One of our first-season Secret Lifers, Laurie Santos, told us that her very favorite primate was the bonobo, aka “the hippie primate.” Sue and bonobo… AWWWW!!

So it’s time to peace out and watch this totally sweet video about Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and her work with bonobos. Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh was recently named one of TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World.” (Experts believe her victory was fueled by a larger-than-expected voter turnout among bonobos. We hope this means Laurie will be on the list next year!)

The baby bonobo in the video is so adorable that you won’t mind the short commercial you’ll have to endure to see him. That little guy surely lets his freak flag fly.

Yale researchers, led by our very own Laurie Santos, have determined that prejudice is a trait humans have retained from our evolutionary predecessors. Judging Monkeys According to studies, rhesus macaques monkeys, who shared a common ancestor with humans millions of years ago, can tell if other monkeys are in the “ingroup” or “outgroup” and will treat them with love or disdain accordingly. And we thought kids could be brutal—I’d hate to be an outsider in monkey middle school. Even after millions of years, it seems valuing those in the in-crowd is a habit neither humans nor monkeys can shake. The good news is that the study also showed monkeys were flexible in letting “outgroup” members become “ingroup” members again. At least there’s hope. Read more about the fascinating discovery in the IB Times article. And watch Laurie’s videos again here

Want to learn more about Laurie Santos’ “monkeynomics”? Here’s a link to an article that gives more insight into her studies, including how monkeys make the same economic mistakes that humans do!

“I have an opposable thumb, but I’m not evolving…..” Pal of SLoS Laurie Santos recently went back to her home town of New Bedford, MA to help some high schoolers celebrate the birthday of Charles Darwin (known in SLoS circles as “Chuck D.”). In addition to engaging in a group sing-along, Laurie told the students that “survival of the fittest might be wrong in theory.” Want to learn more? Check out the whole story right here. And be sure to visit Laurie’s SLoS page, too.

Money for nothing, chimps for free. In her “Monkeynomics” video, Laurie Santos explains that when it comes to economics, monkeys are “smart in the same way humans are smart.” Laurie’s research demonstrates that, if given the opportunity, monkeys—just like humans—will try to take advantage of sales and get the most for their money.

But just as monkeys are smart like us, Laurie’s found that monkeys are dumb like us, too. Her research shows that in terms of economic thinking, monkeys make the same kinds of mistakes that we make—in fact, the kinds of mistakes that can lead to cataclysmic worldwide meltdowns. Says Laurie:

“Many of the kinds of errors that led to things like the financial collapse are exactly the kinds of bias strategies we see in our monkeys. So we often can just look at the newspaper, and it almost looks like we’re back in the lab working with our capuchins.”

So if we see it in monkeys and we see it in ourselves, does that mean faulty economic thinking might actually be hard-wired in us primates? Would an orangutan cash in his 401k? Would a lemur run up a huge credit-card debt? And why do we humans make the same dumb choices… over and over again?

What do you think?

Laurie’s feet as photographed by the SLoS monkey Laurie was so nice about polishing her toenails and all.

And our monkey had just bought a new digital camera.

How could we resist?

(If this doesn’t make any sense to you, watch Laurie’s “Foot Photographer” video. And if it still doesn’t make any sense to you, we’re sending over a monkey and a blue-footed boobie.)

This one’s for Laurie’s Mom!

Mozart and Einstein… together again There are some fields—science is one of them and so is music—which our culture typically regards as being all about natural genius. Either you’re born with the magic or you’re not. And if you’re not, the best you can probably hope for is to sell insurance… or to make lattes… or if you’re lucky, you can produce a web series for NOVA (the ceiling for the non-gifted… well, our ceiling). The fact of the matter, though, is that there aren’t very many Einsteins or Mozarts. And we can’t manufacture them either. There’s never been another Jupiter Symphony or an extra-special version of relativity. But still, there are folks among us who—everyday—create beautiful new music and do brilliant, groundbreaking science. Hmmm. Natural genius? An undeniable path? Destiny?

