What Happens When Monkeys Learn to Use Money?

In one now infamous Yale study, a wild monkey crime spree ensued shortly after a handful of monkeys were taught to use money.

Inquisitive researchers at Yale were interested to find out whether humans were the only primate that was capable of understanding and using money. To find out they began by teaching seven capuchin monkeys that they could trade a small silver token for tasty treats. After several months the monkeys finally got the concept and began trading the tokens for treats.

With the monkeys having successfully understood and used a token as money, the researchers wondered what the monkeys would do if they could trade their tokens for treats at different prices and what would happen if the prices of the treats changed from day to day. Astonishingly, the monkeys acted as rationally as a human by buying more of whatever treat cost the least on any particular day.

The researchers, on the high of their amazing successes and clearly believing that nothing could go wrong at this point decided to roll the dice and see what would happen if they taught their monkeys to gamble. A simple gambling game was devised by the researchers and soon mastered by the monkeys. It wasn’t long before the researchers had established that monkeys prefer to take the same risks as humans.

During the entire time that the previous three phases of the experiment, the researchers noticed something that suggested conclusively that the monkeys had learned to understand and use money like people do. In each experiment, the monkeys were isolated form their communal living space they shared with the other monkeys and taken to a room where the exchanges of the monkey coin for treats occurred. It was only while in this room that the monkeys were allowed access to the the coins, and from time to time the monkeys would try to steal a token or two from the token tray they were given access to.

After the monkeys had learned to steal money on their own and had been taught to gamble by the researchers, there was one monkey in particular was ready to commit the most heinous crime that had ever been committed by any research monkey. In what has been described as a combination jail break and bank robbery, the monkey grabbed the tray holding all the tokens used in the study, threw it out of the room, quickly grabbed up the coins from the floor, and ran to the monkey’s communal living space. When the researchers got there, they found a scene of chaotic jubilation as the tokens were being scattered amongst the entire monkey population.

But wait, there’s more.

This was indeed a great day for the advancement all monkey kind towards the direction of humanity. Immediately following the robbery, the researchers attempted to regain the coins by bribing the monkeys with tasty treats. It was in the mist of the ensuing mayhem that two monkeys exhibited a complex social and economic behavior that up until that time had only been observed in humans.

Two monkeys were seen mating after the male monkey had given a token to the female monkey. As soon as the sex was over, the female monkey was observed trading her token for a grape. It was the first and so far only instance of monkey prostitution ever observed.