Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello, Happiness Lab listeners. We are currently hard at
Speaker 1: work on season three, which will be airing sometime later
Speaker 1: this summer. But while you're waiting, we wanted to share
Speaker 1: something special, an episode of one of my favorite podcasts.
Speaker 1: Hidden Brain, is a weekly podcast hosted by Shankar Vendantem.
Speaker 1: Much like The Happiness Lab, Hidden Brain explores the science
Speaker 1: of human behavior and how we can understand our behavioral
Speaker 1: quirks in order to make better decisions. The show shines
Speaker 1: a spotlight on ideas that help us to better understand
Speaker 1: ourselves and the world around us. You'll get a podcast
Speaker 1: that's guided by empathy, kindness, and great storytelling. And so
Speaker 1: today I want to share an episode of Hidden Brain.
Speaker 1: It's one that I'm quite partial too, because the main
Speaker 1: guest on the episode is me. But this time I'm
Speaker 1: not talking about the science of happiness. Instead, I joined
Speaker 1: Schankar to talk about some of my other search studies
Speaker 1: on the evolutionary origin of our economic biases. Shanka and
Speaker 1: I explore the question of why we make such bad
Speaker 1: decisions when it comes to money, and you'll get to
Speaker 1: hear about some experiments I did back in the day
Speaker 1: with monkeys. We'll look at what monkey's choices can tell
Speaker 1: us about human behavior. It was such a fun conversation
Speaker 1: I wanted to share it with you, so I hope
Speaker 1: you'll enjoy it. Here's my episode on Hidden Brain. This
Speaker 1: is Hidden Brain. I'm shankar Vedantem. Many of the most
Speaker 1: iconic characters and children's stories are talking animals. What yep, gag?
Speaker 1: Just keep swimming, Just keep swimming, Just keep as children,
Speaker 1: we love to imagine that animals think as we think
Speaker 1: and do as we do. We continue to love animal
Speaker 1: videos as we get older. If you need evidence, look
Speaker 1: at YouTube. Maybe you're responsible for one of the twenty
Speaker 1: two million views of this video. It's like to open
Speaker 1: wide s. One monkey lies flat with its mouth wide open.
Speaker 1: A second monkey hunches over the first, peering into its mouth.
Speaker 1: It's pretty typical stuff for monkeys. Animals groom each other
Speaker 1: all the time, But this video went viral for one
Speaker 1: very clear reason. The human voiceovers. Are you going anywhere
Speaker 1: nice on your holidays? Yeah? Yeah, don't try and talk.
Speaker 1: One of my hands are in your mouth. The voices
Speaker 1: turn an ordinary occurrence in the animal world into a
Speaker 1: conversation between a dentist and a patient. Except this dentist
Speaker 1: office is in a tree, and both doctor and patient
Speaker 1: are monkeys. Do a fill in here actually at the back?
Speaker 1: Is it mainly bananas? You eat, won't? I won't tell
Speaker 1: you again, sir, Please don't transpate when I'm working inside
Speaker 1: your mouth. This is just one part of the viral video.
Speaker 1: There are pelicans that look like they're laughing, a squirrel
Speaker 1: that's beatboxing two hours, that complain they've had too much cough.
Speaker 1: I can't blink anymore, and I can hear my heart
Speaker 1: bates in my ears. I don't get it. The joke
Speaker 1: here is that only humans are supposed to do stuff
Speaker 1: like this. Although we love anthropomorphized animals, we don't actually
Speaker 1: believe that other creatures think like us, care about the
Speaker 1: things we care about, or act the way we do.
Speaker 1: When animals behave like people, we find it hilarious. In
Speaker 1: recent years, scientists have begun to actively ask is what
Speaker 1: happens in our minds really that different from what happens
Speaker 1: in the minds of other animals. Researchers working with non
Speaker 1: human primates are finding areas of connection as well as
Speaker 1: important areas of difference. This week on Hidden Brain, what
Speaker 1: other animals can teach us about us the most anxious
Speaker 1: need to smell your breath. Oh oh, that is rank.
Speaker 1: I think gonna lie down. Yale University psychologist Laurie Santos
Speaker 1: has a long commute between her home in Connecticut and
Speaker 1: her lab. It's so far that it takes three forms
Speaker 1: of transportation and the better part of a day to
Speaker 1: get there. But there's no need to feel sorry for her.
Speaker 1: Laurie's lab is a Caribbean island, Cayo Santiago. It's this
Speaker 1: beautiful island right off the southeast coast of Puerto Rico.
Speaker 1: To get there, she flies to San Juan, drives about
Speaker 1: an hour to the small town of Punta Santiago, and
Speaker 1: then hops in a motor boat. Not long after she
Speaker 1: arrives on the dock, she's surrounded by monkeys. The sandy
Speaker 1: colored creatures are everywhere, some lounging around, others jumping off
Speaker 1: a tall branch into the water below. About a thousand
Speaker 1: free ranging reesus monkeys live on this island, and they're
Speaker 1: monkeys that have been used in research for the last
Speaker 1: like eighty years, and so they're incredibly habituated to humans,
Speaker 1: which means we can go down there and test monkeys
Speaker 1: in this natural setting, much like we would test human subjects.
Speaker 1: So you and your team simply walk out onto the
Speaker 1: island with your clipboards looking for ESUS monkeys to study.
Speaker 1: That's exactly right, and we kind of, you know, find
Speaker 1: ones that look kind of bored and like they might
Speaker 1: be willing to do something, and we PLoP down and
Speaker 1: run studies with them. How do you get the animals
Speaker 1: to sit still and take part in the experiment? Would
Speaker 1: why would they want to sign up? Well, they're naturally
Speaker 1: curious animals, you know, and usually many of the studies involved,
Speaker 1: you know, showing the monkeys something really interesting or something
Speaker 1: really unexpected. It's kind of like a little roving you know,
Speaker 1: theater show that shows up. We know when they're sitting
Speaker 1: there eating and they're like, okay, you know what are
Speaker 1: you going to show me? Not all the monkeys sit there,
Speaker 1: you know, So we definitely get some who kind of
Speaker 1: walk away and don't want to deal with us, but
Speaker 1: many are interested enough to stick around. Laurie Santos has
Speaker 1: spent most of her career trying to capture the attention
Speaker 1: of monkeys. Not because she's especially excited about monkeys. She
Speaker 1: didn't come to this work after a childhood of being
Speaker 1: obsessed with curious George no Laurie is fascinated by humans.
Speaker 1: There's no way to study what makes humans special. If
Speaker 1: you only study humans, you actually have to turn to
Speaker 1: all the other critters in the animal kingdom. Monkeys are
Speaker 1: a really important population because they can tell us the
Speaker 1: kinds of things that are unique to the human species.
Speaker 1: You can get very valuable information comparing monkey minds with
Speaker 1: human minds. Doing this can help us distinguish between things
Speaker 1: in our heads that are the product of nature from
Speaker 1: things in our heads that are the product of nature.
