(This posting includes a handout LINK AT THE END OF THIS POST which you are welcome to use with your students.) *

For background information about these articles and for suggestions for how to use them with your students, see  • Introducing “Short, High-Interest Readings” (#1 “For More Happiness, Keep Your Good News Secret for a While.”) Also, I’ll be adding more of these articles in the right-hand column: Categories > Reading > Short-high interest Readings.

Here is the second article. You can download the article for your students by clicking on the link at the end. Also included are three optional exercises: True-False Questions; Paraphrasing Exercise; Reflection Exercise.

Animals Understand Fairness

¹ Imagine that you and your friends have just arrived at a popular restaurant.  Unfortunately, you are told by the hostess that you’ll need to wait in line for about 30 minutes to get a table because there are many other customers who had arrived before you.  After about 10 minutes, a man and woman arrive and talk to the hostess.  You notice that he secretly hands her some money.  Immediately, she takes them to a table.  Most of us would feel that this was unfair and will feel resentful toward the hostess.

² Some researchers have recently become interested in finding out if the idea of unfairness is a unique emotion only felt by people or is it also experienced by animals.  A study looked at how dogs react when a second dog is rewarded in an unequal way for doing the same trick.  The researchers shook hands with two dogs, and the dogs were happy to do that whether they got a reward or not.

³ Next, they asked the dogs to “shake hands” and gave one a reward of a tasty sausage, and the other one a dull piece of bread when they did. Interestingly, the dogs didn’t seem to notice the difference and continued to follow the command and shook hands even though one got a tastier reward than the other.

⁴ But that changed if they saw that another dog was being rewarded with a piece of food while they received nothing. In the next step of the experiment, the dogs were either rewarded with a sausage or not given any reward. When one dog received a reward and the other didn’t, the unrewarded dog hesitated to obey the command.  Eventually, the unrewarded dog stopped playing completely.  

⁵ Psychologists were also interested to see if other animals, for example, monkeys, would have a similar reaction to unfair treatment.  In one experiment, monkeys had to give a small rock to researchers to get a piece of food in return. The monkeys were happy to do this to get a piece of cucumber. But they would suddenly act insulted to be offered a cucumber if they saw that another monkey was getting a more delicious reward, a grape, for doing the same job.

⁶ “The one who got a cucumber became very upset, threw out the food, threw out the rock that we exchanged with them, and at some point, just stopped performing,” says the researcher.

⁷ In that experiment, the monkeys considered the fairness of two different types of payment. But as we saw in the experiment with the dogs, the sausage and dark bread, dogs didn’t seem to notice the unequal treatment.

⁸ Dogs, like monkeys, live in cooperative societies, so the researchers were not surprised that they would also have some sense of fairness. He expects other animals feel this as well. For example, he says, lions hunt cooperatively, and he “would predict that lions would be sensitive to who has done what and what they get for it.”

Here is the link: Animals Undertand Fairness Article

David Kehe

*About the free-download materials. During my 40 years of teaching ESL, I have had many colleagues who were very generous with their time, advice and materials. These downloads are my way of paying it forward