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I think there is a big difference between gift and payment.

Your article is on skinnerian conditioning to train crows to pay for peanuts.

In this article the crows got peanuts whether they gave gifts or not. They just decided to give gifts. No training occured.



Perhaps in the mind of the crows, they are giving gifts as a reward. In effect, training the human (in the article).


That is mind-blowing, and makes me want to reevaluate the concept of gift giving.


There's a famous quote attributed to the Inuit that Marcel Mauss mentions in The Gift: "Gifts make slaves like whips make dogs." Both halves of that statement are provocative.


So can we consider our paychecks to be gifts then?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_8hPcnGeCI


That only proves how smart crows are, they can both participate in an economy and operate on a gifting basis.


Clearly, they're the same crows.




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