Speaker 1: You know, we have lots of human culture, we have
Speaker 1: lots of human teaching. You know, if we're really looking
Speaker 1: for the pure things that the human mind has and
Speaker 1: the absence of those different processes, it's not great to
Speaker 1: study adult humans. Now. Presumably it would be easier if
Speaker 1: you could actually study human ancestors, if you could go
Speaker 1: back and look at you know, human beings who lived
Speaker 1: several hundred thousand years ago, but they're not around any more.
Speaker 1: To round research experiments are Yeah, that's the joke, you know.
Speaker 1: You know, we com undergrad study pools to see if
Speaker 1: there are Neanderthals or Homo erectus, and they're not there.
Speaker 1: It'd be fantastic to study them. But but honestly, for
Speaker 1: many of the things that we've been studying, you know,
Speaker 1: these basic aspects of social cognition, or these basic aspects
Speaker 1: of decision making, these are capacities that are old enough
Speaker 1: that you might expect them to be shared with our
Speaker 1: common ancestor with reciss monkeys, say, and so in some
Speaker 1: ways for the particular cognitive aacities were studying. You know,
Speaker 1: it's good to kind of rewind the evolutionary tape as
Speaker 1: it were as far back as we can. I want
Speaker 1: to get your experiments in a moment. But just being
Speaker 1: on this island has apparently revealed all kinds of similarities
Speaker 1: between humans and other animals. One problem you've had to
Speaker 1: guard against on the island is unethical behavior. Tell me
Speaker 1: about the monkey thieves that you've encountered on Kio Santiago. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of sad to admit that you're
Speaker 1: getting ripped off by monkeys, but it happens more than
Speaker 1: you'd think on the island. You know, they're wily creatures
Speaker 1: who are often pretty hungry, and humans have backpacks filled
Speaker 1: with things like lunches and delicious fruit objects for studies
Speaker 1: and so on. And one of the big inspirations for
Speaker 1: some of the work we were trying to do on
Speaker 1: deception and kind of how monkeys think about other minds
Speaker 1: came from this active theft on behalf of one of
Speaker 1: the monkeys. We were running a study about number where
Speaker 1: we were showing monkeys different numbers of objects, and there
Speaker 1: was one research day that we actually had to go
Speaker 1: home from the island early because the monkey had ripped
Speaker 1: off all of the fruit we were using to display
Speaker 1: the numbers in the study. And I think it was
Speaker 1: really on that boat ride home that I started thinking,
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're doing this in a successful way.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not just that we're we're done researchers
Speaker 1: and they can outsmart us. They're specifically trying to steal
Speaker 1: from us when we're not aware of what they're doing,
Speaker 1: or maybe even when we have a false belief about
Speaker 1: what they're doing. And so it really launched this line
Speaker 1: of research to be like, Okay, how are they thinking
Speaker 1: about that problem? You know that they're duping us in
Speaker 1: you know, what are the representations they're using to solve
Speaker 1: this task. And is it true that they are not
Speaker 1: just simply stealing, but in some ways going after the
Speaker 1: easiest targets, in some ways what criminologists might call a
Speaker 1: rational model of crime. Yeah, in lots of ways. In fact,
Speaker 1: we set this up as a study. This was work
Speaker 1: early work that I did with John Flambum. We basically
Speaker 1: set up an experiment where we gave monkeys the opportunity
Speaker 1: to steal rationally. What we did was we had them experienced.
Speaker 1: They're kind of walking around and they see two people
Speaker 1: who are standing in front of a grape, which is
Speaker 1: a tasty piece of food for monkeys. One of those
Speaker 1: people is kind of looking at the grapes. If you
Speaker 1: try to steal it, he'd probably stop you, whereas the
Speaker 1: other person is not paying attention, either because he's turned
Speaker 1: around or he has a barrier in front of his
Speaker 1: face and so on. And we just gave monkeys one trial,
Speaker 1: and what we found is that even on that first trial,
Speaker 1: monkeys selectively stole from the person who couldn't see them.
Speaker 1: In other words, they're rationally calculating, you know, whether or
Speaker 1: not someone could detect that they're they're about to do
Speaker 1: something dastardly. That's fascinating, And you've done some experiments revealings,
Speaker 1: I'm fairly sophisticated things that the monkeys are doing, including
Speaker 1: things involving basic math. Can you tell me about some
Speaker 1: of the experiments where you've tested whether the monkeys have
Speaker 1: an ability to count a very simple counting for example. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this is some early work that was done at
Speaker 1: the field site back when I was an undergraduate actually,
Speaker 1: and it was studies that we're really trying to see
Speaker 1: whether or not monkeys shared the basic capacities that that
Speaker 1: human infants seemed to have. This is work by Karen
Speaker 1: Wynn and her colleagues at Yale. She found that even
Speaker 1: by about six months of age, babies can track the
Speaker 1: outcomes of arithmetic events. Here's mickey. So if babyc one
Speaker 1: object added to a box, and that box is covered
Speaker 1: up and up goes the screen, and the second object
Speaker 1: is put in and who is this, they seem to
Speaker 1: expect exactly two objects will be in the box. Watch
Speaker 1: the screen, and they seem to be surprised when the
Speaker 1: box is open to reveal only one object or three objects.
Speaker 1: And so we can do the same kinds of studies
Speaker 1: out in the field with the monkeys. We literally set
Speaker 1: up a little magical box for the monkeys. We've come
Speaker 1: to put on a little monkey magician hats and head
Speaker 1: out and then show the magic tricks. That the magic
Speaker 1: isn't all that exciting. You know, we're putting one or
Speaker 1: two eggplants into a box and revealing different outcomes. I
Speaker 1: can give you my magician's secrets if you need them,
Speaker 1: But basically what we found is that monkeys show exactly
Speaker 1: the same performance on these studies as human infants. In
Speaker 1: other words, they expect the outcome of one plus one
Speaker 1: to be exactly two, and they're surprised if they see
Speaker 1: three or one. And in some ways, it's interesting the
Speaker 1: connection you're making between studying monkeys and studying infants, because
Speaker 1: in some ways they both tell us. When you study
Speaker 1: a child, a small child, an infant, and you see
Speaker 1: this kind of rudimentary maths skills, it actually tells you
Speaker 1: you don't actually have to go to school to learn
Speaker 1: that basic math. Some of that is actually potentially programmed
Speaker 1: into how the brain operates. That's right. It's yet another
Speaker 1: way of kind of removing all the training and teaching
Speaker 1: and cultural learning that we humans have. If you turn
Speaker 1: to human infants, what you find is capacities that are
Speaker 1: there in the absence of experience, right in the absence
Speaker 1: of very little experience. These studies suggest that there are
Speaker 1: more similarities than we imagine between humans and other animals.
Speaker 1: They challenge our assumption that the human mind is unique.
