Laurie Santos: How monkeys mirror human irrationality

197,513 views ・ 2010-07-29

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:17
I want to start my talk today with two observations
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about the human species.
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The first observation is something that you might think is quite obvious,
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and that's that our species, Homo sapiens,
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is actually really, really smart --
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like, ridiculously smart --
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like you're all doing things
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that no other species on the planet does right now.
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And this is, of course,
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not the first time you've probably recognized this.
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Of course, in addition to being smart, we're also an extremely vain species.
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So we like pointing out the fact that we're smart.
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You know, so I could turn to pretty much any sage
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from Shakespeare to Stephen Colbert
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to point out things like the fact that
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we're noble in reason and infinite in faculties
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and just kind of awesome-er than anything else on the planet
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when it comes to all things cerebral.
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But of course, there's a second observation about the human species
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that I want to focus on a little bit more,
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and that's the fact that
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even though we're actually really smart, sometimes uniquely smart,
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we can also be incredibly, incredibly dumb
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when it comes to some aspects of our decision making.
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Now I'm seeing lots of smirks out there.
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Don't worry, I'm not going to call anyone in particular out
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on any aspects of your own mistakes.
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But of course, just in the last two years
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we see these unprecedented examples of human ineptitude.
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And we've watched as the tools we uniquely make
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to pull the resources out of our environment
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kind of just blow up in our face.
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We've watched the financial markets that we uniquely create --
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these markets that were supposed to be foolproof --
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we've watched them kind of collapse before our eyes.
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But both of these two embarrassing examples, I think,
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don't highlight what I think is most embarrassing
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about the mistakes that humans make,
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which is that we'd like to think that the mistakes we make
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are really just the result of a couple bad apples
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or a couple really sort of FAIL Blog-worthy decisions.
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But it turns out, what social scientists are actually learning
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is that most of us, when put in certain contexts,
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will actually make very specific mistakes.
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The errors we make are actually predictable.
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We make them again and again.
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And they're actually immune to lots of evidence.
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When we get negative feedback,
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we still, the next time we're face with a certain context,
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tend to make the same errors.
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And so this has been a real puzzle to me
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as a sort of scholar of human nature.
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What I'm most curious about is,
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how is a species that's as smart as we are
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capable of such bad
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and such consistent errors all the time?
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You know, we're the smartest thing out there, why can't we figure this out?
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In some sense, where do our mistakes really come from?
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And having thought about this a little bit, I see a couple different possibilities.
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One possibility is, in some sense, it's not really our fault.
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Because we're a smart species,
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we can actually create all kinds of environments
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that are super, super complicated,
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sometimes too complicated for us to even actually understand,
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even though we've actually created them.
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We create financial markets that are super complex.
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We create mortgage terms that we can't actually deal with.
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And of course, if we are put in environments where we can't deal with it,
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in some sense makes sense that we actually
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might mess certain things up.
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If this was the case, we'd have a really easy solution
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to the problem of human error.
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We'd actually just say, okay, let's figure out
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the kinds of technologies we can't deal with,
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the kinds of environments that are bad --
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get rid of those, design things better,
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and we should be the noble species
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that we expect ourselves to be.
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But there's another possibility that I find a little bit more worrying,
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which is, maybe it's not our environments that are messed up.
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Maybe it's actually us that's designed badly.
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This is a hint that I've gotten
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from watching the ways that social scientists have learned about human errors.
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And what we see is that people tend to keep making errors
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exactly the same way, over and over again.
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It feels like we might almost just be built
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to make errors in certain ways.
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This is a possibility that I worry a little bit more about,
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because, if it's us that's messed up,
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it's not actually clear how we go about dealing with it.
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We might just have to accept the fact that we're error prone
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and try to design things around it.
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So this is the question my students and I wanted to get at.
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How can we tell the difference between possibility one and possibility two?
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What we need is a population
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that's basically smart, can make lots of decisions,
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but doesn't have access to any of the systems we have,
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any of the things that might mess us up --
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no human technology, human culture,
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maybe even not human language.
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And so this is why we turned to these guys here.
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These are one of the guys I work with. This is a brown capuchin monkey.
