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It's Evolution, Baby on Game and Player
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It's Evolution, Baby

Patrick Woods  //  November 21, 2008


Why do we do "systematically dumb things"?

D

iscover Magazine last month posted a fascinating interview with Laurie Santos, a professor who heads up Yale's Comparative Cognition Laboratory. Santos studies primate behavior and designs experiments focused on teasing out potential links between us and them. She is particularly interested in behavioral patterns that have a historically long existence, and thus perhaps evolutionary purpose. While perusing her commentary regarding primates' advanced socio-economic behavior, one of Santos' observations resonated with me. She is interested in understanding and assessing whether certain primate behaviors that logically seem nonsensical have human parallels because we do "systematically dumb things."

Maybe we evolved apples have not fallen so far from the genetic tree.From expecting a 60% return on investment to shuffling mortgage debt into unrecognizable securities (and many pieces in between), I have marveled at man's cognitive dissonance — quite visible in the disconnected, technological landscape of social interaction — and wondered if we can handle our own progress. I myself am not immune to such behavioral folly and have noticed a recurring pattern: as clearly silly as some of man's behavior is revealed after the fact, how can I (and we) not see it coming more often? Must we bear a negative consequence's wake-up call first?

Said Santos regarding primate behavior: "Maybe they're smart for something that is just wrong for our modern environment." Maybe we evolved apples have not fallen so far from the genetic tree.

Consider, for example, primate behavior when they perceive that they are not being monitored. After discovering that monkeys were quite good at deception — they stole researchers' lunches and fruit to be used in later sessions — Santos wanted to see if monkeys could tell when humans could see and hear. "The simplest study," she said, "uses two experimenters standing on either side of a platform holding two portions of food. One of the experimenters can see the food and the other can't. . . . The monkey gets one trial to steal the food. Who does he steal the food from? Consistently the monkeys steal the food from the guy who's facing away."

Similarly, monkeys can pick up that our ears are able monitor, too. "We have a single experimenter who has two boxes. One is covered in jingle bells. . . .The other one looks the same because it's covered in jingle bells, but we've taken the balls out of all the bells. . . . So when the experimenter freezes and looks away, the question is, which box does the monkey steal from? What we find is that they sneak over and take food out of the quiet box and avoid stealing things from the box they know is noisy."

Monkeys' market sense is very similar to our own.Experimental results become even more intriguing with the introduction of rudimentary trade. When monkeys trained in trading tokens for food arrived at the lab, Santos wondered if they bartered and bought more of what might be on sale like we humans do. Have any of you been to CostCo lately? "The easiest way to do these studies is to find two objects the monkeys like about equally, like apples and Jell-O cubes. . . .There are two 'salesmen,' one selling apples and the other selling Jell-O. What we found is the monkeys spend half their budget on apples and half on Jell-O. The next day, one experimenter has the regular-size apples but the guy selling Jell-O is offering two cubes for the price of one. And lo and behold, just like a human would, they buy more Jell-O. We showed that the monkeys' market sense is very similar to our own."

We have some elementary, rather unsurprising insight thus far regarding primates' and perhaps man's behavior. As social creatures, it behooves us to "play nice" while being watched, but maximizing our own utility compels us to cut corners when we think we can do so undetected. Moreover, our perception is our reality: we consume more of which we believe to be a "deal," but seldom consider opportunity costs. At what point is enough Jell-O enough, and is there some hoarding instinct at play?

Santos described an experiment where monkey perception truly defined their reality. "There are two salespeople. One of them looks like he's offering one piece of apple, but when the monkey pays him, that experimenter delivers a bonus — an extra piece of apple. . . . The second salesman looks like he's going to give the monkey three pieces of apple because he's holding three pieces. But when the monkeys pay him, he takes one of these pieces away. . . . The important thing is that, on average, the monkeys get two pieces of apple from both experimenters. . . .The monkeys prefer to trade with the experimenter who's giving them the bonuses and avoid the experimenter who's giving them the losses."

Monkeys prefer to risk, just like humans do.Inasmuch as primates have an illogical aversion to loss, so too is there a willingness to take risk when losses cannot be easily quantified. "Both experimenters start out offering three pieces of something. The first experimenter appears to offer three items but each time ultimately gives the monkey two, so the monkey gets a loss, but it's a safe, consistent loss. The second experimenter starts out offering three but introduces more risk: Sometimes the monkey gets all three, but sometimes it gets only one. We find that the monkeys prefer to go with the second experimenter. They prefer to risk losing more because there is also a chance they will have no loss at all. That is just what humans do."

Are we hardwired to behave in instinctual, contradictory ways? A social contract is important to maintain, but under the cloak of anonymity, we can be boors to each other and maximize our utility function. We hoard when we can, especially when there is a deal to be had, are illogically protective of what we own, but willing to risk more than a steady return when we have little or nothing to lose. Santos speculates that such seemingly contradictory behavior in primates is a function of a question rather constant: What maximizes one's chances of survival? Of course, many of us are not about to go hungry; what makes a man a man is his ability to control his primal instincts. Maybe it's time to evolve.





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