听力课堂TED音频栏目主要包括TED演讲的音频MP3及中英双语文稿，供各位英语爱好者学习使用。本文主要内容为演讲MP3+双语文稿:非理性的猴子经济，希望你会喜欢！

【演讲者及介绍】Laurie Santos

Laurie Santos研究灵长类心理学和猴子经济学——用灵长类动物来测试人类心理学中的问题。

【演讲主题】非理性的猴子经济 A monkey economy as irrational as ours

【中英文字幕】 翻译者 Wenjia Tang 校对者 Tracie Chen

I want to start my talk today with two observations about the human species. The first observation is something that you might think is quite obvious, and that's that our species, Homo sapiens, is actually really, really smart -- like, ridiculously smart -- like you're all doing things that no other species on the planet does right now. And this is, of course, not the first time you've probably recognized this. Of course, in addition to being smart, we're also an extremely vain species. So we like pointing out the fact that we're smart. You know, so I could turn to pretty much any sage from Shakespeare to Stephen Colbert to point out things like the fact that we're noble in reason and infinite in faculties and just kind of awesome-er than anything else on the planet when it comes to all things cerebral.

我想以两个关于人类物种的现象开始今天的话题第一个现象也许你会觉得显而易见这就是我们的物种智人事实上非常非常的聪明聪明的无法形容正如你们现在做的事情地球上其它任何物种都无法做到而且当然这也许不是第一次你意识到这一点当然除了聪明意外我们也是十分自负的物种因此我们喜欢指出我们聪明的这个事实要知道，我可以列举出如莎士比亚或者史蒂芬·考伯特这样的先哲来指出一个事实，那就是我们理性高贵、能力无穷，而且当需要动脑筋的时候是地球上最棒的。

But of course, there's a second observation about the human species that I want to focus on a little bit more, and that's the fact that even though we're actually really smart, sometimes uniquely smart, we can also be incredibly, incredibly dumb when it comes to some aspects of our decision making. Now I'm seeing lots of smirks out there. Don't worry, I'm not going to call anyone in particular out on any aspects of your own mistakes. But of course, just in the last two years we see these unprecedented examples of human ineptitude. And we've watched as the tools we uniquely make to pull the resources out of our environment kind of just blow up in our face. We've watched the financial markets that we uniquely create -- these markets that were supposed to be foolproof -- we've watched them kind of collapse before our eyes.

但是，当然我更希望将注意力更多的放在人类的第二个现象上而且事实上，虽然我们真的非常聪明，有时候独一无二的聪明，我们有时也在制定决策的时候，变得难以置信的愚蠢。我看到在座的很多开始傻笑，不要担心，我不是来指出你们中的任何一位犯的错误。但是，当然仅仅在过去的两年里，我们见证了许多前所未有的，足以证明人类的无能的例子。我们见到了我们使用特制的工具，将资源从环境中发掘出来，就像突然从我们的脸上爆发一样。我们也看到我们特意创造的，本应该万无一失的金融市场，在我们眼皮子底下轰然坍塌。

But both of these two embarrassing examples, I think, don't highlight what I think is most embarrassing about the mistakes that humans make, which is that we'd like to think that the mistakes we make are really just the result of a couple bad apples or a couple really sort of FAIL Blog-worthy decisions. But it turns out, what social scientists are actually learning is that most of us, when put in certain contexts, will actually make very specific mistakes. The errors we make are actually predictable. We make them again and again. And they're actually immune to lots of evidence. When we get negative feedback, we still, the next time we're face with a certain context, tend to make the same errors. And so this has been a real puzzle to me as a sort of scholar of human nature. What I'm most curious about is, how is a species that's as smart as we are capable of such bad and such consistent errors all the time?

