The Hundredth Monkey Effect

The story of the hundredth monkey effect is very interesting and tells us about several very topical aspects.. One of them is the concept of the “critical mass”, which was proposed by sociology and later taken up by various currents of thought, including the so-called “new era” and what is known as self-help.

In very general terms, The critical mass refers to the number of people necessary for some collective phenomenon to occur within a society.. For example, so that a certain community learns to respect traffic lights or so that bicycles are used instead of automobile transportation.

The hundredth monkey effect was positioned as one of the great examples of the practical functioning of this critical mass.. It has to do with the massification of a behavior and has been used hundreds of times as an example, both in self-help books and in similar literature. Let’s see what this is all about.

The Hundredth Monkey Effect

The first time the hundredth monkey effect was discussed was in 1975, in a prologue written by Lyall Watson, a famous disseminator of the precepts of the “New Age”, who was also a biologist, anthropologist and ethnologist, among others. This prologue headed the book Rhythms of visionwritten by Lawrence Blair.

The aforementioned prologue told the world the extraordinary story of the hundredth monkey effect. There Watson tells that A group of Japanese scientists conducted research with macaques, on the island of Koshima, in 1950. The researchers wanted to know if it was possible to somehow influence the learning abilities of these monkeys.

To establish this, one of the scientists gave sweet potatoes to the monkeys, but at first they rejected them because they had dirt on them. Time after, An 18-month-old monkey spent several hours with the potato in her hand and at one point decided to wash it in the sea. Seeing it clean, he ate it and noticed that it tasted pleasant.

The critical mass

Seeing that it was perfectly edible, the monkey taught them their children to wash the potatoes and eat them. Later, he also taught this new trick to many other monkeys in his community. Most of the young specimens were interested in obtaining education, but the older ones were resistant to it.

Lyall Watson says that, in a short time, many monkeys learned to wash sweet potatoes. When one hundred monkeys were completed with that new learning something very striking happened. From there on, all the other monkeys started washing the potatoeseven without someone else having taught them how to do it.

This phenomenon was called the hundredth monkey effect. According to this approach, When there are a hundred individuals from the same community doing something, a kind of domino effect occurs which leads to an entire society as a whole replicating this behavior. To prove it, the research cited by Watson says that before long macaques from neighboring islands were also washing potatoes.

Interesting findings

Ten years after the famous prologue was published, Elaine Myers, a skeptical researcher, decided to search for the origins of the experiment. She found that the same had been carried out by Japan Monkey Center and that at no time did he mention anything related to the hundredth monkey effect.

The original study actually He talked about the experiment and the monkeys’ learning process about washing potatoes, but attributed the spread of this knowledge to other factors. The young monkeys, at random, had learned to wash potatoes and others, by imitation, would have done the same. The adult monkeys did not learn, however, they died and the young ones took their place.

The dissemination of this knowledge to other islands had occurred in a period of no less than four years, during which time many individuals could have emigrated to them, bringing their knowledge. In other words, the happy hundredth monkey effect did not exist. What there was was a habitual process of knowledge circulation.

Finally, despite evidence of its falsehood, this story has been repeated and published hundreds of times. In fact, Deepak Chopra, the famous popularizer of new age, reproduced the hoax as if it were a real investigation, although he changed the potatoes for apples. In times of post-truth, more than ever, “paper supports everything.”

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