In humans, the attitude toward risk is not neutral and is dissimilar between bets involving gains and bets involving losses. The existence and prevalence of these decision features in non-human primates are unclear. In addition, only a few studies have tried to simulate the evolution of agents based on their attitude toward risk. Therefore, we still ignore to what extent Prospect theory’s claims are evolutionarily rooted. To shed light on this issue, we collected data from nine macaques that performed bets involving gains or losses. We confirmed that their overall behaviour is coherent with Prospect theory’s claims. In parallel, we used a genetic algorithm to simulate the evolution of a population of agents across several generations. We showed that the algorithm selects progressively agents that exhibit risk-seeking, and has an inverted S-shape distorted perception of probability. We compared these two results and found that monkeys’ attitude toward risk is only congruent with the simulation when they are facing losses. This result is consistent with the idea that gambling in the loss domain is analogous to deciding in a context of life-threatening challenges where a certain level of risk-seeking behaviour and probability distortion may be adaptive.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Existence and prevalence of economic behaviours among non-human primates’.

在人类中，对风险的态度不是中立的，并且在涉及收益的赌注和涉及损失的赌注之间是不同的。这些决策特征在非人类灵长类动物中的存在和普遍性尚不清楚。此外，只有少数研究试图根据代理人对风险的态度来模拟他们的演变。因此，我们仍然忽略了前景理论的主张在多大程度上是进化根源的。为了阐明这个问题，我们收集了九只猕猴的数据，这些猕猴进行涉及收益或损失的赌注。我们确认他们的整体行为与前景理论的主张是一致的。同时，我们使用遗传算法来模拟数代智能体的进化。我们展示了该算法逐步选择表现出寻求风险的代理，并且对概率有倒 S 形的扭曲感知。我们比较了这两个结果，发现猴子对风险的态度只有在面临损失时才与模拟一致。这一结果与以下观点一致，即在损失域中赌博类似于在威胁生命的挑战的背景下做出决定，其中一定程度的风险寻求行为和概率扭曲可能是适应性的。

本文是主题“非人类灵长类动物经济行为的存在和流行”的一部分。