Month: May 2006

En gammal klassisk historia, hittad på internet…

Week 1: Place five monkeys in a room. Place a banana on a string from the celing. Every time a monkey tries to reach for a banana, spray all the monkeys with ice-cold shower. It doesn’t matter who reaches for the banana, all monkeys get sprayed. After a week of research no monkey in the room will attempt to reach for a banana.

Week 2: Take out one of the monkeys and introduce a new one to the room. The first thing that the newcomer will try to attempt is to reach for the banana hanging from the ceiling. However, he will deal with great force and initmidation from other monkeys, since, they, of course, know, that it will be followed by ice-cold shower. After a while the newcomer stops to attempt to reach for banana, since any time he does it, he’s beaten up by four old-timers.

Week 3: Take yet another original monkey out of the pack, and introduce a new one. Observe the same scenario. Also observe the newcomer from week 2 admonishing the new monkey not to reach for the banana.

Week 4: Ditto. Now you’ve got 2 monkeys from week 1 and 3 new monkeys.

Week 5: Ditto.

Week 6: This is where it gets interesting. A brand new monkey is introduced, and out of the original monkeys, who were in Week 1, none remained. However, observe how aggressively the newcomer will be “advised” once he tries to reach for the banana. Notice that none of the monkeys currently in the room is aware of the ice-cold shower.

So why don’t they reach for the banana? Because that’s the way we’ve always done it.