A new study found that male monkeys will give up their juice rewards in order to ogle pictures of female monkeys' bottoms. The way the experiment was set up, the act is akin to paying for the images, the researchers say.
The rhesus macaque monkeys also splurged on photos of top-dog counterparts, the high-ranking primates. That's like you or I buying People magazine.
The research, which will be detailed in the March issue of Current Biology, gets more interesting.
The scientists actually had to pay these guys, in the form of extra juice, to get them to look at images of lower-ranking monkeys.
Curiously, the monkeys in the test hadn't had any direct physical contact with the monkeys in the photos, so they didn't have personal experience with who was hot and who was not.
"So, somehow, they are getting this information by observation -- by seeing other individuals interact," said Michael Platt of the Duke University Medical Center.
Next, Platt and his colleagues want to see how people will perform in a similar experiment.
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