Professor Don Ross

School of Society, Politics and Ethics, UCC

Wednesday February 26th – 6pm – Aula Maxima, UCC

In this lecture, I first summarise leading results of 10 years of laboratory experiments on human risk attitudes carried out around the world by my research team over the past 14 years. I then describe new experiments we are conducting on the risk attitudes of African elephants. The comparison between human and elephant ways of coping with risk is used to address the following question: why did the more recently evolved of these two highly intelligent and hyper-cooperative species come to ecologically dominate the planet, while driving the other one to the brink of extinction? What is the human "killer app" that elephants lack? Might we be able to help elephants acquire this app before they disappear from the wild?