Do chimps know more about economics than us?

July 7th, 2008, 3:00 am · Post a Comment · posted by Gary Robbins, science writer-editor

Do people and nonhuman primates use basically the same strategies while making important economic decisions?

Maybe, says Bart Wilson, a researcher who’ll spend the next three years studying the question at Chapman University’s new Economic Science Institute.

Wilson has been awarded almost $170,000 by the National Science Foundation to compare how people and primates make economic decisions in certain situations.

He’s trying to get a better sense of the relationship between humans and monkeys and apes (nonhuman primates) and “to understand the roots from which human economic decision making emerged.”

The study reflects Chapman’s big push into “experimental economics,” a field heavily devoted to testing economic theories in lab settings like the ones found at ESI. Chapman created the institute last year by recruiting one of the field’s founders — Nobel laureate Vernon Smith — from George Mason University. Wilson was recruited from the same school.

His new grant will lead to some sophisticated social game playing involving human subjects from Chapman and George Mason, and primates from Georgia State University, where Wilson has collaborators. The participants will play an economics game called Assurance, or “The Stag Hunt.” In part, the game will be tailored to see how subjects make decisions in face-to-face situations, and when they’re not close together. Wilson will assess the performance of the nonhuman primates against humans.

Monkeys and apes, says Wilson, “provide a good model for many human behaviors due to their close evolutionary relatedness and similar cognitive abilities.”

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