banana, take the hose and spray cold water on them. Not just on one, but on all of them simultaneously. Make sure there's plenty of other food -- you want to condition the monkeys, not kill them. After a while they learned their lesson and won't go near the bananas. You can put the hose away now.
When you replace one of the monkeys by a new, unconditioned one, what will he do? He'll try to get to the bananas, of course. That's what monkeys do, right? But the four veterans don't want to get wet all over again, so they won't let him. The newbie won't know why the bananas are forbidden, but he'll accept it and blend in eventually, because the others would beat the crap out of him if he didn't. Now replace the remaining veterans one at a time with long enough breaks to make the newbies adapt their behavior. Do you realize what just happened?
Let's step back a little and check out what we've got: In our cage there are five monkeys that dare not approach the bananas and not a single one of them knows why! That's really amazing, isn't it?
If from now on they were able to talk, all they could offer for an explanation would be something like "well, that's the way things are done around here". Obviously the whole mess could only happen because monkeys are not able to talk to each other in a way that is sophisticated enough to discuss hypothetical scenarios. Could they say something like "if you tried to get these bananas, we'd all get wet", the newbies were much wiser.

That is why it is so terribly important to ask "why" over and over and over again.

And it's also why I never let go of a question once I have asked it.