Speaker 1: For example, Laurie says, one longstanding belief was that non
Speaker 1: human primates were bad at thinking about other animals perspectives.
Speaker 1: Even our closest living relative, chimpanzees, had failed on really
Speaker 1: simple tasks where a humans trying to get the chimpanzee
Speaker 1: to look for food in one particular location, and there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of cups that are turned over, and the
Speaker 1: human would point at one of these overturned cups. And
Speaker 1: what the research showed is that primates were really bad
Speaker 1: at this task. They didn't seem to realize that pointing
Speaker 1: meant some information that a human was trying to communicate
Speaker 1: with you, And this really led to the view that
Speaker 1: primates were bad at understanding others perspectives. They didn't seem
Speaker 1: to know what other individuals knew, and that that that
Speaker 1: line of research kind of it didn't really settle well
Speaker 1: with a lot of the people who are watching primates
Speaker 1: in the field, you know, like, you know, it's bad
Speaker 1: to be reading this paper that you know primates don't
Speaker 1: understand other people's perpective when you're getting ripped off every
Speaker 1: day on this island and have to go home early,
Speaker 1: and so, you know, So that was what launched a
Speaker 1: lot of our studies and other studies by researchers like
Speaker 1: Brian Hare and colleagues trying to look at, you know,
Speaker 1: what are the basic capacities primate non human primates have
Speaker 1: for understanding like what other people's perspectives are. And as
Speaker 1: part of these studies, we've developed all kinds of different
Speaker 1: things to test whether monkeys share our understanding of what
Speaker 1: others perceive, what others here, and what others know. And
Speaker 1: all of those studies by and large seemed to be
Speaker 1: showing that nonhuman primates are pretty good at that they
Speaker 1: seem to know something about someone else's perspective. Can you
Speaker 1: give me one or two examples of what these studies
Speaker 1: are and what they find. Yeah. One of the studies
Speaker 1: was again built off a study that had been done
Speaker 1: in human infants. This was a study looking at whether
Speaker 1: or not human infants predict that a person will reach
Speaker 1: where she knows an object is. So imagine the following scenario.
Speaker 1: You're watching somebody who seems to really like a particular object.
Speaker 1: There's a toy that they're really interested in, and that
Speaker 1: toy rolls over and falls into one of two boxes.
Speaker 1: Question is where do you expect that person to reach.
Speaker 1: You probably expect her to reach in the box where
Speaker 1: she knows it to be. You know, people reach for
Speaker 1: things where they think they are, and that's what the
Speaker 1: research found with babies. Babies are surprised if that person
Speaker 1: who saw a toy roll into one box reaches into
Speaker 1: a different box to look for the toy. We just
Speaker 1: imported that same study for monkeys. We had monkeys watch
Speaker 1: as a human looked longingly at a delicious apple, and
Speaker 1: then they saw that apple move into a particular box,
Speaker 1: and we showed that the monkeys are surprised if when
Speaker 1: a person sees an apple move into a box, they
Speaker 1: look to the opposite location. They kind of expect a
Speaker 1: person to reach for something where they know it's going
Speaker 1: to be. When we come back more from Laurie's experiments
Speaker 1: and what they may tell us about the human mind,
Speaker 1: During the summer, psychologist Laurie Santos takes her research outdoors,
Speaker 1: under palm trees and sunshine. She studies Reesus monkeys on
Speaker 1: the island of Caio Santiago, but that's only one setting
Speaker 1: for her research. For a decade, she also studied monkeys
Speaker 1: at a lab she built at Yale University. Unlike the
Speaker 1: Reesus monkeys in Puerto Rico, the monkeys at Yale were capuchin's.
Speaker 1: We mostly chose different species because in some ways capuchins
Speaker 1: are very easy to kind of house socially in captivity,
Speaker 1: so you can have them in kind of a big
Speaker 1: zoo enclosure and they're very comfortable, and that was one
Speaker 1: of the reasons we picked that species. A second reason
Speaker 1: was that with the capuchins, we wanted to look at
Speaker 1: a set of different questions. We did work on what
Speaker 1: they knew about others perspectives, but we also wanted to
Speaker 1: look at their decision making strategies, and there was lots
Speaker 1: of work showing that capuchins were really good at kind
Speaker 1: of making decisions and using tools, but in particular that
Speaker 1: they were good at a method that we really wanted
Speaker 1: to use, which was a method involving token trading where
Speaker 1: monkeys could pay us for different goods and services. There
Speaker 1: was lots of work suggesting that capuchins might be good
Speaker 1: at that, and we thought that might be an interesting
Speaker 1: avenue to start looking at some of monkeys economic decision making.
Speaker 1: Laurie created what she called a monkey marketplace. She wanted
Speaker 1: to teach monkeys to use money. I mean, when we
Speaker 1: first started talking about these studies, you know, to friends
Speaker 1: and stuff, they're like, you're going to teach monkeys to
Speaker 1: use money? You like, it sounds crazy, but in fact
Speaker 1: it's pretty It's pretty simple to get the monkeys to
Speaker 1: do this kind of trading. They're naturally really curious critters,
Speaker 1: and so at the start we just put inside their
Speaker 1: enclosure little metal tokens. They kind of looked like, you know,
Speaker 1: little fake pieces of money, and the kuchins would naturally
Speaker 1: pick these up, but they kind of, you know, didn't
Speaker 1: have any use for them, and they quickly realized that
Speaker 1: if they handed them back to a human experimenter, we'd
Speaker 1: give the monkeys back a piece of food for the tokens.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of like a token for a piece
Speaker 1: of food sort of exchange. And what was surprising is
Speaker 1: that the monkeys picked this up incredibly quickly, you know,
Speaker 1: within just a few exposures they realized like, oh wait,
Speaker 1: I give tokens for food, got it. And then once
Speaker 1: we had them doing that, we could ask all kinds
Speaker 1: of economic questions about what they knew about real markets.
Speaker 1: Once the monkeys learned the tokens with currency, they began
Speaker 1: hunting for bargains. The first thing we did was give
Speaker 1: them opportunities to find good deals, and that meant giving
Speaker 1: them a choice between different goods offered at different prices.
Speaker 1: So the monkey marketplace was when the monkeys, you know,
Speaker 1: they came in for testing from their big social enclosure
Speaker 1: and entered a little smaller enclosure where they had access
Speaker 1: to a few of these tokens, and then monkeys had
Speaker 1: a choice between two experimenters who sold different goods at
Speaker 1: different prices. You know, so someone might be selling a
Speaker 1: grape for one token and someone might be selling, say
Speaker 1: a cucumber from one token. And the question was whether
Speaker 1: the monkeys maximized their their food dollar as it were,
Speaker 1: you know, did they shop rationally given the amount to
Speaker 1: food that they were getting and the kind of food.