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These guys are New World primates,
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which means they broke off from the human branch
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about 35 million years ago.
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This means that your great, great, great great, great, great --
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with about five million "greats" in there --
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grandmother was probably the same great, great, great, great
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grandmother with five million "greats" in there
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as Holly up here.
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You know, so you can take comfort in the fact that this guy up here is a really really distant,
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but albeit evolutionary, relative.
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The good news about Holly though is that
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she doesn't actually have the same kinds of technologies we do.
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You know, she's a smart, very cut creature, a primate as well,
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but she lacks all the stuff we think might be messing us up.
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So she's the perfect test case.
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What if we put Holly into the same context as humans?
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Does she make the same mistakes as us?
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Does she not learn from them? And so on.
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And so this is the kind of thing we decided to do.
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My students and I got very excited about this a few years ago.
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We said, all right, let's, you know, throw so problems at Holly,
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see if she messes these things up.
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First problem is just, well, where should we start?
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Because, you know, it's great for us, but bad for humans.
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We make a lot of mistakes in a lot of different contexts.
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You know, where are we actually going to start with this?
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And because we started this work around the time of the financial collapse,
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around the time when foreclosures were hitting the news,
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we said, hhmm, maybe we should
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actually start in the financial domain.
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Maybe we should look at monkey's economic decisions
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and try to see if they do the same kinds of dumb things that we do.
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Of course, that's when we hit a sort second problem --
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a little bit more methodological --
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which is that, maybe you guys don't know,
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but monkeys don't actually use money. I know, you haven't met them.
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But this is why, you know, they're not in the queue behind you
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at the grocery store or the ATM -- you know, they don't do this stuff.
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So now we faced, you know, a little bit of a problem here.
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How are we actually going to ask monkeys about money
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if they don't actually use it?
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So we said, well, maybe we should just, actually just suck it up
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and teach monkeys how to use money.
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So that's just what we did.
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What you're looking at over here is actually the first unit that I know of
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of non-human currency.
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We weren't very creative at the time we started these studies,
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so we just called it a token.
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But this is the unit of currency that we've taught our monkeys at Yale
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to actually use with humans,
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to actually buy different pieces of food.
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It doesn't look like much -- in fact, it isn't like much.
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Like most of our money, it's just a piece of metal.
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As those of you who've taken currencies home from your trip know,
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once you get home, it's actually pretty useless.
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It was useless to the monkeys at first
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before they realized what they could do with it.
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When we first gave it to them in their enclosures,
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they actually kind of picked them up, looked at them.
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They were these kind of weird things.
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But very quickly, the monkeys realized
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that they could actually hand these tokens over
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to different humans in the lab for some food.
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And so you see one of our monkeys, Mayday, up here doing this.
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This is A and B are kind of the points where she's sort of a little bit
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curious about these things -- doesn't know.
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There's this waiting hand from a human experimenter,
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and Mayday quickly figures out, apparently the human wants this.
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Hands it over, and then gets some food.
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It turns out not just Mayday, all of our monkeys get good
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at trading tokens with human salesman.
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So here's just a quick video of what this looks like.
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Here's Mayday. She's going to be trading a token for some food
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and waiting happily and getting her food.
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Here's Felix, I think. He's our alpha male; he's a kind of big guy.
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But he too waits patiently, gets his food and goes on.
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So the monkeys get really good at this.
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They're surprisingly good at this with very little training.
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We just allowed them to pick this up on their own.
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The question is: is this anything like human money?
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Is this a market at all,
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or did we just do a weird psychologist's trick
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by getting monkeys to do something,
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looking smart, but not really being smart.
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And so we said, well, what would the monkeys spontaneously do
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if this was really their currency, if they were really using it like money?
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Well, you might actually imagine them
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to do all the kinds of smart things
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that humans do when they start exchanging money with each other.
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You might have them start paying attention to price,
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paying attention to how much they buy --
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sort of keeping track of their monkey token, as it were.
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Do the monkeys do anything like this?
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And so our monkey marketplace was born.
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The way this works is that
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our monkeys normally live in a kind of big zoo social enclosure.
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When they get a hankering for some treats,
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we actually allowed them a way out
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into a little smaller enclosure where they could enter the market.