但是，我想这两个令人尴尬的例子并不是人类所犯错误里最让人尴尬的。我们可能更倾向于认为这些错误更像几个烂苹果，或者几个错误的值得在博客上宣扬的决定。但是事实上，社会科学家认为当在一定的环境中，我们中的大多数人都会犯一些非常特定的错误。我们犯的这些错误实际上是可以预判的，我们总是在犯同样的错误。而且对很多证据视而不见。当我们得到负面反馈的时候，却总是在再次面对同样的情况时，犯下同样的错误。所以我觉得困惑：作为研究人类天性的学者，我最好奇的是，我们作为一个如此聪明的种类，为何总是犯如此糟糕，如此类似的错误呢？

You know, we're the smartest thing out there, why can't we figure this out? In some sense, where do our mistakes really come from? And having thought about this a little bit, I see a couple different possibilities. One possibility is, in some sense, it's not really our fault. Because we're a smart species, we can actually create all kinds of environments that are super, super complicated, sometimes too complicated for us to even actually understand, even though we've actually created them. We create financial markets that are super complex. We create mortgage terms that we can't actually deal with. And of course, if we are put in environments where we can't deal with it, in some sense makes sense that we actually might mess certain things up. If this was the case, we'd have a really easy solution to the problem of human error. We'd actually just say, okay, let's figure out the kinds of technologies we can't deal with, the kinds of environments that are bad -- get rid of those, design things better, and we should be the noble species that we expect ourselves to be.

你们知道，我们是最聪明的，为什么对这个问题得不到答案？从某种意义上来说，我们的错误到底从何而来？考虑一阵子之后，我感觉有一些不同的可能性。第一种可能性就是在某种意义上，这的确不是我们的错。因为我们是聪明的物种，我们事实上能创造出很多种非常非常复杂的环境，复杂到有时候我们都不能理解，虽然是我们创造出来的。我们创造出了超级复杂的金融市场，和自己都不能应付的房屋贷款条款，而且当然，如果我们处于不能应付的环境中，在某种意义上，是我们自己把一些事情搞砸了。如果这样的话，我们可以很轻松的解决这些人为错误的问题。我们可以说，好吧，让我们挑出我们不能对付的技术，还有那些糟糕的环境，抛弃它们，设计更好的东西，而且我们需要成为我们期待的那种高尚的物种。

But there's another possibility that I find a little bit more worrying, which is, maybe it's not our environments that are messed up. Maybe it's actually us that's designed badly. This is a hint that I've gotten from watching the ways that social scientists have learned about human errors. And what we see is that people tend to keep making errors exactly the same way, over and over again. It feels like we might almost just be built to make errors in certain ways. This is a possibility that I worry a little bit more about, because, if it's us that's messed up, it's not actually clear how we go about dealing with it. We might just have to accept the fact that we're error prone and try to design things around it.

但是我更担心的是另外一个可能，那就是，也许不是糟糕的环境的问题，也许问题出在没有设计好的我们自己身上。这是我从观察社会科学家对人类错误的理解而得到的启发。我觉察到人们会一次又一次地以同样的方式犯错误。就好像是我们被造的时候，就设计好了会以某种方式犯错误。这就是我更担心的可能，因为如果我们自己的原因，那就更不清楚应该怎么应对它了。我们也许只能接受这个事实，那就是我们也会犯错误，在设计东西的过程中只能尽可能的避免这些错误。

So this is the question my students and I wanted to get at. How can we tell the difference between possibility one and possibility two? What we need is a population that's basically smart, can make lots of decisions, but doesn't have access to any of the systems we have, any of the things that might mess us up -- no human technology, human culture, maybe even not human language. And so this is why we turned to these guys here. This is a brown capuchin monkey. These guys are New World primates, which means they broke off from the human branch about 35 million years ago. This means that your great, great, great great, great, great -- with about five million "greats" in there -- grandmother was probably the same great, great, great, great grandmother with five million "greats" in there as Holly up here. You know, so you can take comfort in the fact that this guy up here is a really really distant, but albeit evolutionary, relative. The good news about Holly though is that she doesn't actually have the same kinds of technologies we do. You know, she's a smart, very cut creature, a primate as well, but she lacks all the stuff we think might be messing us up. So she's the perfect test case.

