"While It's Always Dangerous to Anthropomorphize..."

When given a choice between steady rewards and the chance for more, monkeys will gamble, a new study found.

And they'll keep taking risks as the stakes rise and dry spells get longer....

The male rhesus macaque monkeys were shown either of two lights on a screen. Looking at a 'safe' light yielded the same fruit juice reward each time. Looking at the 'risky' light meant a larger or smaller juice reward. In the first test, the average reward was the same over time regardless of which light they chose.

The monkeys overwhelmingly preferred to gamble, even when the game was changed so that gambling yielded less juice over time.

'There was no rational reason why monkeys might prefer one of these options over the other because, according to the theory of expected value, they're identical,' said Duke University Medical Center neurobiologist Michael Platt.

Okay fine. So let's change the odds. In test two, the researchers made the average payoff for the risky target less than for the safe target.

'We found that they still preferred the risky target,' Platt said. 'Basically these monkeys really liked to gamble.'

These monkeys, apparently, also liked to smoke, drink, and whore around with airport motel cocktail waitresses; they liked signing "Bobo needs a new pair of shoes," shaking the bones, and losing everything but the red of their widening, ruby asses when they crapped out; and they liked bananas, because, well, they're monkeys.

The one gamble the monkeys wouldn't go for, though, was a state-supported lottery to benefit public education. As one monkey said through an interpreter, "That's a sucker's bet."