I have heard about an expirement involving 5 monkeys, a bananna, a ladder, and a water hose. The experiment is often compared with scenarios where everybody just follows everyone else.
My question is has this ever been done in real life, or is it folklore? My searching on google came up with pages of the same story re-told, and a wiki.answers.com link that was so full of ads that I closed out the page.
The experiment as described everywhere never occurred. The story is evidently based on some research conducted by G.R. Stephenson in the '60s on “Cultural acquisition of a specific learned response among rhesus monkeys.” There was no banana, ladder, or much of any of the behavior described. And Stephenson’s experiment itself appears to have problems (“Unfortunately, training and testing were not carried out using a discrimination procedure.”).
Here’s more about it: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/games-primates-play/201203/what-monkeys-can-teach-us-about-human-behavior-facts-fiction
Thank you, TroutMan! Exactly the reply I was looking for and will reference in the future.