Researchers: Monkeys are rational economic actors, just like humans

Interesting research (Quartz):

This pretty much approximates the kind of rational human behavior economists assume when they construct economic models. Poor people tend to invest their money in assets where they know they won’t lose it, like US Treasurys or simple stock-market indices. Richer humans are more comfortable taking risks where they can lose money so long as the reward is sufficiently large.

But the behavior goes beyond the pecuniary domain. The experiment suggests that risk-analysis is genetic. Humans and monkeys make rational decisions based on risk and reward. In similar experiments, birds did not.

“The monkeys… seem to share human risk preferences. They were slightly risk averse and we know that humans would behave similarly in these experimental conditions,” Agnieszka Tymula of the University of Sydney’s School of Economics, one of the researchers, told Phys.org. ”Understanding the biological mechanisms underlying risky behaviours that evolved around satiety may provide unique insights about decision-making and consumption wealth.”