Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(15)
Instead of being a disaster for animal cognition studies, the horse’s exposé proved a blessing in disguise. Awareness of the Clever Hans Effect, as it became known, has greatly improved animal testing. By illustrating the power of blind procedures, Pfungst paved the way for cognitive studies that were able to withstand scrutiny. Ironically, this lesson is often ignored in research on humans. Young children are typically presented with cognitive tasks while sitting on their mothers’ laps. The assumption is that mothers are like furniture, but every mother wants her child to succeed, and nothing guarantees that her body movements, sighs, and nudges don’t cue her child. Thanks to Clever Hans, the study of animal cognition is now more rigorous than that. Dog labs test the cognition of their animals while the human owner is blindfolded or stands in a corner while facing away. In one well-known study, in which Rico, a border collie, recognized more than two hundred words for different toys, the owner would ask for a specific toy located in a different room. This prevented the owner from looking at the toy and unconsciously guiding the dog’s attention. Rico would need to run to the other room to fetch the mentioned item, which is how the Clever Hans Effect was avoided.25
We owe Pfungst a profound debt for demonstrating that humans and animals develop communication that they are unaware of. The horse reinforced behavior in his owner, and the owner in his horse, whereas everyone was convinced that they were doing something else entirely. While the realization of what was going on moved the historical pendulum to swing firmly from rich to lean interpretations of animal intelligence—where it unfortunately got stuck for too long—other appeals to simplicity have fared less well. Below I describe two examples, one concerning self-awareness and the other culture, both concepts that, whenever mentioned in relation to animals, still send some scholars through the roof.
Armchair Primatology
When American psychologist Gordon Gallup, in 1970, first showed that chimpanzees recognize their own reflection, he spoke of self-awareness—a capacity that he said was lacking in species, such as monkeys, that failed his mirror test.26 The test consisted of putting a mark on the body of an anesthetized ape that it could find only, once awake, by inspecting its reflection. Gallup’s choice of words obviously annoyed those leaning toward a robotic view of animals.
The first counterattack came from B. F. Skinner and colleagues, who promptly trained pigeons to peck at dots on themselves while standing in front of a mirror.27 Reproducing a semblance of the behavior, they felt, would solve the mystery. Never mind that it took them hundreds of grain rewards to get the pigeons to do something that chimpanzees and humans do without any coaching. One can train goldfish to play soccer and bears to dance, but does anyone believe that this tells us much about the skills of human soccer stars or dancers? Worse, we aren’t even sure that this pigeon study is replicable. Another research team spent years trying the exact same training, using the same strain of pigeon, without producing any self-pecking birds. They ended up publishing a report critical of the original study with the word Pinocchio in its title.28
The second counterattack was a fresh interpretation of the mirror test, suggesting that the observed self-recognition might be a by-product of the anesthesia used in the marking procedure. Perhaps when a chimpanzee recovers from the anesthesia, he randomly touches his face, resulting in accidental contact with the mark.29 This idea was quickly disproved by another team that carefully recorded which facial areas chimpanzees touch. It turned out that the touching is far from random: it specifically targets the marked area and peaks right after the ape has seen his own reflection.30 This was, of course, what the experts had been saying all along, but now it was official.
Apes really don’t need anesthesia to show how well they understand mirrors. They spontaneously use them to look inside their mouth, and females always turn around to check out their behinds—something males don’t care about. Both are body parts that they normally never get to see. Apes also use mirrors for special needs. For example, Rowena has a little injury on the top of her head caused by a scuffle with a male. Immediately, when we hold up a mirror, she inspects the injury and grooms around it while following the reflection of her movements. Another female, Borie, has an ear infection that we are trying to treat with antibiotics, but she keeps waving her hand in the direction of a table that is empty except for a small plastic mirror. It takes a while before we understand her intentions, but as soon as we hand her the toy, she picks up a straw and angles the mirror such that she can clean out her ear while watching the process in the mirror.
B. F. Skinner was more interested in experimental control over animals than spontaneous behavior. Stimulus-response contingencies were all that mattered. His behaviorism dominated animal studies for much of the last century. Loosening its theoretical grip was a prerequisite for the rise of evolutionary cognition.
A good experiment doesn’t create new and unusual behavior but taps into natural tendencies, which is exactly what Gallup’s test did. Given the apes’ spontaneous mirror use, no expert would ever have come up with the anesthesia story. So what makes scientists unaccustomed to primates think they know better? Those of us who work with exceptionally gifted animals are used to unsolicited opinions about how we ought to test them and what their behavior actually means. I find the arrogance behind such advice mind-boggling. Once, in his desire to underscore the uniqueness of human altruism, a prominent child psychologist shouted at a large audience, “No ape will ever jump into a lake to save another!” It was left to me to point out during the Q&A afterward that there are actually a handful of reports of apes doing precisely this—often to their own detriment, since they don’t swim.31