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Upon entering the market --
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it was actually a much more fun market for the monkeys than most human markets
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because, as the monkeys entered the door of the market,
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a human would give them a big wallet full of tokens
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so they could actually trade the tokens
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with one of these two guys here --
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two different possible human salesmen
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that they could actually buy stuff from.
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The salesmen were students from my lab.
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They dressed differently; they were different people.
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And over time, they did basically the same thing
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so the monkeys could learn, you know,
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who sold what at what price -- you know, who was reliable, who wasn't, and so on.
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And you can see that each of the experimenters
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is actually holding up a little, yellow food dish.
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and that's what the monkey can for a single token.
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So everything costs one token,
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but as you can see, sometimes tokens buy more than others,
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sometimes more grapes than others.
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So I'll show you a quick video of what this marketplace actually looks like.
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Here's a monkey-eye-view. Monkeys are shorter, so it's a little short.
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But here's Honey.
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She's waiting for the market to open a little impatiently.
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All of a sudden the market opens. Here's her choice: one grapes or two grapes.
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You can see Honey, very good market economist,
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goes with the guy who gives more.
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She could teach our financial advisers a few things or two.
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So not just Honey,
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most of the monkeys went with guys who had more.
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Most of the monkeys went with guys who had better food.
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When we introduced sales, we saw the monkeys paid attention to that.
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They really cared about their monkey token dollar.
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The more surprising thing was that when we collaborated with economists
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to actually look at the monkeys' data using economic tools,
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they basically matched, not just qualitatively,
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but quantitatively with what we saw
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humans doing in a real market.
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So much so that, if you saw the monkeys' numbers,
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you couldn't tell whether they came from a monkey or a human in the same market.
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And what we'd really thought we'd done
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is like we'd actually introduced something
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that, at least for the monkeys and us,
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works like a real financial currency.
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Question is: do the monkeys start messing up in the same ways we do?
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Well, we already saw anecdotally a couple of signs that they might.
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One thing we never saw in the monkey marketplace
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was any evidence of saving --
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you know, just like our own species.
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The monkeys entered the market, spent their entire budget
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and then went back to everyone else.
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The other thing we also spontaneously saw,
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embarrassingly enough,
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is spontaneous evidence of larceny.
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The monkeys would rip-off the tokens at every available opportunity --
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from each other, often from us --
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you know, things we didn't necessarily think we were introducing,
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but things we spontaneously saw.
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So we said, this looks bad.
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Can we actually see if the monkeys
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are doing exactly the same dumb things as humans do?
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One possibility is just kind of let
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the monkey financial system play out,
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you know, see if they start calling us for bailouts in a few years.
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We were a little impatient so we wanted
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to sort of speed things up a bit.
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So we said, let's actually give the monkeys
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the same kinds of problems
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that humans tend to get wrong
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in certain kinds of economic challenges,
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or certain kinds of economic experiments.
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And so, since the best way to see how people go wrong
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is to actually do it yourself,
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I'm going to give you guys a quick experiment
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to sort of watch your own financial intuitions in action.
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So imagine that right now
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I handed each and every one of you
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a thousand U.S. dollars -- so 10 crisp hundred dollar bills.
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Take these, put it in your wallet
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and spend a second thinking about what you're going to do with it.
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Because it's yours now; you can buy whatever you want.
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Donate it, take it, and so on.
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Sounds great, but you get one more choice to earn a little bit more money.
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And here's your choice: you can either be risky,
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in which case I'm going to flip one of these monkey tokens.
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If it comes up heads, you're going to get a thousand dollars more.
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If it comes up tails, you get nothing.
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So it's a chance to get more, but it's pretty risky.
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Your other option is a bit safe. Your just going to get some money for sure.
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I'm just going to give you 500 bucks.
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You can stick it in your wallet and use it immediately.
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So see what your intuition is here.
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Most people actually go with the play-it-safe option.
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Most people say, why should I be risky when I can get 1,500 dollars for sure?
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This seems like a good bet. I'm going to go with that.
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You might say, eh, that's not really irrational.
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People are a little risk-averse. So what?