所以这就是我和我的学生都很关心的问题，我们如何分辨这两种可能的不同呢？我们需要一个聪明的，能做许多决定，但是和我们的系统——也就是我们可能弄糟的任何东西都互不相干，没有人类的技术，人类的文化，可能甚至没有人类的语言的群体。这就是为什么我们研究他们。它是棕色卷尾猴。它们属于新世界灵长科，也就是说它们在三千五百万年前已经与人类得分支脱离了。这样的话，你的曾曾曾。。。祖母大概往上推1千万代，可能和在这里的霍利往上推1千万代的曾曾曾。。。祖母是相同的。为此我们可以放心的说在这里的家伙和我们是真的真的很远的虽然有进化的远亲。关于霍利的好消息是：她实际上没有我们一样的技术。你们知道，她是聪明的，很可爱的小动物，也属于灵长类，而且她没有那些我们自己都搞不懂的东西。所以她应该是比较合适的实验对象。

What if we put Holly into the same context as humans? Does she make the same mistakes as us? Does she not learn from them? And so on. And so this is the kind of thing we decided to do. My students and I got very excited about this a few years ago. We said, all right, let's, you know, throw so problems at Holly, see if she messes these things up. First problem is just, well, where should we start? Because, you know, it's great for us, but bad for humans. We make a lot of mistakes in a lot of different contexts. You know, where are we actually going to start with this? And because we started this work around the time of the financial collapse, around the time when foreclosures were hitting the news, we said, hhmm, maybe we should actually start in the financial domain. Maybe we should look at monkey's economic decisions and try to see if they do the same kinds of dumb things that we do.

如果我们把霍利放在跟人类同样的情境里呢？她会不会犯跟我们同样的错误？她是不是不会从中吸取教训呢？等等。。。这些都是我们想探讨的问题。我和我的学生在好几年前就很期待这个实验。我们说，让我们丢给霍利一些人类才有的问题，看看她有什么反应。第一个问题就是，嗯，从哪儿开始呢？因为实验对我们来说很好，但对人类来说就很难了。我们在不同的领域会犯不同的错误。所以，我们的实验到底要从哪儿开始呢？正好实验开始的时候是在金融危机的时候，同时新闻也不停的报道抵押品回收的消息，我们想，也许就从金融领域开始好了。让我们来观察猴子在经济方面的决策，看看他们是不是也犯跟我们一样的错误。

Of course, that's when we hit a sort second problem -- a little bit more methodological -- which is that, maybe you guys don't know, but monkeys don't actually use money. I know, you haven't met them. But this is why, you know, they're not in the queue behind you at the grocery store or the ATM -- you know, they don't do this stuff. So now we faced, you know, a little bit of a problem here. How are we actually going to ask monkeys about money if they don't actually use it? So we said, well, maybe we should just, actually just suck it up and teach monkeys how to use money. So that's just what we did. We weren't very creative at the time we started these studies, so we just called it a token. But this is the unit of currency that we've taught our monkeys at Yale to actually use with humans, to actually buy different pieces of food. It doesn't look like much -- in fact, it isn't like much.

当然，第二个问题也就随之而来,就是方法上的问题，各位可能不知道，猴子是不是用货币的。各位没跟猴子及出国。这就是为什么当你在杂货店或者提款机前面的时候，没看到猴子排在你后面——他们才不做这种事情。所以我们在这儿碰到一点麻烦，如果猴子不用钱，那要怎么让猴子开始用钱呢？我们就像，好吧，稍微忍耐一下，先从教猴子用钱开始。所以我们就照做了。我们在开始这项研究的时候没多少创意，所以暂时叫它代币。我们在耶鲁大学教猴子们使用这些货币和人类做交易，用来买不同的水果。它看起来不起眼，实际上也没什么价值。

Like most of our money, it's just a piece of metal. As those of you who've taken currencies home from your trip know, once you get home, it's actually pretty useless. It was useless to the monkeys at first before they realized what they could do with it. When we first gave it to them in their enclosures, they actually kind of picked them up, looked at them. They were these kind of weird things. But very quickly, the monkeys realized that they could actually hand these tokens over to different humans in the lab for some food. And so you see one of our monkeys, Mayday, up here doing this. This is A and B are kind of the points where she's sort of a little bit curious about these things -- doesn't know. There's this waiting hand from a human experimenter, and Mayday quickly figures out, apparently the human wants this. Hands it over, and then gets some food. It turns out not just Mayday, all of our monkeys get good at trading tokens with human salesman.

