Happy day for the sociobiologists

Robert Roy Britt, writing in Live Science, reports on a series of experiments establishing that monkeys will pay [forfeit rewards] to see monkey porn and pictures of high status monkeys with which they were previously unaquainted. At the same time they had to be paid [granted extra rewards] to view pictures of low-status monkeys. The money quote from the researchers running the experiments is:

At the moment, it's only a tantalizing possibility, but we believe that similar processes are at work in these monkeys and in people," Platt said. "After all, the same kinds of social conditions have been important in primate evolution for both nonhuman primates and humans.

A full account is forthcoming in the March issue of Current Biology.