Speaker 1: And the amazing thing that we've found is that the
Speaker 1: monkeys seemed to be relatively rational in this market. That is,
Speaker 1: they seemed to substitute rationally. They bought more food with
Speaker 1: their token dollar, and they seem to prefer shopping for
Speaker 1: foods that they liked better. Did they actually, you think,
Speaker 1: enjoy the process of shopping? I mean humans, as you know,
Speaker 1: sort of lots of humans actually enjoy the process of
Speaker 1: going to a store and buying things. What was there
Speaker 1: a pleasure in sort of doing this, because, of course,
Speaker 1: what the monkeys were doing here is not just simply
Speaker 1: I'm part of an experiment where I press you know,
Speaker 1: I press a lever and I get some food. In
Speaker 1: this case, you actually can choose. I can go to
Speaker 1: Personnai or I can go to person BI have choices,
Speaker 1: I have autonomy as a consumer. Yeah, it's hard. I
Speaker 1: mean we didn't have a direct empirical measure of pleasure.
Speaker 1: But but they really did seem to like it. You know,
Speaker 1: they would, you know, rush into the enclosure to try
Speaker 1: to do this. And what I loved most is that
Speaker 1: they tended to pay a lot of attention to you know,
Speaker 1: what the different options were. You know, they'd kind of
Speaker 1: go on both sides of the enclosure and look at
Speaker 1: what each experiment was offering very carefully. So they seem
Speaker 1: to be very careful shoppers. I'm wondering whether the monkeys
Speaker 1: ever traded tokens with each other. Did they say, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm going to pay you three tokens for you to
Speaker 1: groom me. Yeah. Well, you know, the remarkable thing is
Speaker 1: that the monkeys never really did that. I mean, to
Speaker 1: be fair, we didn't give them opportunities to do that,
Speaker 1: you know, because they were kind of with the tokens
Speaker 1: mostly by themselves. But but what's striking is it doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like the monkeys maybe need a token economy in
Speaker 1: their own social system. They kind of have an economy
Speaker 1: that works. They have this really strict dominance hierarchy, and
Speaker 1: that determines who gets goods and services. So in other words,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're a low ranking mail and you
Speaker 1: had a big wallet of tokens, if the alpha male
Speaker 1: saw that, you might kind of naturally let them go
Speaker 1: and let him take it, because you know, that's the
Speaker 1: social system you're part of. You know, it's equivalent to
Speaker 1: you know, human systems of you know, back in the
Speaker 1: days of feudalism and these kinds of things where only
Speaker 1: certain individuals are supposed to get access to goods and services.
Speaker 1: So in some ways it kind of taught us that,
Speaker 1: you know, to be a species that uses money, you
Speaker 1: really have to be a relatively egalitarian species. One of
Speaker 1: the next questions Laurie wanted to answer, it gets at
Speaker 1: the heart of how humans make economic decisions. The economics
Speaker 1: has long rested on the idea that humans are rational
Speaker 1: when money is involved, but we now have plenty of
Speaker 1: evidence that this often isn't the case. Humans are amazing species,
Speaker 1: but you know, pick up any article of the economists
Speaker 1: and you figure out that we're not great at money.
Speaker 1: You know, we kind of mess up a lot of times.
Speaker 1: You know, we overpay attention to losses and risk, we
Speaker 1: don't necessarily invest rationally. And researchers have found a set
Speaker 1: of standard cognitive biases that humans show in the markets,
Speaker 1: and so we wanted to use the monkey market to
Speaker 1: see if monkeys are biased in the same way as
Speaker 1: humans are. And to do that, we gave them options
Speaker 1: that objectively gave them similar outcomes, so they would get
Speaker 1: the same amount of food, but those options were framed differently. Basically,
Speaker 1: we're stealing from classic work in human psychology with adult
Speaker 1: participants from people like Danny Koneman and Amos t Verski,
Speaker 1: who gave people problems where things were framed as gains
Speaker 1: or losses. Danny Koneman and Amos to Verski famously found
Speaker 1: that people don't think of gains and losses the same way.
Speaker 1: Let's say I was going to give you ten dollars.
Speaker 1: In one scenario, I tell you I'm going to give
Speaker 1: you fifteen dollars and instead give you ten. In another scenario,
Speaker 1: I tell you I'm going to give you five dollars
Speaker 1: and instead give you ten. In both scenarios, you receive
Speaker 1: the same amount ten dollars, but they feel different. In
Speaker 1: one case, you feel something's being taken away from you,
Speaker 1: in the other, you feel like you got a little extra.
Speaker 1: Laurie wanted to see if monkeys responded the same way,
Speaker 1: and so to do that, we would show monkeys a
Speaker 1: case where ultimately they're going to get, say, two pieces
Speaker 1: of food, but that two pieces of food is framed differently.
Speaker 1: One experiment or just shows two pieces of food and
Speaker 1: the monkeys get too, so that's kind of what they expect,
Speaker 1: whereas another experiment or say shows three pieces of food
Speaker 1: and then the monkey only gets two pieces of food.
Speaker 1: And that second case, you know, you get the same
Speaker 1: amount of food in the end, but it kind of
Speaker 1: feels like you lost something. And what we would find
Speaker 1: and studies like that is that the monkeys seem to
Speaker 1: systematically avoid the loss, even though they were getting the
Speaker 1: same amount of food, They would avoid the guy that
Speaker 1: gave them what felt like a loss. And this is
Speaker 1: exactly what humans seem to do in a lot of
Speaker 1: standard decision making studies. We tend to avoid losses even
Speaker 1: when they're not objectively a loss, even when they're just
Speaker 1: framed that way. And what about the situation where maybe
Speaker 1: someone showed only one item of food, but when the
Speaker 1: monkey paid up potoke, the monkey got too. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: so the monkeys also seemed to pay a little bit
Speaker 1: of attention to gains what looked like gains. In fact,
Speaker 1: what we gave the monkeys a choice between was a
Speaker 1: gain that they would get for sure, so a sure
Speaker 1: gain and a risky gain. Let me give you the
Speaker 1: following problem that was given to humans by comment Versky.
Speaker 1: I'm first going to give you a thousand dollars, which
Speaker 1: seems great, but now you're going to have to figure
Speaker 1: out a way to get more money. On one hand,
Speaker 1: you could just get five hundred extra dollars with certainty,
Speaker 1: so you get fifteen hundred dollars. Or you could take
Speaker 1: a risk. I'm going to flip a coin and if
Speaker 1: it comes up heads, you get another thousand dollars, but
Speaker 1: tails you get nothing. When you pitch this problem to
Speaker 1: most undergraduates, most people pick the safe option. There. They
Speaker 1: want to go with the gain that they get for sure.
Speaker 1: And that's the problem we gave to monkeys. We gave
Speaker 1: them a choice between a sure gain, like they saw
Speaker 1: one piece of food but knew they were going to
Speaker 1: get too, versus a risky option where they saw one
Speaker 1: piece of food and they were always going to get
Speaker 1: that one, but they might get two extra ones in
Speaker 1: a risky way. So the objective was exactly the same.