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Well, the "so what?" comes when start thinking
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about the same problem
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set up just a little bit differently.
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So now imagine that I give each and every one of you
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2,000 dollars -- 20 crisp hundred dollar bills.
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Now you can buy double to stuff you were going to get before.
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Think about how you'd feel sticking it in your wallet.
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And now imagine that I have you make another choice
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But this time, it's a little bit worse.
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Now, you're going to be deciding how you're going to lose money,
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but you're going to get the same choice.
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You can either take a risky loss --
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so I'll flip a coin. If it comes up heads, you're going to actually lose a lot.
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If it comes up tails, you lose nothing, you're fine, get to keep the whole thing --
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or you could play it safe, which means you have to reach back into your wallet
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and give me five of those $100 bills, for certain.
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And I'm seeing a lot of furrowed brows out there.
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So maybe you're having the same intuitions
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as the subjects that were actually tested in this,
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which is when presented with these options,
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people don't choose to play it safe.
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They actually tend to go a little risky.
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The reason this is irrational is that we've given people in both situations
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the same choice.
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It's a 50/50 shot of a thousand or 2,000,
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or just 1,500 dollars with certainty.
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But people's intuitions about how much risk to take
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varies depending on where they started with.
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So what's going on?
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Well, it turns out that this seems to be the result
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of at least two biases that we have at the psychological level.
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One is that we have a really hard time thinking in absolute terms.
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You really have to do work to figure out,
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well, one option's a thousand, 2,000;
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one is 1,500.
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Instead, we find it very easy to think in very relative terms
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as options change from one time to another.
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So we think of things as, "Oh, I'm going to get more," or "Oh, I'm going to get less."
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This is all well and good, except that
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changes in different directions
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actually effect whether or not we think
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options are good or not.
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And this leads to the second bias,
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which economists have called loss aversion.
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The idea is that we really hate it when things go into the red.
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We really hate it when we have to lose out on some money.
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And this means that sometimes we'll actually
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switch our preferences to avoid this.
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What you saw in that last scenario is that
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subjects get risky
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because they want the small shot that there won't be any loss.
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That means when we're in a risk mindset --
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excuse me, when we're in a loss mindset,
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we actually become more risky,
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which can actually be really worrying.
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These kinds of things play out in lots of bad ways in humans.
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They're why stock investors hold onto losing stocks longer --
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because they're evaluating them in relative terms.
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They're why people in the housing market refused to sell their house --
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because they don't want to sell at a loss.
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The question we were interested in
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is whether the monkeys show the same biases.
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If we set up those same scenarios in our little monkey market,
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would they do the same thing as people?
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And so this is what we did, we gave the monkeys choices
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between guys who were safe -- they did the same thing every time --
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or guys who were risky --
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they did things differently half the time.
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And then we gave them options that were bonuses --
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like you guys did in the first scenario --
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so they actually have a chance more,
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or pieces where they were experiencing losses --
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they actually thought they were going to get more than they really got.
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And so this is what this looks like.
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We introduced the monkeys to two new monkey salesmen.
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The guy on the left and right both start with one piece of grape,
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so it looks pretty good.
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But they're going to give the monkeys bonuses.
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The guy on the left is a safe bonus.
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All the time, he adds one, to give the monkeys two.
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The guy on the right is actually a risky bonus.
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Sometimes the monkeys get no bonus -- so this is a bonus of zero.
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Sometimes the monkeys get two extra.
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For a big bonus, now they get three.
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But this is the same choice you guys just faced.
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Do the monkeys actually want to play it safe
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and then go with the guy who's going to do the same thing on every trial,
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or do they want to be risky
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and try to get a risky, but big, bonus,
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but risk the possibility of getting no bonus.
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People here played it safe.
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Turns out, the monkeys play it safe too.
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Qualitatively and quantitatively,
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they choose exactly the same way as people,
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when tested in the same thing.
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You might say, well, maybe the monkeys just don't like risk.
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Maybe we should see how they do with losses.
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And so we ran a second version of this.
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Now, the monkeys meet two guys
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who aren't giving them bonuses;
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they're actually giving them less than they expect.
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So they look like they're starting out with a big amount.
