What the 5 Monkey story can teach you about INSIGHT!

What is Insight?  Insight is "the capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or a thing."   This can mean having Insight into yourself or others.  

Today as the first day, I want you to gain insight into thinking about behaviors. 

Here's a psychology experiment that you must know about: 

The 5 Monkeys ~~

What this story teaches us is how we are sometimes a product of our environment and have no idea why we do what we do.  With insight we can make conscious changes not only in ourselves but also in the world.

Some of you may question if this was a true experiment and it wasn't but it is based on a true experiment (see below).  If we have insight we can see this happening in our daily lives.  I often hear in school meetings that something was done or going to be done because "it has always been done this way."  Geez that's really scary now if you think about it, right?  

**Reference:

"Stephenson (1967) trained adult male and female rhesus monkeys to avoid manipulating an object and then placed individual naïve animals in a cage with a trained individual of the same age and sex and the object in question. In one case, a trained male actually pulled his naïve partner away from the previously punished manipulandum during their period of interaction, whereas the other two trained males exhibited what were described as "threat facial expressions while in a fear posture" when a naïve animal approached the manipulandum. When placed alone in the cage with the novel object, naïve males that had been paired with trained males showed greatly reduced manipulation of the training object in comparison with controls. Unfortunately, training and testing were not carried out using a discrimination procedure so the nature of the transmitted information cannot be determined, but the data are of considerable interest."

Sources: Stephenson, G. R. (1967). Cultural acquisition of a specific learned response among rhesus monkeys. In: Starek, D., Schneider, R., and Kuhn, H. J. (eds.), Progress in Primatology, Stuttgart: Fischer, pp. 279-288.

Mentioned in: Galef, B. G., Jr. (1976). Social Transmission of Acquired Behavior: A Discussion of Tradition and Social Learning in Vertebrates. In: Rosenblatt, J.S., Hinde, R.A., Shaw, E. and Beer, C. (eds.), Advances in the study of behavior, Vol. 6, New York: Academic Press, pp. 87-88.