Speaker 1: All that varied was their risk, And what we found
Speaker 1: was that the monkeys selectively shocked at the person who
Speaker 1: gave them the safe bet. They, like humans, avoided risk
Speaker 1: when they were in a situation that seemed framed like
Speaker 1: a gain. But all that change when we made the
Speaker 1: situation more about losses, and so you can experience this yourself.
Speaker 1: You know. Imagine I'm going to start you with two
Speaker 1: thousand dollars, and your choices are how to lose this money.
Speaker 1: One option is that you can lose it with certainty,
Speaker 1: so I just take five hundred dollars away. But another
Speaker 1: option is that you can take a risk. I'm going
Speaker 1: to flip a coin. If it comes up heads, that's bad.
Speaker 1: You lose a thousand dollars. Tails you lose nothing. And
Speaker 1: so objectively the amounts are the same. On average, you'll
Speaker 1: get fifteen hundred dollars. But in practice, now that loss
Speaker 1: seems kind of yucky. Most people actually, when given that choice,
Speaker 1: avoid the loss. And what we found when we gave
Speaker 1: the monkeys qualitatively similar economic situations is that they also
Speaker 1: avoided the loss. And that's what's irrational. They're switching their
Speaker 1: choice about risk depending on how a problem is arbitrarily framed.
Speaker 1: In otherwise, they took the safe option when it was
Speaker 1: framed as a gain, they took the risky option when
Speaker 1: it was framed as a loss. That's exactly right, And
Speaker 1: what's surprising is that's exactly the same bias that we
Speaker 1: see in housing markets. That's the exact same bias that
Speaker 1: we see on the golf course. People actually put differently
Speaker 1: when they're putting and they know they're going to go
Speaker 1: overpar versus underpar. It seems to be a basic bias
Speaker 1: we have and how we as humans frame the world.
Speaker 1: And what this study showed was that monkeys seem to
Speaker 1: have exactly that same bias. So researchers like Danny Kaneman
Speaker 1: have also studied something called the endowment effect. What is
Speaker 1: the endowment effect and do we see the same thing
Speaker 1: among monkeys. Yeah, the endowment effect is a bias where
Speaker 1: we overvalue things that we own. You know, that old
Speaker 1: couch that you've had in your house. You know, if
Speaker 1: somebody were to offer you some money on ebate, they
Speaker 1: might think it's kind of, you know, a little ratty,
Speaker 1: but you think, because you own it, it's amazing. This
Speaker 1: is a bias we see playing out all different parts
Speaker 1: of the market in h cultures, and we wanted to
Speaker 1: see whether monkeys had that bias too. What we basically
Speaker 1: did was to give monkeys different food items, so now
Speaker 1: they're trading foods rather than tokens, and we wanted to
Speaker 1: see whether monkeys would give up their piece of food
Speaker 1: for an equivalent piece of food. And what we found
Speaker 1: was that they didn't seem to want to do that,
Speaker 1: even when we upped the anties such that the food
Speaker 1: we were giving them was many many, many times as
Speaker 1: valuable as the food that they had. At one level,
Speaker 1: we were so interested in seeing if we could get
Speaker 1: the monkeys to trade back their food that we offered
Speaker 1: them in contrast to like a small piece of grape
Speaker 1: what we called the fluff taco, which is a fruit
Speaker 1: roll up filled with marshmallow fluff. It's about the sweetest
Speaker 1: thing you can offer a monkey and a small go
Speaker 1: And even in that case, they still wouldn't trade their
Speaker 1: piece of food that they were endowed with for a
Speaker 1: different piece of food. So humans and Kipuchin monkeys shared
Speaker 1: a common ancestor tens of millions of years ago. What
Speaker 1: does it tell us that we see loss of version
Speaker 1: or the endowment effect in monkeys as well as humans.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it tells us that whatever cognitive
Speaker 1: strategies we're using, you know, when we go to the
Speaker 1: grocery store to buy our food, those mechanisms aren't just
Speaker 1: mechanisms that are built for using money. Like those mechanisms
Speaker 1: are mechanisms that we've been using to frame decisions for millennia. Right,
Speaker 1: The mechanisms that we use when we're making quick purchases
Speaker 1: online are the same as the mechanisms monkeys must be
Speaker 1: using when they're foraging and so on. So I think
Speaker 1: it tells us that the strategies we're using are really
Speaker 1: really old, and that gives us some hints about what
Speaker 1: those strategies might be for and whether or not we
Speaker 1: should really consider them irrational. I was going to ask
Speaker 1: you that question. I mean, we think of these as
Speaker 1: being examples of bias or error, but the fact that
Speaker 1: they're really ancient suggest that perhaps they played a useful
Speaker 1: role at least in our evolutionary past, if not the present. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you'd think if they were that harmful, they
Speaker 1: would have been selected out. You know, monkeys who use
Speaker 1: loss of version versus some other bias you know, might
Speaker 1: not do as well, kind of you know, real monkey mark.
Speaker 1: It's out there in the evolutionary world. I think that's
Speaker 1: one possibility. I think, you know, when you think about
Speaker 1: what could a bias like that be useful for, it
Speaker 1: turns out that it's hard to think in objective terms
Speaker 1: in the world. Sometimes there's a strategy where you think relative,
Speaker 1: like relative to someone else's option, a relative to a
Speaker 1: reference point. Those strategies can be better. So imagine the
Speaker 1: following scenario. You're you're instantly a Kapuchin monkey, and you
Speaker 1: have to figure out how much food to get today.
Speaker 1: You know, you're forging for nuts. How many nuts should
Speaker 1: you go for and when should you stop? You know,
Speaker 1: it's a hard problem. But if you see that I'm
Speaker 1: walking around with three nuts and Joe Monkey's walking around
Speaker 1: with three nuts, then maybe shooting for three nuts is
Speaker 1: pretty good. Maybe if you only get two, you should
Speaker 1: work a little harder and feel bad. But if you
Speaker 1: get four, I shouldn't You know, you don't need to celebrate.
Speaker 1: That was just good. And so it might be that
Speaker 1: strategies like loss a version, where you really are comparing
Speaker 1: against other people and then you have mechanisms to motivate
Speaker 1: you not to go under what other people have, those
Speaker 1: might have been more useful than we think. It's just
Speaker 1: when we throw them into stock markets that they kind
Speaker 1: of look a little quirky, you know. We had Heath Pain,
Speaker 1: the psychologist on Hidden Brain, recently talking about how inequality
Speaker 1: works in the psychology of inequality, and in some ways
Speaker 1: you and others have found that monkeys exhibit some of
Speaker 1: the same behavior. They pay very very close attention, as
Speaker 1: in the analogy you just gave me, to what other
Speaker 1: monkeys have and whether what they have in relative terms
Speaker 1: is fair. I think that's right. I mean, there's some
Speaker 1: classic work by their researchers, Sarah Brosnon and Franz to all.
