No, this is not the official collective noun for our closest animal relatives. Unlike the wonderful unkindness of ravens*, the proper collective for a group of chimps is a troop or family — or occasionally a cartload or whoop.

But the collective noun for chimps might as well be an unfairness, because that tendency is what they seem regularly to display. Their failures of fairness put humankind’s successes into relief and perhaps demonstrate still more why we need to uphold fairness in order to continue to prosper.

Unlike homo sapiens, chimpanzees are close to a form of homo economicus, the theoretical human who behaves according to the selfish logic that underlies traditional economics: operating to their own narrow individual benefit, unmoved by any sense of altruism, or of fairness. 

Chimps have been challenged with a form of the ultimatum game. Two chimps have access to trays of a range of different splits of goodies. Only one can choose the tray and so allocate the goodies; only the other is able to pull the tray so that each can access the allocation chosen.

Whereas humans have shown that there are levels of allocation that are unacceptable, and so the second participant might reject some sets of choices in splitting the goodies, doing without a benefit if the split seems unfair, the experiments show that chimps will take whatever they are offered as long as it is not nothing. Unlike humans who care for fairness, it seems chimps obey the expectations of traditional economists and will accept the smallest of benefits, knowing that they are better off for having done so. The concept that the chosen split is not fair, and that might influence whether it should be accepted or not, seems simply alien to our chimp cousins.

This reflects the lack of cooperation shown by chimpanzees in the wild. While they appear to hunt in packs, close analysis of what goes on reveals that this is simply the combination of a series of individualistic selfish motivations of each chimp seeking to catch their red colobus monkey prey. The chimp who makes a successful kill at the end of a hunt does not share the proceeds fairly with other participants. Rather it tries to sneak off with the body, and shares it not according to the level of participation by others in the hunt but instead allows shares to be taken according to the scale of begging and harassment from those who crowd around.

This selfishness has been replicated in scientific studies, to the extent of it preventing the participating chimpanzees from getting food at all. The challenge set is of food being placed some distance away from their cages which can only be brought within reach if two chimps work collaboratively to pull ropes to draw the food nearer. The study found that while two chimps will cooperate to drag two separate items of food towards them, they actually avoid collaboration if the reward has not already been separated into two parts. It is not unfairness they cannot face, as they will cooperate even if the two separated rewards are notably unbalanced, it is the fear of receiving nothing because the weaker knows it will lose out to the stronger once the single meal is within reach. Thus the chimps expend no effort and gain nothing — the contrast with the ability and willingness of humans to cooperate, and then to share fairly, is striking.

There are some studies that suggest this sense of selfishness among our brethren is not universal and that they may enjoy some sense of fairness. Studies where the participating chimps have a choice of fellow participants show more success in cooperation — and that chimps choose fellow participants who are better at cooperating and shun those that fail. But even these studies show that the levels of collaboration fall far short of what can be expected by even the youngest humans (this collaboration is explored wonderfully in Michael Tomasello’s Why we Cooperate, Boston Review 2009).

Perhaps most shockingly, while human mothers will starve themselves in order to feed their children, chimpanzee infants tend to be given the worst of the food that their mother is eating: the peelings, the husk, the shell rather than the more nutritious part of the fruit. Even where chimp infants are trying to get good food from their mother, they are more likely to be rejected than fed. Even in the most intimate relationships, chimpanzees are selfish and don’t act fair.

In this failure of cooperation by our very closest relatives (and chimp DNA is all but identical to that of humans) may well lie human’s crucial evolutionary advantage: that we are willing to work together and trust each other to share the rewards with some level of fairness. We thus take at least a portion of the benefit of our efforts, and as a result enjoy a larger collective pie to share between us.

It is not that fairness is a uniquely human trait — I had the privilege two years ago of witnessing humpback whales collaborating to take it in turns as a pod to chase fish down a narrow funnel of sea between the cliffs (known in the delightful Newfoundland dialect as a tickle) into the mouth of one of their group, with the taking of turns and sharing of effort just being a natural response for them — but it is so fully embedded in who we are that we struggle to understand why our closest animal relatives can possibly fail to follow the same obvious steps. Some of how our modern world works seems to act more chimpanzee than human, and to stifle those natural instincts. It is this that this blog is seeking to explore, and to try to understand what we might choose to do about it.

It is an unfairness of chimpanzees, but it is a fairness of humans — and we need to remind ourselves of that, and take the full benefit of it.

 

* Though ‘an unkindness’ is wonderful, it’s odd that there’s a collective noun at all for ravens as they are largely solitary beasts, more likely to be found in pairs than more, and indeed seem to suffer stress when in groups. Genuinely, an unkindness.