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These are three grapes; the monkey's really psyched for this.
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But now they learn these guys are going to give them less than they expect.
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They guy on the left is a safe loss.
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Every single time, he's going to take one of these away
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and give the monkeys just two.
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the guy on the right is the risky loss.
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Sometimes he gives no loss, so the monkeys are really psyched,
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but sometimes he actually gives a big loss,
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taking away two to give the monkeys only one.
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And so what do the monkeys do?
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Again, same choice; they can play it safe
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for always getting two grapes every single time,
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or they can take a risky bet and choose between one and three.
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The remarkable thing to us is that, when you give monkeys this choice,
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they do the same irrational thing that people do.
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They actually become more risky
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depending on how the experimenters started.
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This is crazy because it suggests that the monkeys too
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are evaluating things in relative terms
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and actually treating losses differently than they treat gains.
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So what does all of this mean?
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Well, what we've shown is that, first of all,
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we can actually give the monkeys a financial currency,
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and they do very similar things with it.
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They do some of the smart things we do,
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some of the kind of not so nice things we do,
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like steal it and so on.
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But they also do some of the irrational things we do.
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They systematically get things wrong
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and in the same ways that we do.
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This is the first take-home message of the Talk,
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which is that if you saw the beginning of this and you thought,
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oh, I'm totally going to go home and hire a capuchin monkey financial adviser.
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They're way cuter than the one at ... you know --
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Don't do that; they're probably going to be just as dumb
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as the human one you already have.
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So, you know, a little bad -- Sorry, sorry, sorry.
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A little bad for monkey investors.
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But of course, you know, the reason you're laughing is bad for humans too.
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Because we've answered the question we started out with.
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We wanted to know where these kinds of errors came from.
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And we started with the hope that maybe we can
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sort of tweak our financial institutions,
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tweak our technologies to make ourselves better.
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But what we've learn is that these biases might be a deeper part of us than that.
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In fact, they might be due to the very nature
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of our evolutionary history.
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You know, maybe it's not just humans
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at the right side of this chain that's duncey.
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Maybe it's sort of duncey all the way back.
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And this, if we believe the capuchin monkey results,
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means that these duncey strategies
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might be 35 million years old.
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That's a long time for a strategy
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to potentially get changed around -- really, really old.
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What do we know about other old strategies like this?
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Well, one thing we know is that they tend to be really hard to overcome.
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You know, think of our evolutionary predilection
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for eating sweet things, fatty things like cheesecake.
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You can't just shut that off.
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You can't just look at the dessert cart as say, "No, no, no. That looks disgusting to me."
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We're just built differently.
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We're going to perceive it as a good thing to go after.
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My guess is that the same thing is going to be true
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when humans are perceiving
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different financial decisions.
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When you're watching your stocks plummet into the red,
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when you're watching your house price go down,
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you're not going to be able to see that
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in anything but old evolutionary terms.
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This means that the biases
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that lead investors to do badly,
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that lead to the foreclosure crisis
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are going to be really hard to overcome.
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So that's the bad news. The question is: is there any good news?
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I'm supposed to be up here telling you the good news.
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Well, the good news, I think,
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is what I started with at the beginning of the Talk,
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which is that humans are not only smart;
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we're really inspirationally smart
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to the rest of the animals in the biological kingdom.
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We're so good at overcoming our biological limitations --
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you know, I flew over here in an airplane.
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I didn't have to try to flap my wings.
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I'm wearing contact lenses now so that I can see all of you.
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I don't have to rely on my own near-sightedness.
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We actually have all of these cases
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where we overcome our biological limitations
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through technology and other means, seemingly pretty easily.
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But we have to recognize that we have those limitations.
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And here's the rub.
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It was Camus who once said that, "Man is the only species
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who refuses to be what he really is."
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But the irony is that
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it might only be in recognizing our limitations
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that we can really actually overcome them.
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The hope is that you all will think about your limitations,
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not necessarily as unovercomable,
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but to recognize them, accept them
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and then use the world of design to actually figure them out.
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That might be the only way that we will really be able
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to achieve our own human potential
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and really be the noble species we hope to all be.
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Thank you.
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19:34
(Applause)
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About this website

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