Speaker 1: They find that monkeys don't just pay attention to what
Speaker 1: other individuals have when they feel like they're getting a
Speaker 1: raw deal. You know, if you're unlikey who's getting kind
Speaker 1: of a yucky cucumber when another monkey's getting a grape,
Speaker 1: you actually reject that offer. So it's not just that
Speaker 1: monkeys sort of experience things like, hey, that's unfair, they
Speaker 1: actually act on it in ways that reduce the number
Speaker 1: of resources they have. When we come back experiments that
Speaker 1: show what other animals do differently than us, and the
Speaker 1: psychological quirks that make us uniquely human. In the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: a British inventor named William Henry Talbot was so caught
Speaker 1: up in his work that he and his wife had
Speaker 1: to delay their honeymoon Eventually they did go, winding their
Speaker 1: way through Europe to Italy. He was mesmerized by Lake Como,
Speaker 1: with its wishbone shape and its backdrop of the Alps.
Speaker 1: He was neither the first nor the last to be
Speaker 1: enchanted by the view. It was even a lake that
Speaker 1: George Lucas used in one of the Star Wars movies
Speaker 1: when Padmi and Anakin were getting together. We used to
Speaker 1: lie out on the sand and let the sun gi
Speaker 1: us and try to guess the names of the birds singing.
Speaker 1: I don't like sound, its course, and he allegedly didn't
Speaker 1: use any CGI on that scene. William Henry Talbot wanted
Speaker 1: to capture the moment and share it with others, but
Speaker 1: it was the nineteenth century cameras as we know them
Speaker 1: didn't exist. What he had was something called a camera lucida,
Speaker 1: which is like, you know a little device that you
Speaker 1: can use to kind of sketch things. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like the iPhone eleven of his time, and he made
Speaker 1: an amazing sketch. One that's very famous because he was
Speaker 1: very disappointed with his sketch. He allegedly said it was
Speaker 1: a melancholy to behold, which is not what you want
Speaker 1: to say about your honeymoons, and it caused him to
Speaker 1: start thinking about what it would be like, what technology
Speaker 1: could actually let images that he saw in his version
Speaker 1: of a camera to stick on paper, and it led
Speaker 1: him to be one of the first developers of a
Speaker 1: lot of the photo technology that we use in real
Speaker 1: cameras today. William Henry Talbot's pioneering techniques and photography tell
Speaker 1: us something about how humans we have an impulse to
Speaker 1: share with others what is going on in our heads,
Speaker 1: our feelings, our experiences, our perspectives. Laurie things this might
Speaker 1: be an important area of difference with other animals. I
Speaker 1: think even if animals had had photographs, they wouldn't use them.
Speaker 1: You know, if they had their iPhone eleven, they wouldn't
Speaker 1: take pictures. And it's so funny when you realize that,
Speaker 1: because you know, that urge to share stuff is such
Speaker 1: a very human urge. You know, it's one that researchers
Speaker 1: like Mike Thomas Ello and colleagues fine emerges like within
Speaker 1: the first year of life, babies are already starting to
Speaker 1: point at things and trying to get their parents to
Speaker 1: look and so it's a very, very fundamental urge, and remarkably,
Speaker 1: it seems to be one that's unique to humans. And
Speaker 1: you can see this so strikingly when you watch the
Speaker 1: behavior of you know, mother primates and their kids, like
Speaker 1: they just don't tend to show each other stuff, Like
Speaker 1: there's just not like active teaching or even active like
Speaker 1: hey mom, look at this, look at me. They kind
Speaker 1: of just don't care. How do these differences reveal themselves
Speaker 1: and experiments, especially when it comes to certain mistakes that
Speaker 1: perhaps monkeys, chims and dogs don't make that humans do make. Well.
Speaker 1: I think one of the consequences of being a species
Speaker 1: that shares a lot of stuff is that we also
Speaker 1: are probably a species that believes a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, we want to share because it affects what
Speaker 1: others learn, and that suggests that we might be a
Speaker 1: species that kind of can overlearn based on when we're
Speaker 1: getting information from others. In other words, we really are
Speaker 1: liable to believe the stuff that we're hearing from other individuals,
Speaker 1: you know. That's why the sharing feels so powerful. But
Speaker 1: given that sharing is kind of in beta testing, it
Speaker 1: suggests that the learning might be in beta testing too,
Speaker 1: and so the way that researchers have tried to test
Speaker 1: this is to ask whether or not humans are prone
Speaker 1: to overlearn when they get bad information from others. It's
Speaker 1: a it's a tendency that researchers call over imitation, the
Speaker 1: tendency to imitate too much. And so here's the study.
Speaker 1: You bring human children in chimpanzees into the lab. This
Speaker 1: is work done by Vicki Horner and her colleagues, and
Speaker 1: you give them access to a little puzzle box. In
Speaker 1: some cases, the puzzle box is opaque, it's hard to
Speaker 1: figure out how it opens up. But they get to
Speaker 1: see a human experiment or who helps them, and the
Speaker 1: human are experiment or does all these different actions on
Speaker 1: the box. You have to tap a lever at the
Speaker 1: top and stick a tool in, and it's very, very elaborate.
Speaker 1: What you find is that when kids and chimpanzees see that,
Speaker 1: they copy pretty slavishly everything the human does. And that
Speaker 1: kind of copying makes sense because they don't know how
Speaker 1: to open the box. But in a different condition, all
Speaker 1: that changes. Now you give kids in chimpanzees a transparent
Speaker 1: puzzle box, and because it's transparent, it's really obvious how
Speaker 1: to open it. There's just a door, and you open
Speaker 1: the door. There's nothing else in the box. The subjects
Speaker 1: also get to see this experiment, are painstakingly trying to
Speaker 1: open the box, you know, using all these levers, using
Speaker 1: tools inside it, and so on. But you can see
Speaker 1: those actions aren't doing anything. What you find is that
Speaker 1: the chimpanzees are pretty rational on this task. They completely
Speaker 1: ignore what the human did on the transparent box and
Speaker 1: just solve it in the really easy way. But sadly,
Speaker 1: perhaps for our species, human children don't do that. They
Speaker 1: slavishly follow everything they see the human doing. They overimitate
Speaker 1: these actions, suggesting that when you see another individual doing something,
Speaker 1: especially intentionally, it messes up the way you think about
Speaker 1: the world. In the case of the children, it messes
Speaker 1: up the way they think the box works. There's also
Speaker 1: been some work, i think, looking at a sort of
Speaker 1: child development showing that when children are shown how a
Speaker 1: certain toy works a certain way, they become it's really
Speaker 1: difficult for them to actually explore the toy and actually
Speaker 1: play with it in a different way that they actually believe. Okay,
Speaker 1: now I've been shown this is how the toy works,
Speaker 1: this is how I have to play with it. That's
Speaker 1: exactly right. This is some lovely work by Liz Bonowich
Speaker 1: which is shown that when children are taught something, it
Speaker 1: limits their exploration. So if they're given a puzzle box
Speaker 1: with lots of different knobs and interesting things, and a
Speaker 1: teacher comes and says, hey, here, this is how it works,
Speaker 1: and just presses one of the buttons, when children interact
Speaker 1: with that box, they'll just press that button. Even though
Speaker 1: all these other levers and cool things also make the
Speaker 1: toy do interest stuff. Kids never find it, and so
Speaker 1: it seems like teaching We often think of as this
Speaker 1: wonderful thing, and of course it is, you know, of course,
Speaker 1: this is the way we learn so much about our
Speaker 1: culture and how to do things in the world. But
Speaker 1: there's a downside to it, which is that we don't
Speaker 1: have mechanisms to be critical about the things we're hearing
Speaker 1: from other humans. There's something humans do that's so intuitive
Speaker 1: it's hard to even recognize that we're doing it. We
Speaker 1: can believe one thing I can understand. Another person might
Speaker 1: believe something entirely different. Imagine that you ask a friend
Speaker 1: what day it is. She tells you it's the twenty.