We thought about all this after our interview with Laurie Santos. Laurie is an extremely accomplished scientist—you don’t become a professor and run a lab at Yale University if you aren’t—but like most scientists, she doesn’t see herself as some kind of magical natural genius. In fact, she used the word “accident” more than once to describe her education and her career trajectory. Laurie ended up at Harvard for her undergraduate years, she told us, “by accident”….

If you don’t ask Laurie Santos a question, she might take a picture of your feet.

UPDATE: We are no longer taking new questions for Laurie. But check out the Q&A below—Laurie may have given an answer to something you wanted to ask.

Q: Judi Hild Why do you state that we evolved on the Savannah, as if that was the only place and we stopped there? Not a biggie, just kinda caught my attention. Love the feet pix, esp. the Galapagos tortoise toes, keep up the great work!

A: Laurie Hi Judi, Thanks for keeping me honest here. I didn’t mean to imply that we had stopped evolving when we left the savannah. My point was just humans are really not specialized for the environments in which we find ourselves today— modern cities with electricity and facebook and the like. If we really want to understand how our cognitive mechanisms were shaped, its best to go back much further (and even further than the savannah for many traits!)

Q: Paula Zitzelberger From your primate studies, have you been able to form an opinion as to how much “free will” humans actually have? Doesn’t our DNA predispose us to certain personality traits, thought patterns, and reactions?

A: Laurie Hi Paula, A great question, but a really hard one. The more we learn about human cognition, the more we realize that much of the way we see the world and make decisions is controlled by lots of unconscious processes that are outside of our awareness. For a great review of this work, check out Dan Wegner’s book “The Illusion of Conscious Will” (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.)

Q: Jose A Castellnos Lopez I wondered if the same would be true if you gave them the choice of buying tools or a tent kind off a house or property. Also was there any variation in the sexes, like in humans men and woman don’t shop the same or are interesd in the same stuff.

A: Laurie Hi Jose, Thanks for your interesting question! There is some evidence that capuchin monkeys are willing to “pay” for tools. Gregory Westergaard and his colleagues have shown that capuchins are willing to use their to tokens to buy tools that they can use to get food later (e.g., a stick that they can use to dip into a container with juice, etc). So monkeys can use their token economy to buy tools as well. As for sex differences, so far we haven’t observed any differences between the purchases made by make and female monkeys. But with only a few monkey “shoppers” it might be hard to see such differences in our studies.

Q: Jessie If monkeys had lives like us (for instance, if they had houses, jobs, money, and clothes), do you think they would be happy? Would they go out of control?

Also, what would happen if you tried to keep a monkey as a pet?

A: Laurie Hi Jessie, Thanks for your question! It always hard to say what would make our monkeys “happiest,” because it’s hard for them to tell us. But if I had to guess, I’d say that monkeys are most likely to be the most comfortable/happy in their natural environment. Keeping any primate as a pet is a BAD idea. Unlike dogs and cats, primates are NOT domesticated animals. They may be cute, but they can be very dangerous, as evidenced by the tragic case this past February of woman who was mauled by a pet chimpanzee. For a really well-argued article about why primate pets are bad, see this recent guest column by my colleague, Brian Hare

Q: Melissa You mention in the text that monkeys are ‘dumb’ like us too— “Many of the kinds of errors that led to things like the financial collapse are exactly the kinds of bias strategies we see in our monkeys.” I was wondering specifically what types of errors they make? And if we are hardwired the same way monkeys are, then would it make sense to get an experimental psychologist on the White House economic team?

A: Laurie Hi Melissa, Thanks for your question! We’ve observed lots of economic biases in our monkey subjects. One of the most salient ones is what economists call “loss aversion,” a bias that involves paying too much attention to losses. There’s lots of work suggesting that humans worry more about going into the red than they should, which leads us to make lots of errors (not investing enough in the stock market, etc). We’ve found that monkeys show similar biases. You can read about this work in more detail here. As for getting a psychologist on the White House team, I love your idea. Many researchers have actual argued that policy-makers need to take these evolved biases seriously. For a great introduction to this work, check out the book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.