• People often display impatience when they are making decisions about rewards either right now or (larger rewards) with a slight delay.
• The impatience is reduced if both the options are delayed, say, by an additional month; hence, there is a possibility for dynamic inconsistency, where people opt to be patient for choices concerning the distant future, but when those same choices become closer to the present, the less patient, immediate gratification choice becomes more attractive.
• Do bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans – who share some 99% of their DNA with humans – display similar choice patterns? If they do, that suggests that human preferences are not due to human cultural factors, but are rather baked into us by our genetic make-up.
• The "N" is quite small: 6 orangutans, 5 bonobos, and 4 gorillas. One of the gorillas was left out of the full experiment due to not meeting the pre-test criteria.
• In the experiments, apes are offered the choice between an immediate reward (fruit) and a three-times-larger reward that is delayed by three minutes.
• The same choices are again offered to apes, but this time, the “fast” reward arrives after three minutes, and the delayed reward arrives in nine minutes.
• The apes prefer more to less, if the time delay is the same.
• The apes prefer sooner to later, if the reward is the same.
• The apes show more patience for the larger reward when both the options are delayed; that is, like humans, they seem to be subject to dynamic inconsistency in their intertemporal choices.
• As the small sample-size suggests, the statistical significance of the results is quite limited.
