ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
The adaptive value of probability distortion and risk-seeking in macaques' decision-making.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 1 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social hierarchy influences monkeys' risky decisions.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Tolerant macaque species are less impulsive and reactive.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Dorsal raphe neurons signal integrated value during multi-attribute decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Dynamic prospect theory: Two core decision theories coexist in the gambling behavior of monkeys and humans.Science advances · 2023Article
- A neuronal prospect theory model in the brain reward circuitry.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Economic behaviours among non-human primates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In humans, the attitude toward risk is not neutral and is dissimilar between bets involving gains and bets involving losses. The existence and prevalence of these decision features in non-human primates are unclear. In addition, only a few studies have tried to simulate the evolution of agents based on their attitude toward risk. Therefore, we still ignore to what extent Prospect theory's claims are evolutionarily rooted. To shed light on this issue, we collected data from nine macaques that performed bets involving gains or losses. We confirmed that their overall behaviour is coherent with Prospect theory's claims. In parallel, we used a genetic algorithm to simulate the evolution of a population of agents across several generations. We showed that the algorithm selects progressively agents that exhibit risk-seeking, and has an inverted S-shape distorted perception of probability. We compared these two results and found that monkeys' attitude toward risk is only congruent with the simulation when they are facing losses. This result is consistent with the idea that gambling in the loss domain is analogous to deciding in a context of life-threatening challenges where a certain level of risk-seeking behaviour and probability distortion may be adaptive. This article is part of the theme issue 'Existence and prevalence of economic behaviours among non-human primates'.
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