 

Studies evidencing the unfairness of chimpanzees:

Chimpanzees Are Rational Maximizers in an Ultimatum Game, Keith Jensen, Josep Call, Michael Tomasello, Science 05 Oct 2007: Vol. 318, Issue 5847

Meat sharing among the Gombe chimpanzees: Harassment and reciprocal exchange, Ian Gilby, Animal Behaviour 71 (4) (2006)

Tolerance allows bonobos to outperform chimpanzees in a cooperative task, Brian Hare, Alicia Melis, Vanessa Woods, Sara Hastings, Richard Wrangham, Current Biology 17(7), April 2007

How chimpanzees cooperate in a competitive world, Malini Suchak, Timothy Eppley, Matthew Campbell, Rebecca Feldman, Luke Quarles, Frans de Waal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(36), September 2016

Food transfer between chimpanzee mothers and their infants, Ari Ueno, Tetsuro Matsuzawa, Primates 45 no 4 (2004)

Peter Drucker, the management education guru, was clear: “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” There is no business without being able to serve a customer and deliver something to them that they value more than the cost of creation and delivery — that is what profit is, after all.

It is a shame that profit has become a dirty word, given that it is just the measure of the value that a business adds for its customers — or should be.

So customers matter, and businesses that want to prosper for the long-run must nurture their customer relationships. Hence the importance of a recent discussion ‘What does it mean to be honest and fair with customers’ fostered by the reliably thoughtful Blueprint for Better Business.

Customers are central to any business, and serving customers well is vital for any business that wants to prosper for the long-run. Yet Citizens Advice recently used its new powers to launch a so-called super-complaint, requiring the Competition and Markets Authority to investigate the penalty that loyal customers apparently pay. According to Citizens Advice, who call it a systematic scam, customers who stick with their existing suppliers for mobile, broadband, savings, home insurance and mortgages, are losing more than £4 billion a year — in effect being overcharged by nearly £900 each. 

Loyalty does not pay, it seems — so why would any customer be loyal to such businesses? Not least, there is a clear benefit to companies from loyal customers as the cost of winning new business is always a significant one. Sharing part of that cost with those who are retained business might be a better way to engender trust and be seen to be acting fair. But without this spirit of fairness in relation to their customers, some businesses might find that they will not retain them — and that cost risks being far greater than any fine from the CMA.

For me perhaps the most powerful element of the write-up of the Blueprint discussion
 is the acknowledgement that being called consumers may not drive the right dynamic among customers: “The goal of activating ‘more conscious consumerism’ does not play to human instincts to collaborate – the data shows that when we identify as a person, a householder, a neighbour, we act more in group interest and have greater trust in the collective, than if we are approached and described as a ‘consumer’. The language matters.” It usually does.

Helping our customers to be active participants in long-term business success may be a bold step but perhaps it is one that every fair-minded corporation needs to take. After all, Drucker’s maxim includes keeping customers as well as creating them.

Blueprint is planning an event to discuss fairness in more depth, to be held at the RSA on March 9th 2019.

My article in Governance, October 2018, on Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act proposals:

“A corporate sector that more explicitly aims to add value to society and not simply to itself has a better chance of reversing the current perceptions of significant unfairness, and beginning to change the negative view of capitalism as a whole.”

A number of people have challenged me in recent weeks to define fairness, arguing that it is hard to put too much weight on such an amorphous concept.

Now, I well understand the value of clear definitions and the precision of rules — not least, I studied law, and edited legal journals for several years — but to my mind it is precisely in the imprecision of fairness that its value lies.

Largely, we all know fairness when we see it, and we certainly know unfairness. In many ways, that is the point: human beings have an innate sense of fairness and we mostly aspire to achieve it. The sense of fairness is largely consistent across societies and seems to also be over time. Scientists have shown it is apparent in children as young as 12 months, and is demonstrated across all age-groups. The sense of fairness truly can be said to be an innate sense.

As one of the participants at the Blueprint for Better Business roundtable discussion (see Constrained Resources) said, “The word equality deadens conversations”. She pointed out that the precise nature of the term equality, and the spiky expectation that it creates, makes it a limiting factor on dialogue. Certainly, a lot of discussions seem to waste time on whether the aim of those railing at inequality is absolute equality — when saying that the aim is fairness would avoid such wasted debating efforts. The imprecise concept of fairness allows space for active and vigorous discussion, and so for concrete progress to be made.

So don’t ask me for a definition of fairness. To my mind, it is better that we do not have a precise one, because the delight is that we all understand what we mean by the term — and, we all clearly and certainly understand what unfairness looks like.

 

 

Studies evidencing a sense of fairness among very young children:

The developmental foundations of human fairness, McAuliffe, Blake, Steinbeis, Warneken, Nature Human Behaviour, 2017

The developmental origins of fairness: The knowledge-behavior gap, Blake, McAuliffe, Warneken, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18(11), 2014

Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants, Schmidt, Sommerville, PLoS ONE 6(10), 2011

Egalitarianism in very young children, Fehr, Bernhard, Rockenbach, Nature 454, p1079-84, 2008