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Monkeys suggest the wealthy take more risks


Monkeys, like humans, make rational choices when it comes to gambling, say researchers (Source: webking/iStockphoto)

Taking a gamble An experiment involving thirsty monkeys supports the idea that wealthy humans take more risks than their poorer counterparts, say researchers.

Economist Dr Agnieszka Tymula, from the University of Sydney, and colleagues, report their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Whether to cross the street, how much to invest in stocks or retirement, and whether to get a health check-up are all decisions that involve taking a risk.

"Following your decision, the consequences are probabilistic, so you are not sure what's going to happen," says Tymula.

She says there are hundreds of studies showing humans are, on average, a risk averse bunch.

For example, they prefer the certainty of a fixed amount of money to a 50 per cent gamble that they'll double their money, says Tymula.

But, she says, what's less well known is how someone's available wealth influences their tendency to take risks.

Tymula says it is important to understand this because if risk behaviour changes during hard economic times when everyone's wealth drops, this has implications for the economy.

Water wealth

Testing whether humans take more risks when they have more wealth to play with is tricky.

"That's difficult to study in humans because it's difficult to get one person with different wealth levels," says Tymula.

To get around this problem, Tymula and colleagues set up an experiment involving two rhesus monkeys, which each had to make 20 different decisions under a range of different "wealth" conditions.

Being monkeys, they weren't given money, but instead had different levels of hydration or "water wealth", which was measurable using blood tests.

The monkeys were trained to be able to choose between two different rewards.

On the one hand, they could choose a certain fixed amount of water, on the other, they could choose to gamble to get an increased amount of water.

"They could either go for the safe choice, and know how much water they were getting for sure, or they could play a gamble where they could get more or nothing," says Tymula.

"We found that the monkeys that had more water in the blood were more risk tolerant."

The study supports the hypothesis that wealth increases risk tolerance in humans, says Tymula, and that monkeys are a good model for studying risk taking in humans.

"We found that monkeys are capable of rational decision-making, just like humans, after training, and we found their risk attitudes are also similar to those of humans," she says.

Tags: psychology