The cucumber, the grape, and the first lesson in management
There is a rather famous experiment in which capuchin monkeys are paid to perform a small task. They have to hand over a pebble and receive a reward in return.
As long as both monkeys receive cucumber, everything is more or less fine. Cucumber may not be champagne, but it is still food. Then something happens: one monkey continues to receive cucumber, while the other, for the exact same task, receives grapes.
At that point, the first monkey does not enroll in a leadership course, update its LinkedIn profile, or request a one-to-one meeting with its manager to discuss a possible growth path.
It gets angry.
It refuses the cucumber, throws it away, and stops cooperating. The message, in its elegant primatological simplicity, is more or less this: “If she gets grapes and I get cucumber for the same work, the problem is not the cucumber. The problem is the game.” And if we could translate from the language of capuchin monkeys, they would probably explain to us, alas, very clearly what we should do with our cucumber.
The experiment is the one conducted by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, published in Nature in 2003 under the title “Monkeys reject unequal pay”. The concept usually discussed here is inequity aversion: I do not react only because I receive little in absolute terms, but because I receive less than someone else in a comparable situation.
Of course, with human beings things are more complicated. We have language, culture, status, mortgages, pension plans, career promises, annual reviews, and the extraordinary ability to tell ourselves that today’s cucumber is an investment in tomorrow’s grape.
And this is where modern society becomes interesting.
The unfair offer we can no longer refuse
The ultimatum game describes the same problem in a more abstract form. One person receives a sum of money and has to propose how to divide it with another person. They can offer half, almost everything, or almost nothing. The other person can only accept or reject. If they accept, both receive the proposed amounts. If they reject, nobody receives anything.
According to a certain idea of economic rationality, the person receiving the offer should accept any positive amount. Even one euro is better than zero. And yet, in practice, many people reject offers that are too low, because they perceive them as humiliating or unfair.
This experiment became famous because it shows something simple and unsettling: human beings do not reason only in terms of immediate material advantage. Sometimes they prefer to lose something rather than accept a hierarchy they perceive as offensive.
But there is a problem: in modern society, the ultimatum almost never appears in such a clear form.
Nobody openly tells us: “I take 99 and you take 1.”
We are told something much more sophisticated:
“It is an investment in your future.”
“You have to pay your dues.”
“This is a great opportunity.”
“We are doing what we can with the available budget.”
“This bonus shows that we are on your side.”
“Today’s sacrifice will lead to tomorrow’s growth.”
The unfair offer is not eliminated. It is made narratively acceptable.
The corporate world as a laboratory of modern inequity
In the corporate world, especially within large organizations, the relationship between the real quality of work and individual reward often becomes indirect, confused, and mediated by hierarchical levels, processes, KPIs, internal evaluations, and managerial expectations.
In a small business, inefficiency becomes visible quickly. If someone works badly, the damage reaches the customer, revenue, and the very survival of the business. In large organizations, however, damage is absorbed. It is distributed across departments, procedures, budgets, turnover, external consultants, and new strategic initiatives.
The system keeps standing even as it becomes less efficient.
Precisely for this reason, many corporate environments are where the real “monkey business” begins: the risk is that what truly matters is not always producing quality. What matters is satisfying the expectations of one’s manager. What matters is appearing aligned. What matters is not disturbing the internal narrative. What matters is being perceived as part of the solution, even when one is contributing to the problem.
Real efficiency becomes less important than one’s position within the organization’s social network.
Those who work well but cannot sell themselves, those who see contradictions, those who point out structural inefficiencies, may even become inconvenient. Because real efficiency measures the system against reality. Narrative, on the other hand, protects the system from reality.
Why do people accept unfair conditions for years
The point is not that workers fail to perceive unfairness. Very often, they perceive it perfectly well.
The problem is that unfairness is connected to a promise.
People accept excessive workloads, disproportionate pay, toxic environments, contradictory goals, useless meetings, and humiliations disguised as feedback because all of it is placed inside a narrative of possible advancement.
Endure today to obtain tomorrow.
Tolerate today to be recognized tomorrow.
Prove loyalty today to gain the favor of management tomorrow.
To this, we must add the social dimension. Work no longer serves only to provide income. It serves to maintain a certain status, to avoid looking inadequate among colleagues, to sustain a social identity, and to satisfy family, cultural, and personal expectations.
Thus, real need becomes confused with perceived need.
People do not work only to live. They work to continue appearing adequate to the social role they have been educated to desire.
In this sense, modern society has created a much more refined form of ultimatum: it does not simply offer you too little. It offers you too little today, while convincing you that accepting it is necessary in order to become someone tomorrow.
The politics of money moving around
The same mechanism can be found in contemporary politics.
More and more often, public debate does not begin with the question: “What is the concrete solution to this problem?”
It begins with the question: “How much money can we move?”
Bonuses, incentives, subsidies, tax deductions, one-off transfers. Money here, money there, categories to compensate, groups to reassure, measures to announce.
Of course, the cost of solutions matters. Economic sustainability is fundamental. But it should be the final stage of evaluation, not the first and only one.
A rational sequence should be:
- identify the real problem;
- understand its causes;
- build concrete alternatives;
- evaluate their effectiveness;
- measure their sustainability;
- decide the budget.
