Monkeys are savvier than human shoppers when it comes to getting value for money, research has shown.
Humans may be easily seduced by the lure of designer labels and luxurious brands, but capuchin monkeys were not as simply tricked into thinking that more expensive items are automatically better quality than cheaper ones.
While the creatures share some irrational desires with us, in a simulated shopping scenario, they behaved in a more rational manner than humans.
Previous psychological studies have demonstrated how easy it is to fool people into thinking that price reflects quality.
In tests, human volunteers consistently preferred the taste of wine poured out of an expensively labelled bottle to exactly the same wine with a cheap label.
But scientists found they could not make brown capuchins act in the same way.
The researchers set up an elaborate ‘market’ in which the monkeys were trained to exchange tokens for rewards in form of chunks of flavoured ice, jelly, or juice.
They learned that some rewards were cheap and others expensive, in terms of how many one token could buy.
For example, a single token purchased three of the cheap goods, but only one of the pricier rewards.
The series of four experiments showed that while the monkeys understood differences in price, they stubbornly refused to fall for the idea that higher-priced rewards tasted better.
‘We know that capuchin monkeys share a number of our own economic biases,’ US lead researcher Laurie Santos, from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, explained.
‘Our previous work has shown that monkeys are loss-averse, irrational when it comes to dealing with risk, and even prone to rationalising their own decisions, just like humans.
‘But this is one of the first domains we’ve tested in which monkeys show more rational behaviour than humans do.
‘For humans, higher price tags often signal that other people like a particular good.
'Our richer social experiences with markets might be the very thing that leads us - and not monkeys - astray in this case.’
The findings are reported in the online journal Frontiers in Psychology.
RETAIL THERAPY DOES EXIST, SCIENTISTS CLAIM
US scientists have discovered that not only does retail therapy exist, but that it could be caused by an individual's fear of sudden death.
Last September, researchers found materialistic people find terrorism and war more stressful than others - and are more likely to spend compulsively to help them cope.
Psychologists believe the rise of materialism around the world, and its therapeutic effect on extreme stress might be a response to fear of death caused by acts of terrorism, disease and natural disasters.
The scientists from Michigan State University said people with possession obsessions often have lower self-esteem than others so are more likely splurge in the wake of severe psychological trauma.
Ayalla Ruvio, a business professor who studied people's shopping habits while rockets fell in Israel, said: 'When the going gets tough, the materialistic go shopping.
'And this compulsive and impulsive spending is likely to produce even greater stress and lower well-being. Essentially, materialism appears to make bad events even worse.'
