This is an ongoing, multi-year project funded by the Center for the Economic Analysis of Risk, Georgia State University. We’ve adapted the experimental methods we’ve used for many years in quantitatively modelling human risk preferences for application to our six African elephant study participants at Adventures with Elephants, Limpopo Province, South Africa. The project isn’t about ‘conditioning’ the elephants to do what humans want them to; it’s about establishing a communication channel that allows us to share information with them about their own risky choices. The elephants participate, for fresh fruit prizes, in an outdoor lab involving no enclosure, with equipment they operate themselves. Other research team members are Andrea Bouwer, Chloe Caister, Arianna Galliera, Glenn Harrison, Sean Hensman, Elena Mariotti, Francesca Parrini, and E. Elisabet Rutström.
