Here’s an interesting new TED talk on YouTube: Laurie Santos: How Monkeys Mirror Human Irrationality.
It seems that the human brain is structured in such a way that we are irrationally opposed to accepting losses, whether on our stocks or on our houses, and this way of thinking has contributed to the financial collapse. In fact, people will give wildly varying answers to the same exact scenario depending on whether the question is phrased as a potential gain or a potential loss. The question is, do our monkey relatives share this same cognitive deficit?
Leave a Reply