Making a monkey out of the business world?
By Herb Drill
It’s absolutely fascinating to someone like me, who at one time got lost on an electric typewriter keyboard, to get marooned in a blizzard of data on the Internet. No, I don’t mean THOSE pictures. I mean REAL information.
For instance, on the new PLoS Biology Web site, there’s a headline which
states: “Cell-Passage Activity Is Required for the Malarial Parasite to Cross the Liver Sinusoidal Cell Layer.”
Say what?
This comes up because Kendall Powell, a freelance science writer in Broomfield, CO (kendall2@nasw.org), published an article entitled Economy of the Mind. In it, he tells of Frans de Waal, C.H. Candler Professor of Primate Behavior at Emory University in Atlanta. It seems de Waal's laboratory monkeys won't work for unequal pay. If a partner monkey gets a grape (big bucks) for little or no work (trading a token), a monkey will reject her measly cucumber pay from her human “boss.” She makes her disdain known, hurling her cucumber or token out of her cubicle, even though she would happily gobble down cucumbers in other circumstances.
De Waal says, “My research on primate behavior focuses on social complexity in the widest possible sense, including alliance formation, reciprocal exchange, reconciliation following aggression, deceptive communication, and responses to environmentally induced stress. This research has a distinctly comparative character; it is being pursued with chimpanzees, bonobos, several macaque species, and capuchin monkeys. The methodology requires group-living captive animals, preferably under naturalistic conditions such as found at major zoos and research institutions.”
Powell contends de Waal's work at Emory’s Yerkes Primate Center has shown an “aversion to inequality in non-human primates, drawing an evolutionary link between how humans and monkeys make decisions.” It seems humans reject inequality, too, even if it means walking away empty-handed.
Powell avers this behavior “can’t be explained by classical economic
theory which states both monkeys and humans should take whatever reward they ’re offered to maximize gain.”
In species like de Waal's monkeys and humans who rely heavily on cooperation for survival, evolution has favored a complex calculus for even simple decisions.
ow many times have you read in The Wall Street Journal or Business Week Magazine of corporate tycoons “walking away” from multi-billion-dollar terms because they didn’t come to terms on compensation?
In a simplified way, de Waal's experiments and others blend neurobiologists'
ability to track behavior and brain processes with
economists' models of the cost-benefit analyses behind every decision made
by an animal. The two fields have each been working toward explaining
decision-making behavior, using widely different approaches for decades.
Recently, researchers in both fields have recognized that using tools from
the other trade might speed their own work along, resulting in the emerging field of neuroeconomics.
Powell says he principle of “expected utility” states that a person facing uncertainty will rank the possible payoffs or outcomes as a function of their expected values and probabilities of happening. Using this principle, experimental economists tested the idea that humans should interact with a
self-interest which gives the highest possible gain. In the Ultimatum game,
one person is given a sum of money and must decide how much of that sum to share with a second person. The second person can decide to accept or
reject the offer. The catch is that if he/she rejects the offer, neither player gets any money.
“Standard economic theory uses models where players are calculating
complicated numbers, thinking far ahead to figure out what the other person will do, and there are no temptations,” explains Colin Camerer, a behavioral economist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Those models tend to be mathematically simple, but realistically hard on the players, he says. “People aren't that smart. An 18-year-old doesn't plan out his entire lifetime savings.”
“To make decisions about rewards or money, a person has to make
predictions about the future, and in any prediction there is some uncertainty that is critical,” says Christopher Fiorillo, a neurophysiologist. “This is the first
demonstration of a single neuron coding uncertainty.” Fiorillo says there
are probably many other types of neurons in the brain that can code uncertainty, but the fact that dopamine neurons do it adds another intriguing layer to decision-making behavior.
And you thought working for a living was simple.