Five fictitious monkeys and millions of real ones

I started out my evening wanting to write an erudite piece on social inertia. But like July Delphi's character in Before Sunset:

I wanna learn Chinese,
I wanna write more songs...
There're so many things I wanna do,
and end up doing not much.

What a sad state of inertial affairs. I just end up surfing the web, convincing myself that all that information must somehow be making me smarter. Right. In fact, the web is very effective at amplifying human stupidity.

Take the following story which is recounted (it seems) millions of times on the Internet:

The "Monkey experiment" was an experiment performed in the previous century in which it was shown how social inertia causes behaviour which develops in response to a negative stimulus to persist in a population of monkeys, even after the stimulus is removed.

Researchers placed five monkeys into a cage, which, at its centre, had a ladder leading up to a bunch of bananas. Soon enough, one of the monkeys attempted to scale the ladder to grab a banana. The researchers responded by spraying cold water over all of the monkeys¹. Later, when another monkey attempted to climb the ladder, the researchers again sprayed all of the monkeys with cold water.

The monkeys quickly grasped the causal relationship and meted out physical punishment to any monkey which attempted to climb the ladder.

From this point onwards, the researchers did not spray any more water on any of the monkeys, and they removed one of the existing monkeys, introducing a new monkey into the cage. The new monkey, not yet aware of the apparent connection between climbing the ladder and being drenched in cold water, soon proceeded to start climbing the ladder. The other monkeys swiftly punished this transgression and pinned the new monkey down with force. Needless to say, the new monkey quickly learned to avoid the ladder.

Then, the researchers removed another monkey from the original group from the cage and introduced another new monkey. Since the new monkey was unaware of the perils of climbing the stairway to the bananas, it soon attempted to do so. This monkey too was severely dealt with, and the monkey who was introduced prior to new monkey enthusiastically took part in the punishment of the newcomer.

The researchers replaced the remaining three monkeys from the original group in the same way, each time observing the same behaviour.

Thus, even though the original "population" of monkeys was completely replaced and even though the cause for their behaviour was never experienced by any of the "second generation" monkeys, the behaviour introduced by the first generation persisted.

The researchers suggested that social inertia causes similar, if more complex phenomena in human beings.

Pardon me if my version does not exactly match the many plagiarized copies out in the wild. But it does not really matter, for this story seems to illustrate the point nicely, because for a story without a verifiable source, it is duplicated so many times on the Internet and (more frighteningly in books), that people clearly are not thinking about why they are recounting this inane story. And they certainly are not seeing the irony² here.

Well, whether or not this really is an illustration of social inertia is debatable. But it certainly is an illustration of neural inertia.

---

1. This must have occurred rather early in the century, before being a kamikaze animal rights fighter came into vogue.
   
2. Or maybe their idea of irony is - as a journalist (I forget who and for which publication) once said of the white trashy artist Kidd Rock's conception of irony - what their mothers do to their washed shirts.