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April 05, 2005
My Kindgdom for a Chimp
Out of a mostly-useless conference I attended last Saturday (an attempt to apply the theories of social evolution to business leadership), one thing did stick with me. Apparently there was once a lab study involving both children and chimpanzees trying to open latched boxes to get at pieces of fruit inside. A lab technician would demonstrate one of several methods for opening the box, some of which were more effective than others. The result? Humans are really good at imitating the demonstrated techniques, even if they don’t work, and chimpanzees waste no time getting to the fruit.
I love this kind of insight into human behavior, and now I'm seeing examples of this phemenon everywhere! Case in point: the prevalence of email and text messages as modes of personal communication when, in my opinion, a one-sided string of words on the screen is rarely an effective proxy for actual human interaction. (Oh yeah, blogs suck too.)
Posted by Elizabeth at April 5, 2005 11:32 AM