Evolutionary Anthropological Insights into Neuroeconomics: What Non-Human Primates can Tell us About Human Decision-Making Strategies

One of the central goals of neuroeconomics is to understand the neural mechanisms that allow people to make decisions and act in ways that satisfy their preferences. In order to do so, neuroeconomists face something of a challenge ! they must strive to understand all aspects of our species’ decision-making strategies, including our systematic biases and seemingly irrational tendencies. Unfortunately, as much work in the field of behavioral economics has demonstrated, many aspects of human choice work in ways that violate the assumptions of rationality. People, for example, change their decisions depending on framing (e.g., Tversky and Kahneman, 1981) and exhibit a number of paradoxical sets of preferences that would appear to violate expected utility theory (e.g., Ellsberg, 1961). Although the study of neuroeconomics would be far more convenient if people had perfectly stable preferences and made choices that maximized utility in the classical sense, neuroeconomists who want to understand real human choice must find ways to try to understand it as it is, no matter how irrational, biased, clunky, or inelegant it may be. It is in the context of understanding even the inelegant aspects of human choice that this chapter aims to introduce the importance of non-human primate studies for the field of neuroeconomics. Recognizing that human choice is not perfect begs the question of where our biased decision-making strategies come from in the first place. Are our irrational decision-making strategies the result of learning over the course of a lifetime of decisions? Do these biased strategies result from specific environmental experiences or contexts? Or could these decision-making strategies be more universal, perhaps resulting from mechanisms that arose over evolution and operate regardless of context or experience? This chapter argues that comparative work with non-human primates can provide an important tool for answering these questions. Specifically, we will argue that comparative work can yield insights into the nature of human decision making in two distinct ways. First, the comparative approach can suggest