Speaker 1: First you check your calendar and realize it's actually the twentieth.
Speaker 1: You're capable of understanding that it is the twentieth by
Speaker 1: that your friend believes something else. We can constantly think
Speaker 1: about these cases where other people have misinformation, you know, otherwise,
Speaker 1: you know, Romeo and Juliet would make no sense. You know,
Speaker 1: Juliet didn't know that Romeo was alive, and all these
Speaker 1: things that I forget from my high school English class. Right.
Speaker 1: But this is the kind of thing we do all
Speaker 1: the time. We constantly can think about that other people
Speaker 1: have a different belief than us. We can think about
Speaker 1: past us and know that we had different beliefs than
Speaker 1: we do have now. We can think about future us
Speaker 1: and think, you know, I might have a different belief
Speaker 1: when I'm old and gray than when I do now,
Speaker 1: and so is. It seems so easy because it comes
Speaker 1: so fluidly to us, But cognitively this is really tricky.
Speaker 1: It means I have to maintain this like representation, this
Speaker 1: information about the world that I know is really true,
Speaker 1: versus at the same time knowing that somebody else thinks
Speaker 1: something different. It's it's kind of a hard task when
Speaker 1: you think about it. You know, when you think about
Speaker 1: the movies. For example, the movies wouldn't work if we
Speaker 1: didn't have this scale. I'm thinking about the famous shower
Speaker 1: scene in Psycho. You know, as a member of the audience,
Speaker 1: you know that you know the murder is about to
Speaker 1: kill the woman in the shower, but the woman in
Speaker 1: the shower doesn't know this, and of course that that
Speaker 1: increases your fear and anxiety about what's happening, not just
Speaker 1: because you know a motor is about to take place,
Speaker 1: but because you know the victim doesn't know that a
Speaker 1: murder is about to take place. That's exactly right. And
Speaker 1: beyond that, you know, another feature of this ability that
Speaker 1: we have is, you know, it allows us to do
Speaker 1: fiction at all. You know, like you know that there's
Speaker 1: a murder about to take place, but it's not in
Speaker 1: your house, like you can represent that. There's a separation
Speaker 1: between you and what you know in the moment and
Speaker 1: other people's representations, other people's beliefs. So it's a really
Speaker 1: fundamental capacity, and that's one of the reasons that researchers
Speaker 1: have been so interested in whether or not non human
Speaker 1: animals can do this. You know, how do we solve
Speaker 1: this hard computational problem, like do we need language to
Speaker 1: solve it, you know, is this the kind of thing
Speaker 1: other species can look at. Testing this, though, is pretty
Speaker 1: tricky because you have to be able to ask whether
Speaker 1: or not a monkey knows that some other person has
Speaker 1: a false belief, and it's hard because they can't tell you. Luckily,
Speaker 1: we have different tricks we can use to test it,
Speaker 1: and one of those tricks is kind of using the
Speaker 1: same type of study we use to look at what
Speaker 1: monkeys know about other perspectives. These kinds of studies where
Speaker 1: monkeys see people acting in different ways based on what
Speaker 1: they know. But in this case, we can ask how
Speaker 1: monkeys expect people to behave based on their belief. And
Speaker 1: here's the situation. You know, we just use this example
Speaker 1: of me having the false belief about it raining, you know,
Speaker 1: so imagine I think it's raining out in Newhaven. You
Speaker 1: might have certain predictions about my behavior. You might expect
Speaker 1: me to take an umbrella and be surprised, you know,
Speaker 1: if I went out in like, you know, shoes that
Speaker 1: weren't appropriate for the rain. That would surprise you because
Speaker 1: you know something about my belief, even though that belief
Speaker 1: is false. That was basically the logic we used to
Speaker 1: set up a study with monkeys. Monkeys get to watch
Speaker 1: as a person is looking for an object that she
Speaker 1: really wants in the world, and the monkeys get to
Speaker 1: watch this object rolling back and forth between two boxes,
Speaker 1: a left box and a right box. So at this
Speaker 1: point the monkey should be thinking, oh, the person's going
Speaker 1: to reach into the left box. But then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, the person gets covered up. She's not paying
Speaker 1: attention anymore, and the monkey gets his own private access
Speaker 1: to the fact that the object that the person wants
Speaker 1: then rolls into the right sidebox, so the monkey knows
Speaker 1: where it's really But the question is whether or not
Speaker 1: the monkey recognizes that the person shouldn't know where it is,
Speaker 1: that the person should have a false belief. If the
Speaker 1: monkey gets that, he should be surprised if the person
Speaker 1: reaches to where the object really is because she shouldn't
Speaker 1: know that she should have a false belief. But interestingly,
Speaker 1: that's not what we find. What we find is that
Speaker 1: the monkeys seem to make no prediction in that case.
Speaker 1: And what this tells us, which is so cool, is
Speaker 1: it tells us that the monkey is realized the person's
Speaker 1: perspective is different from their own, but they can't simulate
Speaker 1: what it is. In other words, they know, well, she
Speaker 1: doesn't know what I know. Like that's why they don't
Speaker 1: really have a prediction about where she should act. They
Speaker 1: don't think she should reach for the object, but they
Speaker 1: can't really simulate this other belief. So this is so
Speaker 1: fascinating because when you think about what the monkeys were
Speaker 1: doing on the island in Puerto Rico, and they're basically saying,
Speaker 1: this person has her back to me, so it's going
Speaker 1: to be easier to steal a fruit from this person
Speaker 1: than the person who is facing me. At some level,
Speaker 1: the monkey is able to say, I have a sense
Speaker 1: that the person who's back is toward me knows less
Speaker 1: than the person who is faces toward me. So they
Speaker 1: have some sense of representation of what's happening inside the
Speaker 1: experimenter's mind or the experimenter's knowledge, But that doesn't translate
Speaker 1: in this experiment into what you think about are the
Speaker 1: beliefs of the experiment and what's the distinction between those
Speaker 1: two scenarios. Yeah, the distinction is between a case where
Speaker 1: the monkeys simply think, oh, that person doesn't know anything,
Speaker 1: versus that person has a very specific belief right, and
Speaker 1: when you get back to, you know, the example you used,
Speaker 1: the kind of the shower example, the really scary example,
Speaker 1: the monkeys might have the same intuition and the same
Speaker 1: reaction to that scene that we do. You know, they
Speaker 1: would probably know the person doesn't know that you know,
Speaker 1: a killer is coming. But what they might not be
Speaker 1: able to represent is what the person themselves does believe.
