The Chimp Banana Video and What Research Says About Ape Kindness

This post once carried a short video that spread widely in 2014. Chimpanzees were given a simple task, matching shapes, with a banana as the reward, and the chimp who got it right then did something that viewers found deeply moving. The video has since been removed from YouTube, and we have not been able to confirm who filmed it or where, so we will not guess at the details. What we can do is look at the question it raised: do chimpanzees really show kindness and a sense of fairness? Decades of research say the answer is a qualified yes.

(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)

We are against animal testing, but we felt the video carried a powerful message, and the science behind it is worth knowing.

What the video claimed to show

The clip followed a familiar format for animal-cognition videos online: an experimenter sets a task, the animals take turns, and one succeeds and receives food. The emotional turn came afterwards, in what the successful chimp did next, which is why the video was shared under the headline that the chimps ended up testing the man's humanity rather than the other way round.

Because the original footage is no longer available, it is worth being careful. A short extract does not tell us what reward each animal could see, how often a behaviour happened, or whether the scene was part of a formal study. A single moment can be genuine and touching without proving a complete theory of ape morality.

What scientists have found about chimpanzee kindness

The best-known researcher in this field was the Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal, who directed the Living Links Center at Emory University's Yerkes National Primate Research Center and died in March 2024. Across more than forty years he documented reconciliation after fights, cooperation, food sharing and what he called empathy in great apes.

In books such as Chimpanzee Politics (1982) and The Age of Empathy (2009), de Waal argued that empathy and cooperation are not uniquely human inventions but are shared, to different degrees, across many mammals. He concluded that the difference between humans and apes is one of degree rather than kind. A 2011 study he co-authored found that chimpanzees given a free choice tended to pick an option that rewarded a partner as well as themselves.

Do apes care about fairness?

Videos like this one are often linked with a famous 2003 experiment by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, published in Nature. Capuchin monkeys traded tokens for food; when one monkey received cucumber while its partner got grapes for the same task, it often refused the cucumber and sometimes threw it back. The result was widely reported as evidence that animals dislike unequal pay.

Later studies with chimpanzees found similar reactions in some groups, and a 2010 study even reported chimps reacting when they themselves were the ones getting the better deal. In a 2013 study, chimpanzees playing a simple sharing game chose the fair option more often than chance.

Why the evidence is mixed

Not every researcher reads these results the same way. Teams at the Max Planck Institute led by Michael Tomasello and colleagues ran similar tests and often found no sign of fairness concerns. Some argued that refusals came from frustration at seeing better food, or from disappointment with the human experimenter, rather than from a sense of injustice. Other studies with capuchins found no inequity aversion at all.

Part of the problem is practical. Many studies involve only a handful of animals, small changes in procedure can change the outcome, and almost every test uses food, while real cooperation in the wild often has nothing to do with food. That is why careful scientists talk about chimpanzee "prosocial behaviour" and avoid saying that apes share our moral rules.

Why clips like this move us

We respond strongly to animals behaving generously because it challenges the idea that kindness is something humans invented. Chimpanzees are among our closest living relatives, so a gesture that looks like sharing feels like a glimpse of where our own empathy comes from.

That instinct is not wrong, but the research suggests a more interesting picture than a single viral moment. Apes can be cooperative, competitive, generous and selfish, depending on the situation, the relationship and what is at stake. In that respect they are a lot like us.

The ethics question

The original post was clear that we do not support animal testing. Most of the studies above are behavioural: animals choose between options, usually for food, and are not harmed. Even so, keeping great apes in captivity for research raises real ethical questions, and many people who admire the findings also want those animals to live in good sanctuaries with their own social groups.

Sources: Video originally shared via True Activist (creator unknown); Wikipedia: Frans de Waal; Wikipedia: Inequity aversion in animals.

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