和我们的货币系统一样，它使用金属做的。就像各位旅行后带回家的各种外币一样，一旦你到家了，这钱也就没法用了。在猴子们了解能用这些代币做什么之前，对它们来说这些东西也一点用都没有。当我们第一次把这些代币放到猴笼里，它们捡了起来，看着这些代币。对它们来说是很奇怪的事情。不过很快这些猴子就认识到，他们可以用这些代币跟实验室里不同的人换食物。可以看到其中一只猴子，五月天，就正在做这件事情。A图到B图是她正对这些代币感到一点好奇，因为她从来没见过这些东西。图C是实验人员正在伸出手等着，五月天很快就意识到，显然人类想要这个代币。她交出代币，然后就拿到一些食物。不只是五月天，实验室里所有的猴子都懂。

So the monkeys get really good at this. They're surprisingly good at this with very little training. We just allowed them to pick this up on their own. The question is: is this anything like human money? Is this a market at all, or did we just do a weird psychologist's trick by getting monkeys to do something, looking smart, but not really being smart. And so we said, well, what would the monkeys spontaneously do if this was really their currency, if they were really using it like money? Well, you might actually imagine them to do all the kinds of smart things that humans do when they start exchanging money with each other. You might have them start paying attention to price, paying attention to how much they buy -- sort of keeping track of their monkey token, as it were. Do the monkeys do anything like this?

所以猴子们对交易这件事挺在行。只要很少一点训练他们就能表现得非常好。我们只是放手让他们自己做选择。问题是：这跟人类的货币有什么关系？市场运作就是这样而已？或者我们只是用一些奇特的心理手段，引诱猴子们去做一些事情，看似聪明实际上却并不聪明的事情。所以我们想，如果这真是它们的货币，也真是像我们用钱那样用它，猴子们会做什么样的自然反应？各位可以想象一下，当他们开始用货币彼此做交易的时候，就是他们开始做类似人类做的聪明事情了。他们会开始注意到价格，注意到该用多少价格去买，而且记住这些猴子币的使用情况。看看猴子们是否做了这些事情呢？

And so our monkey marketplace was born. The way this works is that our monkeys normally live in a kind of big zoo social enclosure. When they get a hankering for some treats, we actually allowed them a way out into a little smaller enclosure where they could enter the market. Upon entering the market -- it was actually a much more fun market for the monkeys than most human markets because, as the monkeys entered the door of the market, a human would give them a big wallet full of tokens so they could actually trade the tokens with one of these two guys here -- two different possible human salesmen that they could actually buy stuff from. The salesmen were students from my lab. They dressed differently; they were different people. And over time, they did basically the same thing so the monkeys could learn, you know, who sold what at what price -- you know, who was reliable, who wasn't, and so on. And you can see that each of the experimenters is actually holding up a little, yellow food dish. and that's what the monkey can for a single token. So everything costs one token, but as you can see, sometimes tokens buy more than others, sometimes more grapes than others.