Speaker 1: You know, they believe they're safe in the shower, you
Speaker 1: know that nothing's going to happen, that they're going to
Speaker 1: be in their fine Like the monkeys seem to not
Speaker 1: be able to simulate all the things that the person knows,
Speaker 1: but that the monkey himself doesn't know. They know reality
Speaker 1: in the here and now, but they can't kind of
Speaker 1: simulate things that go beyond reality, you know, someone else's
Speaker 1: belief that's not true of reality now or even you know,
Speaker 1: what we're going to think in the future, or what
Speaker 1: we thought in the past, even counterfactual situations, things that
Speaker 1: aren't true in the here and now, but in theory
Speaker 1: could be true. Those aren't situations about the world that
Speaker 1: the monkeys seem to be able to simulate. That's not
Speaker 1: the kind of thing they seem to be able to represent.
Speaker 1: But if you think about how critical that is not
Speaker 1: just to know someone has a different perspective, but to
Speaker 1: know what that perspective is. It really is the crux
Speaker 1: of human cognition in so many ways. So it's fascinating
Speaker 1: that other animals seem not to have this. There's one
Speaker 1: last area of difference I want to explore, which has
Speaker 1: to do with how price shapes the perceptions of humans
Speaker 1: and other animals. How do humans and other animals respond
Speaker 1: when you raise the price of an object. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: this was another spot where we actually assumed we would
Speaker 1: see similarity between monkeys and humans in this respect, but
Speaker 1: it was one of the few spots in the economic
Speaker 1: domain where we saw these big differences. You know, humans
Speaker 1: have all kinds of theories about price, but one of
Speaker 1: the theories we have is that more expensive things are better.
Speaker 1: You know. This is why you know, when a new
Speaker 1: iPhone comes out, it's often more expensive than the old iPhone,
Speaker 1: and that kind of makes people think it's a lot
Speaker 1: more valuable. You know. It's one of the reasons that
Speaker 1: very very expensive wine people are all excited to try it,
Speaker 1: not necessarily because they know it's necessarily better, but people
Speaker 1: assume it's going to taste better. In fact, there's some
Speaker 1: neuroscience work that you can change the pattern of firing
Speaker 1: in the reward areas of people's brains merely by giving
Speaker 1: them the same wine and lying to them and telling
Speaker 1: them it was more expensive. You know. So this seems
Speaker 1: to be a basic way that we approach price. We
Speaker 1: assume that more expensive things have to be better, and
Speaker 1: so we had this great way to test that in
Speaker 1: our monkey market. We could change the price of goods
Speaker 1: merely by altering the amount of food we gave monkeys.
Speaker 1: You know, so we could give them a really really
Speaker 1: huge piece of one kind of food for their token dollar,
Speaker 1: which would kind of be like you know, getting a
Speaker 1: brand of chocolate that's like really enormous for a dollar,
Speaker 1: Or we could give them a really really tiny piece
Speaker 1: of food, you know, it's like the teeny tiny truffle
Speaker 1: of expensive chocolate that you get for a one dollar, right,
Speaker 1: And so we could train them on this and then
Speaker 1: give them a situation where they got to just decide
Speaker 1: which of those they wanted without having to pay. And
Speaker 1: so that's that's kind of the model. You know, imagine
Speaker 1: you learn, you know, for one dollar you get Brand
Speaker 1: A of chocolate and it's this huge, enormous piece you know,
Speaker 1: probably not that good. And for another dollar, you get
Speaker 1: Brand BE of chocolate and that's a teeny teeny tiny
Speaker 1: piece of chocolate. Now you go to a reception and
Speaker 1: both of those kinds of chocolates are out there, you know,
Speaker 1: sitting for free. You know, which do you go after?
Speaker 1: That was basically what we gave them monkeys. They had
Speaker 1: a free feeding condition where they could grab whatever they wanted,
Speaker 1: and to our surprise, they just didn't seem to care,
Speaker 1: which was shocking because in all our other studies they
Speaker 1: showed us that they cared about price a lot. You know,
Speaker 1: they were these wonderful bargain shoppers, But they did, you
Speaker 1: fall prey to this bias that we show about price.
Speaker 1: They didn't irrationally think that higher priced goods we're going
Speaker 1: to taste better. So in other words, what I'm hearing
Speaker 1: you say is that you could set up a costco
Speaker 1: in the world of monkeys, but probably not a three
Speaker 1: Michelin star restaurant. And that's exactly right, especially a three
Speaker 1: michelin star restaurant that didn't actually have good food. So
Speaker 1: many of the differences you've just identified between humans and
Speaker 1: other animals seem to be connected to the way we
Speaker 1: relate to our social worlds, how we want to share
Speaker 1: ideas with other people, how we intuit what's happening inside
Speaker 1: someone else's mind, how we care intensely about what others
Speaker 1: think of us. It's so interesting that these differences might
Speaker 1: be responsible for some of the best things that humans do,
Speaker 1: but also some of the worst things that humans do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's one of the things I find most fascinating about
Speaker 1: these findings is that the things that make us different
Speaker 1: not only allow humans to do some of the smartest
Speaker 1: things we do, you know, set up these five star restaurants,
Speaker 1: you understand, rich fiction and movies, but they also make
Speaker 1: us do some downright dumb stuff, you know. I think
Speaker 1: that the biases we've identified are the same biases that
Speaker 1: result in fake news being spread so easily. They also
Speaker 1: are the same kinds of things that cause us to
Speaker 1: like spend lots of money on stuff that's probably not
Speaker 1: that good, you know. So it's remarkable that the very
Speaker 1: things that make us so special and so smart can also,
Speaker 1: in some contexts make us seem kind of dumb. Laurie
Speaker 1: Santos is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at
Speaker 1: Yale University. She's the host of the podcast The Happiness Lab. Laurie,
Speaker 1: thanks for joining us today on Hidden Brain. Thanks so much.
Speaker 1: Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our production
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Speaker 1: Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive
Speaker 1: produce I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero this
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Speaker 1: When you're as skilled at audio editing as Andy is,
Speaker 1: it's easy to fall prey to the curse of knowledge,
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Speaker 1: him a true unsung hero. Thanks Andy for more Hidden Brain.
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Speaker 1: A big thank you to Hidden Brains chanker Vedantem for
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