Say Anything Blog

A short while ago I had the pleasure of attending a lecture titled “The Evolution of Irrationality, Insights from Non-Human Primates” by Dr. Santos from the Comparative Cognition Lab at Yale. She discussed three different studies that she has been working on including this one. Here’s the abstract:

Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. Do these biases extend across contexts, cultures, or even species?
We investigate this question by introducing fiat currency and trade to a colony of capuchin monkeys, and recovering their preferences over a range of goods and gambles. We show that capuchins react rationally to both price and wealth shocks, but display several hallmark biases when faced with gambles, including reference-dependence and
loss-aversion. Given our capuchins’ inexperience with trade and gambles, these results suggest that loss-aversion extends beyond humans, and may be innate rather than learned.

They taught Capuchins to trade, then they compared the risk-taking tendencies of humans to those of the Capuchins and found that, low and behold, they display the same asymmetrical biases we do. Amazing. The implications are that we, as a species, acquired that bias at some point in our evolutionary history roughly 35 million years ago. Soon denying evolution is going to have some serious economic disadvantages. I recommend y’all get in at the ground floor. This is cool stuff. You should have seen the footage of these guys making buys. They trained them will little wallets full of mock currency. Again, amazing. Also, notice that one of the authors of this paper is from the School of Management. Cool stuff.