The so-called “ultimatum game” is something like the gold standard for measuring the perception of justice. That says Darby Proctor, American behavioral scientist who tried a variant of this game, which is also used in business psychology studies use, with a total of six chimpanzees and 20 children of men.

In the modified experiment, two apes formed a team. One of the chimpanzees could choose between two tiles, the second chimp could then subsequently exchanged for a human supervisor for a food reward. A token stood for a just distribution of food: Both chimps were like half the food.

Elected the first ape, however the other token, the majority of the food went to him himself so he had the second chimp able to refuse to answer gereichten token. In that case, both went ape from empty.

As the researchers report in the journal ‘PNAS’ report, the chimpanzees behaved in this game pretty fair. They opted for the more common game piece, which guaranteed a fair distribution of the food. In experiments in which the second chimpanzee had no possibility of rejection, the animals acted but usually much more selfish – and pretty much the way children and adults of Homo sapiens: They decided on the token that secured them the majority of the forage .

The conclusion of the researchers around co-author Frans de Waal: Not only humans, chimpanzees also have a sense of fairness