Some years ago, I started a blog in Spanish with the naive intention of posting stories from time to time, eventually I realized that I was too lazy for doing that. I'm not that good at making up stories. Needless to say that I ended up posting only one story about something I had read long ago.

The story I posted said something like that a scientist had developed some sort of experiment which involved a group of six monkeys trapped in a cage. In the cage there was a ladder and a bunch of bananas above it, this cage was also provided with a mechanism which activated a sprinkler every time one of the monkeys tried to reach the bananas.

When the scientist put the group of monkeys in the cage, one of them climbed the ladder and when he tried to reach the bananas the rest of the group ended up soaking wet. After all of them tried to reach the bananas, the outcome of every attempt was always the same, all the group got wet except for the momkey on the ladder. Some more attempts later, the behaviour of the monkeys started to change. Then, before any of the monkeys tried to climb the ladder, the rest of the group started to beat the unfortunate monkey before he could even try to reach his prize.

At this point of the experiment, the scientist replaced one of the monkeys for a new one. Obviously, the new monkey tried to climb the ladder, but the rest of the group didn't let him touch the bananas and started to beat the crap out of him. Then, the scientist kept on replacing every monkey of the original group one by one until there were none of them left.

At this point of the experiment, without any member of the original group of monkeys inside the cage, the scientist added a new moneky to the group. This monkey, like the ones before him, tried to reach the bananas, and the rest of the group didn't let him do it, even though none of them had been ended up soaking wet.

I guess if any of us were able to communicate with one of the monkeys and asked him why they had done that, his answer would be something like: I don't know, we've always done it this way around here.