Monkey Economics: We Might be Irrational, but What’s Fair is Fair

First, let’s get the monkey in the room out of the way: humans are--often--irrational. 

For example, most of the things we do are not because of deliberate decisions, but habits. A lot of the things we think are based on heuristics, we understand best through emotions, and well, we often do some stupid shit too.

Being irrational is not always bad. Actually, it often isn’t.  I would bet that if we were completely rational we’d miss a lot of chances for innovations and progress that are outside of the box, not associate to framework thinking, or highly creative. Also, we might not have had art! That would suck.

Laurie Santos, Professor at Yale,  and a team of psychologists and economists wondered if it is simply humans that make financial mistakes, or would monkeys make the same faults if they had their own currency?

Laurie and her team were determined to find the answer, so they trained several monkeys how to trade little metal tokens for food (paying humans, not other monkeys...though that would have been great to watch)

They next conducted a series of tests to see how the monkeys spent their resources in various situations.

Things got very interesting. But before that, I’ll share the video about “fairness” that we’ll discuss later. Why now? Because I’m irrational and can’t wait.

Researchers discovered that rhesus monkeys chose a high-valued food item (a fruit) alone over the same item combined with a positive but lower-valued food (fruit and a vegetable).

According to the researchers, this behaviour is identical to what has been observed in prior human investigations, in which people ranked a 24-piece dinnerware set higher than one with the same 24 pieces plus 16 additional pieces, nine of which were damaged.

According to the researchers, human and other primates' decision-making mechanisms have developed to simplify choices among vast groups of various things, which may lead to irrational choices.

People frequently assess a set of items, foods, or other people based on its aggregate rather than the sum of its parts. According to new research, monkeys appear to do the same thing as humans, implying that both monkeys and humans acquired a similar technique of simplifying the environment around us, making decisions easier, sometimes at the sacrifice of 'rationality.'

While we can't deny our tree-dwelling ancestors' similarities, the most intriguing discovery Laurie and her team uncovered was the main difference: our willingness to exchange ideas. No other ape appears to care as much as we do about sharing information for the sake of sharing it. While this characteristic gives significant benefits and explains our species' dominance, it can also lead to dumb behaviour.

And yes, monkeys do recognise unfairness and inequity, as seen in the video. Capuchin monkeys indeed refuse unequal pay. I truly enjoy how, after the unfairly paid monkey throws the cucumber, he tries to rip the cage apart in order to kick the humans in the shins. 

And that’s about it. I’m sure more monkey-human similarities will come out!