All right, who has been kissing the investors?

From the almost too bizarre to believe, this just in:

" A
group of Yale researchers studying the origin of irrational decision-making found that choosing impractically isn't a behavior exhibited only by humans. Our evolutionary cousins, capuchin monkeys, exhibit the same tendency with respect to loss aversion, or the tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses rather than acquiring gains.

The findings, published in the Journal of Political Economy, indicate these biases are innate in primates and have existed since before capuchins and humans split 40 million years ago.

'Some of the most deeply ingrained economic behaviors turn out to be very, very ancient and hardwired parts of our decision-making processes,' said Yale economics professor and the study's lead author, Keith Chen. 'If I showed a string of capuchin monkey data to an economist, he couldn't, with any statistical test, tell the difference between a capuchin monkey and your average American stock market investor.'
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The rest of the story can be read here and, apparently, this isn't the only time that these same capuchin monkeys have exhibited human traits.

This is an interesting adjunct to a recent post I made on considering "regret" before investing.


JW

The Confused Capitalist