Do Monkeys Have Superstitions?

We share a lot in common with monkeys, but are they just as superstitious? And could the belief in winning streaks carry an evolutionary advantage?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogel bomb here. Imagine your hours into a late
night poker match. Hold up in the basement of a
sketchy watering hole where tensions are rising. You know you
should quit while you're ahead, but you just can't bring
yourself to leave any possible winnings on the table. The
streak has gone on so long it's like you can't lose,

(00:24):
except you do. One bad card deals you a killer blow.
The spell is broken and your hot hand is gone.
Unfortunately it never existed in the first place. Researchers have
taken great pains to prove that the hot hand bias
is exactly that a bias. It's humans innate predisposition that
makes us believe we see patterns, including winning or losing

(00:46):
streaks where none exist, especially when preservation or gain are involved.
Now we know that monkeys have the same superstitious bias too.
Oh and they really love to gamble. It seems we
species have more in common than us to the of
our DNA. During a study by researchers at Clarkston University
and the University of Rochester, ess monkeys played a fast

(01:08):
paced computer game with built in rewards. Correctly guess the
next step in the pattern, get a treat. However, even
when the sequence was random, the monkeys gambled like they
were on a winning streak, showing a false belief in
their run of good luck. Despite being given multiple opportunities
to rehearse a different scenario, the monkeys stuck to the
patterns they perceived to be winning ones. Gambling monkeys hell

(01:29):
bent on a hot hand is one thing. Figuring out
why they share our pension for these patterns is another.
A researcher's point to the odds of finding food in
a monkey's natural habitat. If a monkey finds a plump
beetle under tree bark once, it's a clue that he
should check nearby trees too. If he finds another beetle nearby,
it reinforces a pattern that the monkey will probably repeat
the next time he's hungry, even though he may never

(01:51):
find another beetle the next twenty times he looks. It
seems neither monkeys nor humans ever really make decisions that
are free from bias, and we don't even recognize that
we're doing it. Take the process by which some humans
decide to invest in a particular stock. A stock that
rises one day is never guaranteed to rise the next,
or ever again. Yet we believe that if a stock

(02:11):
went up once, it will do it again, and so
surely that will be the most logical investment. This belief
in winning and losing streaks may not be solely a
product of life experiences, as was previously thought, Because we
share the superstition with monkeys. Scientists think there may be
a genetic component to it and hope that further research
could lead to new approaches to treating gambling addiction, insight

(02:33):
into decision making theory, and more. Today's episode was written
by Laurie L. Dove and produced by Tristan McNeil. For
more on this and tons of other psychological topics, visit
our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.