Why Wall Street investors may think more like monkeys than we might have imagined.<br /><br />Question: Why is important to study the evolutionary origins <br />of our behavior? Laurie Santos: One reason it's <br />important to actually study the evolutionary origins of say, you know, <br />our economic troubles and so on is that, oftentimes when we learn some <br />behavior or some bias, is built in natural selection, it means it's <br />actually hard to overcome. So, you know, it's really hard to convince <br />people that cheesecake doesn't inherently kind of taste good, right? <br />You know, sugary, fatty things are just built in by natural selection; <br />we're going to like them. By the same token, it's really hard to <br />convince people not to flinch when there's some moving object coming at <br />your head, or there's some scary spider, or so on. These are these <br />kinds of biases that are built in via natural selection. They're pretty <br />old and they're also really hard to turn off, even when we're aware of <br />them. The problem in the economic domain is, my guess is that <br /> the biases we are seeing in us and in monkeys are going to be equally <br />hard to turn off. But these are ones that it's hard to even be aware of <br /> how strong they are. So, I think one of the important things about <br />seeing these kinds of errors in monkeys is, it's just not only that they <br /> are old, but they're going to be really hard to get over. So, policies <br /> that try to deal with these biases it might be well served to say, <br />"Look, let's just assume that these biases are in place and how can we <br />design policies that can accept that sort of deal with them as they <br />are?" Question: Do monkeys have an awareness of their <br />own biases when making tough decisions? Laurie Santos: Yeah. So one thing we're really interested in is <br />whether monkeys have the opportunity to think twice, right? Now we can <br />experience this bias and succumb to it, we can also be very meta about <br />it and think about, "Well, I can talk to you now about these biases," <br />you know, the monkeys probably aren't you know, sitting around the <br />forest talking to each other about the kinds of economic biases they <br />have. So the fact that we can kind of think twice, pause, <br />kind of inhibit this sort of instinctual bias... that gives us a weapon <br />against these sorts of biases. But in some sense we have to know <br />they're there in the first place to actually implement these kind of <br />"Wait, wait, wait, let me stop, pause, think about it and try to come up <br /> with the right decision." So, I think awareness that we have these <br />biases in these everyday situations and that we're really affected by <br />them is actually very important.Recorded May 21, 2010Interviewed by Andrew Dermont
