With the study, the researchers wanted to find out whether the willingness to take risks was acquired through evolution or for cultural reasons, as the University of Neuchâtel (Unine) said in a statement Wednesday.
Because monkeys display risk-taking behaviors similar to humans, the authors believe this behavior has strong evolutionary underpinnings.
“We know that people are much less rational than previously thought,” Penelope Lacombe, the first author of the study, told the Keystone-SDA news agency. The same type of cognitive bias has been observed in monkeys.
The researchers came to this conclusion by giving the monkeys two upside-down cups: a yellow cup that contained a strictly small reward, and a pink cup that concealed a larger reward. So the primate made a choice between a safe and risky option.
In a second step, the team replaced the pink trophy with a series of orange trophies, hiding the grand prize under a single trophy. This change had an impact on the strategy used by the monkeys.
“We showed that orangutans and gorillas can sense changes in the amount of reward and changes in the probability of winning and are able to make rational decisions about these changes,” Lacombe said in the Une paper.
(SDA)