Laurie Santos: Monkeynomics

(logo whooshing) (upbeat music) - A lot of the time, when I tell family members or people I meet at cocktail parties that I'm a psychologist, they say, "Oh, you gotta study me, "and I say, "No, no, no.

I study monkeys."

Everybody thinks about the puzzles in psychology.

Everybody wonders, why can't I just go on the diet I'm supposed to go on, or why can't I save for the down payment on my home that I really wanna care about, or why did she fall in love with him?

- We're gonna to be so happy together.

- And despite all the progress we have in neuroscience and biology and physics, we still know relatively little about what makes us tick.

Of course, humans didn't evolve in a world with Twitter and cellphones and computers and all this stuff that we use all the time.

We actually evolved in the Savannah.

So if we really wanna gain insight into what are we built for?

What are the strategies that natural selection prepared us for?

Let's get rid of all the human-specific stuff, like culture and language and so on, and that's why we turn to monkeys.

They provide this wonderful window into what humans would look like in the absence of all that stuff.

So we wanted to see whether the monkeys could deal with economic choices.

So our first challenge was to actually give monkeys some money.

We actually set up a little monkey market.

And the way we we did that was we introduced monkeys to tiny metal tokens that they could trade for food.

Rather than just give them all the food and the fruit and stuff they eat for the day, they get to buy it themselves.

And the monkeys actually picked this up very, very quickly.

What we first discovered was that monkeys are actually very similar to humans when it comes to buying their food.

So if you give monkeys a market in which one kind of food goes on sale, so now you can get double the amount of apples for your token, they'll actually shop and buy more apples just like humans do.

They're actually smart in the same ways that humans are smart, so we could look at the monkeys' economic choices in the same spots that human economists look at human economic choices, really what they're willing to pay and what they wanna buy.

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