Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(44)

There are only a dozen institutes that test ape cognition, and I have visited most of them. I have noticed procedures in which humans barely interact with their subjects and ones in which they have close physical contact. The latter can safely be done only by those who raised the apes themselves or have at least known them since infancy. Since apes are much stronger than we are and have been known to kill people, the up-close-and-personal approach is not for everyone. The other extreme derives from the traditional approach in the psychology lab: carrying a rat or a pigeon into a testing room with as little contact as possible. The ideal here is a nonexistent experimenter, meaning the absence of any personal relation. In some labs apes are called into a room and given only a few minutes to perform before they are sent out again without any playful or friendly contact, almost like a military drill. Imagine if children were tested under such circumstances: how would they fare?

At our center in Atlanta, all our chimps are reared by their own kind and so are more ape-than human-oriented. They are “chimpy,” as we say, relative to apes that have a less social background or were raised by humans. We never share the same space with them, but we do interact through the bars, and we always play or groom before testing. We talk to them to put them at ease, give them goodies, and in general try to create a relaxed atmosphere. We want them to look upon our tasks as a game rather than as work, and certainly never put them under pressure. If they are tense because of events in their group, or because another chimp is banging on the outside door or hooting his lungs out, we wait until everyone has calmed down, or we reschedule the test. There is no point testing apes who are not ready. If such procedures are not followed, apes may act as if they don’t understand the problem at hand, whereas the real issue is high anxiety and distraction. Many negative results in the literature may be explained this way.

The methodology sections of scientific papers rarely offer a look in the “kitchen,” but I think it is crucial. My own approach has always been to be firm and friendly. Firm, meaning that we are consistent and don’t make capricious demands but also don’t let the animals walk all over us, such as when they only want to play around and get free sweets. But we are also friendly, without punishment, anger, or attempts to dominate. The latter still happens all too often in experiments and is counterproductive with such headstrong animals. Why would an ape follow the points and prompts of a human experimenter whom he sees as a rival? This is another potential source of negative outcomes.

My own team typically cajoles, bribes, and sweet-talks its primate partners. Sometimes I feel like a motivational speaker, such as when Peony, one of our oldest females, ignored a task that we had set up for her. For twenty minutes, she lay in the corner. I sat down right next to her and told her, in a calm voice, that I didn’t have all day and it would be great if she would get going. She slowly got up, glancing at me, and strolled to the next room, where she sat down for the task. Of course—as discussed in the previous chapter in relation to Robert Yerkes—it is unlikely that Peony followed the details of what I had said. She was sensitive to my tone of voice and knew all along what we wanted.

However good our relations with apes, the idea that we can test them in exactly the same way we test children is an illusion of the same order as someone throwing both fish and cats into a swimming pool and believing he is treating them the same way. Think of the children as the fish. While testing them, psychologists smile and talk all the time, giving instructions where to look or what to do. “Look at the little froggy!” tells a child so much more than an ape will ever know about the green plastic blob in your hand. Moreover, children are usually tested with a parent in the room, often sitting on their lap. Having permission to run around and an experimenter of their own species, they have an enormous leg up over the ape sitting behind bars without verbal hints or parental support.

True, developmental psychologists try to reduce the influence of parents by telling them not to talk or point, and they may give them sunglasses or a baseball cap to cover their eyes. These measures, however, reveal their woeful underestimation of the power of a parent’s motivation to see their child succeed. When it comes to their precious offspring, few people care about the objective truth. We can be glad that Oskar Pfungst designed far more rigorous controls while examining Clever Hans. In fact, Pfungst found that the wide-rimmed hat of the horse owner greatly benefited Hans, since hats amplify head movements. In the same way that the owner vociferously denied his effect on the horse even after it had been proven, parents of children may be completely honest about suppressing cues. But adults have far too many ways to unintentionally guide the choices of a child on their lap, through slight body movements, gaze direction, halted breathing, sighs, squeezes, strokes, and whispered encouragements. Letting parents attend the testing of a child is asking for trouble—the sort of trouble we avoid in animal testing.

The American primatologist Allan Gardner—who was first to teach American Sign Language to an ape—discussed human biases under the heading “Pygmalion leading.” Pygmalion, in ancient mythology, was a Cypriot sculptor who fell in love with his own statue of a woman. The story has been used as a metaphor of how teachers raise the performance of certain children by expecting the world of them. They fall in love with their own prediction, which serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remember how Charlie Menzel felt that only people who hold apes in high esteem will fully appreciate what they are trying to communicate? His was a plea for raised expectations, which unfortunately is not the situation apes typically face. Children, in contrast, are treated in such a nurturing manner that they inevitably confirm the mental superiority ascribed to them.35 Experimenters admire and stimulate them from the outset, making them feel like fish in the water, whereas they often treat apes more like albino rats: keeping them at a distance, and in the dark, while depriving them of the verbal encouragement we offer members of our own species.