The political sequence often seems to be:
- identify an available budget;
- choose a beneficiary category;
- build a communicable measure;
- present it as a solution.
Money stops being a tool and becomes the apparent solution.
The hundred euros for pensioners
Take a simple example: sending 100 euros to all pensioners.
At first glance, it looks like a positive measure. The citizen sees that the state is giving something. They see a transfer. They see money that, at least in theory, is moving in their direction.
But if prices continue to rise because of inflation, speculation, protected rents, energy costs, market concentration, or structural inefficiencies, those 100 euros do not solve the problem. They are simply absorbed by the system that generated the price increase in the first place.
In practice, they may become an indirect transfer to those who control prices, rents, energy, essential goods, or supply chains.
The pensioner receives 100 euros. The system takes back 120.
And yet, politically, the measure works because it produces an immediate perception of intervention. The citizen may think: “At least something was given to me.”
The point is not the real benefit. It is the consensus produced by the visible movement of money.
The distorted perception of needs
Here we reach an even deeper problem: modern society does not only manipulates the distribution of resources. It also manipulates the perception of needs.
As Maslow might have put it, in a poor society, need is often material, direct, and visible: food, housing, safety, health, work. In a wealthier and more complex society, need also becomes symbolic: status, recognition, career, inclusion, image, belonging.
This does not mean that material needs disappear. It means they become intertwined with artificial or amplified needs.
The citizen no longer asks only for better services, more stable prices, and more efficient institutions. The citizen also asks for signals. They want to see that a category has been recognized. They want to feel that someone is “doing something”. They want to perceive that money is moving in the right direction.
The risk is that politics learns to govern not by solving problems, but by administering perceptions.
There is no need to truly reduce the cost of living, if it is possible to communicate support for the cost of living.
There is no need to build efficient services, if it is possible to announce an investment plan for services.
There is no need to correct the causes of inequity, if it is possible to distribute enough visible compensations to make inequity temporarily tolerable.
Consensus as a substitute for efficiency
The common problem between politics and the corporate world is scale.
When a system becomes large enough, it can survive enormous levels of inefficiency. Errors do not produce immediate and visible consequences. Responsibilities are fragmented. Costs are distributed across millions of citizens, thousands of employees, final customers, taxpayers, shareholders, or future generations.
At that point, the criterion for survival changes.
The winner is not necessarily whoever produces the best result. The winner is whoever maintains the consensus of the social network that sustains the system.
In the corporate world, this network is made of managers, stakeholders, shareholders, consultants, team leaders, internal functions, strategic narratives, quarterly targets, presentations, and selected metrics.
In politics, the network is made of voters, social categories, media, interest groups, bureaucratic structures, parties, lobbies, supranational institutions, and identity narratives.
In both cases, the system does not necessarily have to be efficient. It has to appear manageable, justifiable, sustainable, and morally defensible.
Reality moves into the background. Narrative becomes infrastructure.
Unfairness is no longer imposed. It is administered.
The ultimatum game strikes us because unfairness is transparent. One person proposes a division. The other decides whether to accept it. Everything is visible.
Modern society works differently.
Inequity is fragmented into salaries, bonuses, taxes, inflation, incentives, rents, energy costs, career promises, corporate benefits, deductions, strategic plans, emergencies, procedures, reforms, annual reviews, and press releases.
There is no longer a single moment in which someone says: “This is the deal: I take almost everything, you take almost nothing.”
There is a long series of micro-deals, each one apparently reasonable.
Accept this sacrifice.
Wait for this promotion.
Appreciate this bonus.
Understand this emergency.
Support this reform.
Trust this plan.
Adapt to this process.
The ultimatum becomes invisible precisely because it is distributed over time.
Conclusion: the postponed refusal
Perhaps the most important characteristic of modern society is not that people have stopped refusing unfairness.
It is that they have learned to postpone the refusal.
The worker accepts unfair conditions in hopes of a promotion. The citizen accepts ineffective policies because they receive a bonus. The consumer accepts rising prices because they think they are inevitable. The voter accepts structural inefficiencies because they are offered a reassuring narrative.
Inequity aversion has not disappeared. It has been incorporated into a system of promises, status, and consensus.
The real power of modern society does not lie in convincing us that unfairness is fair.
It lies in convincing us that it is temporary, necessary, inevitable, or useful for our future self-realization.
And so we keep accepting the offer.
Not because it is not unfair.
But because we have been taught to wait for the next round.
And so we keep accepting the cucumber, waiting for the grape that may never come.
REFERENCES:
- Güth, W., Schmittberger, R. and Schwarze, B. (1982). An experimental analysis of ultimatum bargaining. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 3(4), pp.367–388. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-2681(82)90011-7.
- Thaler, R.H. (1988). Anomalies: The Ultimatum Game. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2(4), pp.195–206. doi:https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.2.4.195.
- Brosnan, S.F. and de Waal, F.B.M. (2003). Monkeys reject unequal pay. Nature, 425(6955), pp.297–299. doi:https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01963.
- Oosterbeek, H., Sloof, R. and van de Kuilen, G. (2001). Cultural Differences In Ultimatum Game Experiments: Evidence From A Meta-Analysis. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.286428.
- Maslow, A.H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. United States: BN Publishing, pp.370–396. https://a.co/d/02UFPpra.