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Evolution of economics

People may gain a deeper understanding of how they handle their money from research being conducted at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston.

Harvard University researchers are exploring how gorillas make economic decisions to determine if there are evolutionary links to human behavior.

For the past year, researchers under the direction of principal investigator Marc Hauser, a professor of psychology at Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., have been training and studying four western lowland gorillas at the zoo.

“The goal is to understand more about the evolution of economic decision making in non-humans, including risk-averse behavior, and how these behaviors evolved,” said Katherine McAuliffe, a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard who has been working with the gorillas.

First, the gorillas — two males, Little Joe and Oki, both 16 years old, and two females, Kira, 9, and Gigi, 27 — had to learn about money.

During the past year, the gorillas were taught a unique monetary system using colored wooden dowels. They learned that a blue token could be traded for a high-quality food of monkey chow, a yellow token could be exchanged for a low-quality food of celery and a white token had no value and didn’t have a food reward.

“When we gave them a choice, they would pick the blue token,” Ms. McAuliffe said.

“Then they would go back and get the yellow,” she said. “They would leave the white ones behind.”

The researchers have completed the first phase of the study and last month moved on to the second phase, which will explore the gorillas’ “financial” behavior in the face of risk.

The experiment involves two differently shaped buckets, one that offers a constant reward of four pieces of food and the other that may offer either one piece of food or seven pieces of food, Ms. McAuliffe said.

“A human would tend to go to the safer reward; they are risk averse,” she said.

Now the researchers want to find out whether our primate cousins share our outlook.