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Five Monkeys

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Submitted By Rarara
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Ever come across the five monkeys and a ladder thought experiment? If not, stick around. This is going to be an interesting post. If nothing else, it’s a modern-day parable.

People usually fail to mention this is actually a thought experiment and pass it off as a real experiment. It’s not. It’s a thought experiment based on an actual experiment published in a 1967 paper by a researcher called G.R. Stephenson (cited below), and it goes like this:

Five monkeys were placed in a cage. In the middle of the cage there was a ladder with a banana on top. As one might expect one of the monkeys raced toward the ladder and as he started to climb, the researchers sprayed the monkey with cold water. In addition to the monkey climbing the ladder, however, the four monkeys at the bottom of the ladder were also sprayed with ice cold water.

A second monkey attempted to climb the ladder and the same thing happened: the researchers sprayed all 5 monkeys with cold water. After a while none of the monkeys dared to climb the ladder to get their hands on the delicious banana, regardless of the temptation.

Once the researchers made sure none of the monkeys was going to climb the ladder, they replaced one of them with another monkey. The newcomer, unaware of the situation, ran toward the ladder to get the banana. But once he started to climb the ladder he was brought down and beaten up by the other four monkeys. After several beatings, the inexperienced new guy learned his lesson: Climbing = Getting beat up. Although he had absolutely no idea why.

The researchers then replaced another one of the original monkeys with an inexperienced one. The same thing happened again: newcomer climbs -> the other four beat him up -> he learns his lesson. The interesting observation here was that the first substituted monkey also joined in to beat up the the new guy, even though he had no idea

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