Earlier this year, we ran a story about how researchers tested monkey poker players to see if they possessed any skills on the felt. Interestingly enough, the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center discovered that monkeys actually have the ability to figure out what other poker players are thinking. It appears as if monkey gambling is in full effect again since the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics put various primates through some interesting studies.
Rather than playing poker, this time the apes were gambling for pieces of fruit while choosing from upside-down cups that had been shuffled. This has been a popular game for centuries among humans, but until now, few realized that monkeys could play it too.
The primates could either play the game in hopes of picking the correct cup and winning a large piece of fruit, or they could take a guaranteed piece of fruit instead. When there were fewer cups on the table, most of the apes gambled to win a large piece of fruit. However, when researchers added a lot more cups to the game, which lowered the monkeys’ odds of winning, they wisely took the guaranteed piece of fruit.
The only exception to the latter is when the gambled fruit prize was so much larger than the guaranteed fruit that the apes couldn’t resist; this showed they have a strong ability to know when a big prize outweighs taking lowered odds.
It’s pretty incredible to see that monkeys have the ability to comprehend the complex thought process that humans go through when making gambling decisions. Furthermore, primates are the only form of life that can do this besides humans. And the way I’ve seen some humans play poker, monkeys might even make better gambling decisions.
