Monday 27 April 2015

Try this: The monkey economy and behavioural biases

Someone (I forget who, sorry) pointed me to this 2010 TED Talk by Laurie Santos (a psychologist at Yale). In it, Santos talks about creating an economy in a group of capuchin monkeys by introducing them to the concept of money. My ECON110 students might recognise it, as one of their assignments was based on this research. She also shows that the monkeys are subject to some of the same behavioural biases as humans, especially: (1) loss aversion (we value losses more than we value gains); and (2) thinking in relative rather than absolute terms (we compare any change we anticipate relative to our current position). Enjoy!

You might also like: Does exposure to markets make us more, or less, rational?

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