The bailout plan that earlier failed to get approval of the US House of Representatives has now been passed by the

US Senate, and handsomely to boot. The journey that it traversed has been an extremely interesting one.

The first version of the bill from the Treasury Department was a measly three pages. What has been passed by the Senate is a voluminous 450 pages. Did the lawmakers just want more trees to be chopped in order to pass the bill? Obviously not. Strangely enough, the answer might well lie in our primate past. The human species yearns for fairness when cooperative effort and rewards are at stake.

A team led by Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, made some thought-provoking observations in their studies of primate behaviour with regard to cooperation, effort and reward. It went something like this; two monkeys, in separate enclosures, had to press a lever in order for both of them to receive a reward, say grapes. If one of them did not depress the lever, neither of them got anything. Turned out that as the rewards became more and more unequal there came a point when the monkey receiving the lesser share would stop cooperating. Hence, if they began with a 5-5 split out of 10 grapes and moved towards 10-0, at some point in that progression the monkey receiving less would stop cooperating.

This in a sense is irrational behaviour on the part of the monkey that doesn’t depress the lever: after all, it is undeniable that one grape is better than no grapes. But, the monkey receiving less would not cooperate simply because the sharing of the spoils was unfair, when the effort put in was identical.

... contd.