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Monkeys have shown that they’re better than humans at ‘thinking outside the box.’

Julia Watzek, a graduate student in psychology at Georgia State University, set up a test involving a problem-solving video game and invited human volunteers and a few selected capuchin and rhesus macaque monkeys to play it.

The simple game involved recognising geometric shapes, whereby when a player clicked a striped square and then a spotted square, the game would display a blue triangle.

Clicking the blue triangle resulted in a ‘win’ – humans got a simple audio “cheer”, while the monkeys got a little banana-flavoured sweet.

(Image: @watzoever/Twitter)

Once the players had got used to the game, the experimenters varied the playing conditions. They would pop up a blue triangle at the beginning of the game – before anyone had clicked any squares.

Most of the monkeys took advantage of the new rules straight away, with 70% of the monkeys going for the blue triangle as soon as they saw it.

(Image: @watzoever/Twitter)

Meanwhile, nearly all of the humans stuck doggedly to the original rules and ignored the “free gift” blue triangle. Only one human trial subject out of 56 took advantage of the new conditions.

“I am really surprised that the humans, a sizeable portion … just keep using the same strategy," Julia told Live Science .

In a further experiment, the same human guinea-pigs were shown a video of someone else using the shortcut and were told not to be afraid “to try something new."

Even then, about 30% of participants stuck with the original “two squares first” method.

(Image: @watzoever/Twitter)

Julia said that perhaps our education system, which focuses on memorising facts rather than encouraging improvisation, might be the issue: “To set ourselves up for good decision-making, sometimes that means changing available options.

“I’m not proposing to topple the entire Western education system, but it is interesting to think through ways in which we train our children to think a specific way and stay in the box and not outside of it. Just be mindful of it."

(Image: @watzoever/Twitter)

“There are good reasons for why we do what we do, but I think sometimes it can get us into a lot of trouble.”

That, or maybe monkeys are just smarter than we think.

“I think we’re less and less surprised when primates outsmart humans sometimes,” Julia added.