Scientific Studies of the Evolution of Preferences

这个项目探讨了人类非理性决策的进化基础。在过去的几十年里，行为经济学观察到人们在实验室和现场都表现出许多系统性的决策偏差。然而，迄今为止，很少有研究探索这种偏见的起源。经济偏见是否反映了从特定市场经验中习得的行为，或者这些偏见是更根深蒂固的倾向的结果，是进化的，可能是先天机制的结果？该项目研究了人类经济行为的进化起源，包括持续的偏见，如得失不对称和参考依赖。为此，该项目开展了一系列经济研究，涉及一组新颖的研究对象——非人类灵长类动物。尽管非人灵长类动物缺乏市场条件，但它们也面临着各种明显的经济问题，例如应对商品的稀缺，分配获取商品所需的有限资源，以及管理其原生生态中固有的风险。因此，经济决策的某些方面可能会遵循为处理预示着现代经济的原始资源条件而设计的进化专门机制。该项目向一群灵长类动物引入法定货币和交易，然后验证这些市场实验的结果。然后，该项目在一系列研究中使用这种方法来探索灵长类动物对一系列经济问题的偏好，这些问题通常用于提取描述人类决策的数据。这些研究将首次确定我们的近亲灵长类动物是否存在类似人类的理性标准，如果存在，是否同源的心理结构可以解释这两个物种的理性选择。证明灵长类动物与人类有或没有共同的经济偏见，将对政策干预可能克服人类市场中的这种偏见产生影响，并可用于为未来人类经济偏见的神经科学和临床研究开发新的行为措施。

This project explores the evolutionary basis of human irrational decision-making. In the past few decades, behavioral economics has observed that people demonstrate a number of systematic decision-making biases in both the laboratory and the field. To date, however, very little research has explored the origins of such biases. Do economic biases reflect learned behaviors that result from particular market experiences, or are these biases the result of more ingrained tendencies, ones that result from evolved and possibly innate mechanisms? This proejct investigates the evolutionary origins of human economic behaviors, including persistent biases such as gain-loss asymmetry and reference dependence. To do so, this project conducts a series of economic studies with a novel set of subjects, non-human primates. Although non-human primates lack market conditioning, they too face a variety of distinctly economic problems, such as coping with the scarcity of goods, assigning the limited resources necessary to acquire them, and managing risks inherent in their native ecology.It is possible, then, that certain aspects of economic decision-making will follow from evolutionarily-specialized mechanisms designed to deal with primitive resource conditions that foreshadowed modern economies. This project introduces a fiat currency and trade to a captive group of primates and then verifies the results of these market experiments. The project then uses this method in a series of studies to explore primate preferences over a range of economic problems typically used to extract data describing human decision-making. These studies will be the first of their kind to determine whether human-like standards of rationality are present in our close primate relatives and, if so, whether homologous psychological architectures can explain rational choice in both species. Demonstrating that primates either do or do not share economic biases with humans will have implications for which policy interventions are likely to overcome such biases in human markets and can be used to develop new behavioral measures for future neuroscientific and clinical investigations of human economic biases.