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Monkeys aren't fooled by luxury prices

Smart simian shoppers Monkeys do not share our irrational preference for more expensive, branded goods over cheaper equivalents, researchers have found.

A study in capuchin monkeys, published today in Frontiers in Psychology, showed that unlike humans, they are less swayed by price and more likely to choose based on personal preference.

Co-author Professor Laurie Santos, from Yale University, says the work stems from an interest in economic biases in primates.

"We got interested in trying to look at what parts of human cognition are evolutionarily old, and we were particularly interested in some of our more irrational biases to try to see where those came from," Santos says.

The capuchin monkeys in the study had been previously trained in a 'token market', so they knew how to use tokens to purchase flavoured ice blocks from the experimenter.

They also knew that some flavours were more expensive than others, in that a single token would buy them less of one particular flavour than of another flavour.

After this training, the researchers placed the monkeys in the situation where the flavoured ice blocks were freely available, without any need for tokens, and the monkeys were allowed to choose whichever flavours they liked.

"Learning which kind of ice was more expensive in the price learning phase did not seem to affect monkeys' preferences in the preference assessment phase," the authors wrote.

"This result suggests that learning that a food is expensive doesn't seem to make monkeys like it more."

Santos says this is in direct contrast to human behaviour.

"Imagine you go to your shop and you know which wine is expensive, and you might not buy the wine that is three times as expensive, but if you went to a cocktail party and you could just have those wines for free, you might think that the expensive one is going to be better."

"It means that we're more irrational than monkeys, and it also raises this question of where these price effects come from."

One theory is that we use our understanding of supply and demand to use price as a proxy indicator of quality.

"We know if a wine was really awful, no one would buy it if it cost a ton of money, and so we get a sense that maybe there is this connection between price and value," Santos says.

Another possibility is that we are simply following the herd, using price as an indicator of popularity.

"It might not be that the wine is actually better, but I know rich people like that wine or rich people like that watch or rich people drive that car," she says.

"What the monkeys lack -- and there is some other work suggesting that they might lack this -- is a tendency to go with what everybody else is doing, or what the important people are doing."