The wisdom of aging may not apply to economic decisions. In a study of choices make about money, the oldest people performed the worst—even beating out the usual bad-decision champions, adolescents.
Agnieszka Tymula, a decision scientist at the University of Sydney in Australia, studies economic decision making in humans (and sometimes monkeys). With colleagues at Yale and New York University, she gathered 135 total subjects in four different age groups: teens (12-17), young adults (21-25), "midlife" adults (30-50), and older adults (65-90). All the elderly subjects were screened for dementia to make sure they had healthily aging brains.
At the start of the experiment, researchers gave the subjects $125 in cash. It was theirs to lose—or to more than double, depending on the choices they made. Then subjects made a series of quick decisions. For example, would you rather take a guaranteed loss of $5, or play a "lottery" where ...
