Humans are known to be far more intelligent than monkeys, but it appears that these animals make better and more intelligent choices than us when it comes to shopping for goods.
People have the tendency to associate price with quality. In one study involving a taste test of wine, the participants reported that the wine with a more expensive price tag tasted better than the one with a cheaper price despite both wines being the same. In another study, the researchers found that people tend to believe that a painkiller works better because it is more expensive.
Capuchin monkeys, however, do not have such mindset. Researchers from Yale University have found that the animal, known to be the most intelligent of New World monkeys, do not associate a higher price tag with a higher quality of goods.
In a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology on Dec. 2, Laurie Santos from the Comparative Cognition Laboratory, Psychology Department of Yale University, together with colleagues, conducted a series of experiments to see if capuchins would prefer food with a higher price.
Capuchin monkeys can be taught to conduct rudimentary market transactions such as trade tokens for treats. They can also understand the differences in the prices of food.
Santos and colleagues trained the monkeys to exchange tokens for food such as jelly, juice and flavored ice. The capuchins were also taught that some of the food options were cheap and others were more expensive in terms of the tokens they needed to shell out to get them.
For the cheap items, the capuchins could get three for one token but they could only get one of the pricier items for the same number of tokens. When the researchers eventually gave them the chance to get treats without the need to pay for them, they found that the monkeys did not prefer the more expensive treats.
"Our findings suggest that capuchin monkeys perform very differently [from] humans when interacting with differently priced goods," Santos and colleagues wrote. "Although humans regularly prefer goods that are higher in price, capuchin monkeys appear to show no such effect. "
The researchers said that the difference in the behavior of humans and capuchin monkeys can be attributed to their unique experiences with markets.
"For humans, higher price tags often signal that other people like a particular good," Santos said. "Our richer social experiences with markets might be the very thing that leads us -- and not monkeys -- astray in this case."
