PSYCHOLOGIST TRAINS MONKEYS TO USE MONEY

Laurie Santos heads the Comparative Cognition Laboratory at Yale University. In that lab, she and her colleagues are exploring the fact that when two species share a relative on the evolutionary family tree, not only do they share similar physical features, but they also share similar behaviors. Psychologists and other scientists have used animals to study humans for a very long time, but Santos and her colleagues have taken it a step further by choosing to focus on a closer relation, the capuchin monkey; that way they could investigate subtler, more complex aspects of human decision making – like cognitive biases.

One of her most fascinating lines of research has come from training monkeys how to use money. That by itself is worthy of a jaw drop or two. Yes, monkeys can be taught how to trade tokens for food, and for years, Santos has observed capuchin monkeys attempting to solve the same sort of financial problems humans have attempted prior experiments, and what Santos and others have discovered is pretty amazing. Monkeys and humans seem to be prone to the same biases, and when it comes to money, they make the same kinds of mistakes.

Santos and her colleagues created something they call the monkey marketplace, an enclosure where those monkeys could comparison shop with their tokens. Inside, human merchants offered deals for grapes and apples, some better than others, some risky and some safe, and the tiny primates picked up on these factors, changing their behavior in exactly the same way as humans. In fact, Santos says that on paper, across many experiments, you can’t tell capuchins and humans apart.

To read the complete article, see:
Monkeys, money, and the primate origins of human irrationality (http://boingboing.net/2015/01/09/monkeys-money-and-the-primat.html)

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