Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(43)

During a live demonstration of Panzee’s skills, Charlie told me that caretakers generally have a higher opinion of apes’ mental abilities than does the typical philosopher or psychologist. This high opinion was essential for his experiment, he explained, because it meant that Panzee was dealing with people who took her seriously. All those recruited by Panzee said they were at first surprised by her behavior but soon understood what she wanted them to do. By following her pointing, beckoning, panting, and calling, they had no trouble finding the candies hidden in the forest. Without her instructions, they would never have known where to look. Panzee never pointed in the wrong direction, or to locations that had been used on previous occasions. The result was communication about a past event, present in the ape’s memory, to ignorant members of a different species. If the human followed the instructions correctly and got closer to the food, Panzee would vigorously bob her head in affirmation (like “Yes! Yes!”), and like us, she’d lift her hand up, giving higher points, if the item was farther away. She realized that she knew something that the other didn’t know, and was intelligent enough to recruit humans as willing slaves to obtain the goodies of her desire.31

Just to illustrate how creative chimps can be in this regard, here is a typical incident at our field station. A young female grunted at me from behind a fence and kept looking at me with shiny eyes (indicating that she knew something exciting) alternated with pointed stares into the grass near my feet. I couldn’t figure out what she wanted, until she spat. From the trajectory, I noticed a small green grape. When I gave it to her, she ran to another spot and repeated her performance. Having memorized the locations of fruits dropped by the caretakers, she proved an accurate spitter, collecting three rewards this way.


Clever Hans in Reverse

So why did we at first reach the wrong conclusion about animal perspective taking, and why has it happened so many times before and since? Claims about absent capacities range from the idea that primates do not care about the welfare of others, do not imitate, or even fail to understand gravity. Imagine this for flightless animals that travel high above the ground! In my own career, I have faced resistance to the notion that primates reconcile after fights or console those who are distressed. Or at least I heard the counterclaim that they do not truly do so—as in, they do not “truly imitate” or “truly console”—which immediately gets one into debates about how to distinguish what looks like consolation or imitation from the real thing. At times, the overwhelming negativity got to me, as an entire literature burgeoned that was more excited about the cognitive deficits of other species than about their actual accomplishments.32 It would be like having a career adviser who all the time tells you that you are too dumb for this or too dumb for that. What a depressing attitude!

The fundamental problem with all these denials is that it is impossible to prove a negative. This is no minor issue. When anyone claims the absence of a given capacity in other species, and speculates that it must therefore have arisen recently in our lineage, we hardly need to inspect the data to appreciate the shakiness of such a claim. All we can ever conclude with some certainty is that we have failed to find a given skill in the species that we have examined. We cannot go much further than this, and we certainly may not turn it into an affirmation of absence. Scientists do so all the time, though, whenever the human-animal comparison is at stake. The zeal to find out what sets us apart overrides all reasonable caution.

Not even with regard to the Monster of Loch Ness or the Abominable Snowman will you ever hear anyone claim to have proven its nonexistence, even though this would fit the expectations of most of us. And why do governments still spend billions of dollars to search for extraterrestrial civilizations while there is no shred of evidence to encourage this quest? Isn’t it time to conclude once and for all that these civilizations simply don’t exist? But this conclusion will never be reached. That respected psychologists ignore the recommendation to tread lightly around absent evidence is most puzzling, therefore. One reason is that they test apes and children in the same manner—at least in their minds—while coming up with contrary results. Applying a battery of cognitive tasks to both apes and children and finding not a single result in the apes’ favor, they tout the differences as proof of human uniqueness. Otherwise, why didn’t the apes fare better? To understand the flaw in this logic, we need to go back to Clever Hans, the counting horse. But instead of using Hans to illustrate why animal capacities are sometimes overrated, this time we are concerned with the unfair advantage that human capacities enjoy.

The outcome of ape-child comparisons themselves suggests the answer. When tested on physical tasks, such as memory, causality, and the use of tools, apes perform at about the same level as two-and-a-half-year-old children, but when it comes to social skills, such as learning from others or following others’ signals, they are left in the dust.33 Social problem solving requires interaction with an experimenter, however, whereas physical problem solving does not. This raises the possibility that the human interface is key. The typical format of an experiment is to let apes interact with a white-coated barely familiar human. Since experimenters are supposed to be bland and neutral, they do not engage in schmoozing, petting, or other niceties. This doesn’t help make the ape feel at ease and identify with the experimenter. Children, however, are encouraged to do so. Moreover, only the children are interacting with a member of their own species, which helps them even more. Nevertheless, experimenters comparing apes and children insist that all their subjects are treated exactly the same. The inherent bias of this arrangement has become harder to ignore, however, now that we know more about ape attitudes. A recent eye-tracking study (which precisely measured where subjects looked) reached the unsurprising conclusion that apes consider members of their own species special: they follow the gaze of another ape more closely than they follow the human gaze.34 This may be all we need to explain why apes fare poorly on social tasks presented by members of our species.