于是我们的猴子市集诞生了。它是这样运作的：我们让猴子生活在一种类似动物园的透明笼子里，当它们表现出想要做交易的时候，我们会让它们转移到一个可以进入“市场”的透明笼子里。一进入这个市场——这个市场可比人类的市场有趣多了，因为，当猴子一进入这个市场，人们会给他们一个装满代币的钱包，它们可以用代币和画面中的其中一个人做交易，2个不同的销售员，猴子们可以从他们那儿买到不同的东西。这两位是我实验室里的学生。他们穿着不同的衣服。在一段时间内，销售员会一直做同样的事情，所以猴子们就能意识到谁卖什么价格，谁比较可靠等等之类的事情。各位能看到这2位销售员都拿着一个小小的黄色食物盘，猴子可以用一个代币买盘子里的东西。其实每样东西都值一个代币，但有时候一个代币可以买到比较多的东西，也就是买到比较多的葡萄。

So I'll show you a quick video of what this marketplace actually looks like. Here's a monkey-eye-view. Monkeys are shorter, so it's a little short. But here's Honey. She's waiting for the market to open a little impatiently. All of a sudden the market opens. Here's her choice: one grapes or two grapes. You can see Honey, very good market economist, goes with the guy who gives more. She could teach our financial advisers a few things or two. So not just Honey, most of the monkeys went with guys who had more. Most of the monkeys went with guys who had better food. When we introduced sales, we saw the monkeys paid attention to that. They really cared about their monkey token dollar. The more surprising thing was that when we collaborated with economists to actually look at the monkeys' data using economic tools, they basically matched, not just qualitatively, but quantitatively with what we saw humans doing in a real market. So much so that, if you saw the monkeys' numbers, you couldn't tell whether they came from a monkey or a human in the same market.

让我给大家演示一下这个猴子市集的运作情况。这是从猴子的视角拍的，所以比较低。她是小可爱。她有点不耐烦的等着市场开张。然后市场开张了，她有2个选择：买1个葡萄或者2个葡萄。各位可以发现小可爱是个很棒的市场经济学家，她跟卖较多葡萄的人做交易了。她可以给我们的财务学教授上课了。不只是小可爱，大多数的猴子都会跟卖较多葡萄的人做交易。大多数的猴子都会跟有较好食物的人交易。开始与猴子做买卖猴，我们发现猴子会专注在这件事情上。他们会在意猴子币的真正价值。最令人惊讶的是，当我们开始与经济学家合作，使用经济工具分析猴子的数据的时候，不管是在定性研究上，还是在定量研究上，他们的使用方式与我们人类在市场上做的一样。以至于在定量研究中，你根本没法分辨这些数据结果是人类的还是猴子的。

And what we'd really thought we'd done is like we'd actually introduced something that, at least for the monkeys and us, works like a real financial currency. Question is: do the monkeys start messing up in the same ways we do? Well, we already saw anecdotally a couple of signs that they might. One thing we never saw in the monkey marketplace was any evidence of saving -- you know, just like our own species. The monkeys entered the market, spent their entire budget and then went back to everyone else. The other thing we also spontaneously saw, embarrassingly enough, is spontaneous evidence of larceny. The monkeys would rip-off the tokens at every available opportunity -- from each other, often from us -- you know, things we didn't necessarily think we were introducing, but things we spontaneously saw.

我们已经成功做到引介给猴子一些东西，至少猴子与我们将代币运作得跟金融货币差不多。另一个问题是：猴子会不会跟我们一样把这个制度搞乱？其实我们也观察到一些现象。第一，在猴子市场中我们没发现到任何储蓄的证据，没发现像我们人一样的储蓄行为。猴子来到市场，会把所有钱花光，然后再跳回猴群里。我们同时也发现另一件事，非常尴尬，就是自发性的盗窃行为。猴子不放过任何机会来偷代币，偷同伴的、偷我们的。这些都是我们不认为介绍给了猴子们的行为，但是我们还是同时看到了这种行为。

So we said, this looks bad. Can we actually see if the monkeys are doing exactly the same dumb things as humans do? One possibility is just kind of let the monkey financial system play out, you know, see if they start calling us for bailouts in a few years. We were a little impatient so we wanted to sort of speed things up a bit. So we said, let's actually give the monkeys the same kinds of problems that humans tend to get wrong in certain kinds of economic challenges, or certain kinds of economic experiments. And so, since the best way to see how people go wrong is to actually do it yourself, I'm going to give you guys a quick experiment to sort of watch your own financial intuitions in action.

