Name: A monkey economy as irrational as ours
Uploaded: 2010-07-29T08:47:00Z
Duration: 19 min 28 s
Description: Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in "monkeynomics" shows that some of the silly choices we make, monkeys make too.

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Laurie Santos: A monkey economy as irrational as ours

A monkey economy as irrational as ours

Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in "monkeynomics" shows that some of the silly choices we make, monkeys make too.

Humans are celebrated for their intelligence, but their decision making can be embarrassingly flawed. By teaching capuchin monkeys to use tokens as money, researchers discovered that monkeys fell into the same predictable financial traps as people. The monkeys spent their entire budgets, ignored saving, and even stole tokens, just like humans. These biases may date back 35 million years, revealing that our irrational choices are rooted deep in our evolutionary past.