这看起来很糟糕。我们是否能够看到猴子们做出跟人类一样愚蠢的事情？有个方法是先创立猴子金融市场，然后再让这个市场停摆，不过，这样做实验可能得等上好几年。我们有点等不及，所以让实验进行得快一点。我们就像，那就让这些小猴子们面对一些问题，这些问题是人类经常会犯错的一些经济议题，或者一些经济方面的实验。想要了解人类是怎么犯错的，最直接的方式就是自己做一次。所以我给大家一个小实验，请各位用你的财务直觉来回答。

So imagine that right now I handed each and every one of you a thousand U.S. dollars -- so 10 crisp hundred dollar bills. Take these, put it in your wallet and spend a second thinking about what you're going to do with it. Because it's yours now; you can buy whatever you want. Donate it, take it, and so on. Sounds great, but you get one more choice to earn a little bit more money. And here's your choice: you can either be risky, in which case I'm going to flip one of these monkey tokens. If it comes up heads, you're going to get a thousand dollars more. If it comes up tails, you get nothing. So it's a chance to get more, but it's pretty risky. Your other option is a bit safe. Your just going to get some money for sure. I'm just going to give you 500 bucks. You can stick it in your wallet and use it immediately. So see what your intuition is here. Most people actually go with the play-it-safe option. Most people say, why should I be risky when I can get 1,500 dollars for sure? This seems like a good bet. I'm going to go with that. You might say, eh, that's not really irrational. People are a little risk-averse. So what?

请各位现在想象一下，我给现场每个人各1千美金，10张百元钞票成一捆的1千美金。把它放进你的皮夹里，花点时间想想你要拿这笔钱做什么。这是你的钱，你可以用它买任何想要的东西。捐出去，花掉，怎么都行。听起来不错吧？不过再给你另一个机会，让你能拿1千美金以上的钱。第一种选择：冒险拿多一些，我用丢猴子代币来决定这个选择的结果。如果代币是正面，你可以多得1千美金。如果是背面，那你一分钱都不能多得。有机会拿到比较多，但是要冒点风险。而另一个比较安全的选择：让你再拿一笔确切的金额。不过只能拿500美金。你可以把这笔钱放进皮夹或者马上花掉。你的直觉决定好了吗？大部分的人会选择不冒险的选项。这些人想说，我确定能拿1500美金，干嘛还要去冒险？这似乎是一个不错的选择，我选这个。各位也许觉得这样选没错啊，人是风险趋避者，有问题吗？

Well, the "so what?" comes when start thinking about the same problem set up just a little bit differently. So now imagine that I give each and every one of you 2,000 dollars -- 20 crisp hundred dollar bills. Now you can buy double to stuff you were going to get before. Think about how you'd feel sticking it in your wallet. And now imagine that I have you make another choice But this time, it's a little bit worse. Now, you're going to be deciding how you're going to lose money, but you're going to get the same choice. You can either take a risky loss -- so I'll flip a coin. If it comes up heads, you're going to actually lose a lot. If it comes up tails, you lose nothing, you're fine, get to keep the whole thing -- or you could play it safe, which means you have to reach back into your wallet and give me five of those $100 bills, for certain.

人是不是风险趋避者的问题，请思考过另一个类似问题后，再作判断。现在再想象一下，我现在给各位2千美金，20张百元钞票成一捆。你刚刚想买的物品可以多买一倍。想想这笔钱在皮夹里的感觉。现在，选择的一刻又来了，但这次，条件比较糟糕。因为你将决定“失去金钱”的方式，一样要从中做个选择。第一个选择是有风险的损失——一样用丢硬币，如果是正面，你会损失1千美金。如果是反面，你1毛都不用丢，2千美金好好放着。或者可以不冒险，也就是说你乖乖把皮夹拿出来，然后给我5张100元钞票。

(完整文稿见字幕）