Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(45)

The cognition of children and apes is tested in superficially similar ways. Yet children are not kept behind a barrier; they are talked to and often sit on their parents’ laps, all of which helps them connect with the experimenter and receive unintentional hints. The greatest difference, however, is that only apes face a member of another species. Given how much these comparisons disadvantage one class of subjects, they remain inconclusive.

Needless to say, I view most ape-child comparisons as fatally flawed.36

Recall that apes have been tested for ToM by having them guess what humans know or don’t know. The problem here is that captive apes have every reason to believe that we are omniscient! Suppose my assistant calls to tell me that Socko, the alpha male, has been wounded in a fight. I head over to the field station, walk up to him, and ask him to turn around, which he does—having known me since he was a baby—to show me his behind with the gash. Now try to look at this from Socko’s perspective. Chimps are smart animals, always trying to figure out what’s going on. Of course, he wonders how I know about his injury—I must be an all-knowing god. As such, human experimenters are about the last to be used to find out if apes understand the connection between seeing and knowing. All we are testing is the ape’s theory of the human mind. It is no accident that we made substantial progress only after egg-hunt scenarios pitted apes against other apes.

One area of cognitive research that has been lucky to escape the species barrier is the study of ToM in animals that are so different from us that everyone understands that humans are unsuitable partners. This has been the case with corvids. Since a true animal watcher never takes a break, the British ethologist Nicky Clayton made a major discovery over lunch at the University of California at Davis. While sitting at an outdoor terrace, she saw Western scrub jays fly off with scraps stolen from the tables. They not only cached them but also guarded them against thieves. If another bird saw where they hid their food, it was bound to disappear. Clayton noticed that after their rivals left the scene, many of the jays returned to rebury their treasures. In follow-up research with Nathan Emery in their lab at Cambridge, she let jays cache mealworms either in private or while being watched by another jay. Given a chance, the jays quickly re-cached their worms at a new location—but only if they had been watched. They seemed to understand that the food was safe if no other birds had any information. Moreover, only birds who themselves had pilfered others’ food re-cached their own. Following the dictum “It takes a thief to know a thief,” the jays seemed to extrapolate from their own criminality to that of others.37



A Western scrub jay caches a mealworm while being watched from behind glass by another. As soon as he is alone, the jay will quickly rehide his treasures, as if realizing that the other knows too much.

Again, we recognize the Menzel-like design of this experiment, which is even more obvious in a study of perspective-taking ravens. The Austrian zoologist Thomas Bugnyar had a low-ranking male who was expert at opening canisters that contained goodies, but this male often lost his prize to a bullying and stealing dominant male. The low-ranking male, however, learned to distract his competitor by enthusiastically opening empty containers and making as if to eat from them. When the dominant bird found out, “he got very angry, and started throwing things around.” Bugnyar further found that when ravens approach hidden food, they take into account what other ravens know. If their competitors have the same knowledge, they hurry to get there first. But if the others are ignorant, they take their time.38

All in all, animals do plenty of perspective taking, from being aware of what others want to knowing what others know. A few frontiers are left, of course, such as whether they recognize when others have the wrong knowledge. In humans, researchers test this issue with the so-called false-belief task. But since these refinements are hard to evaluate without language, we face a dearth of animal data. Still, even if the remaining differences hold up, there is little doubt that the blanket assertion that ToM is uniquely human must be downgraded to a more nuanced, gradualist view.39 Humans probably possess a fuller understanding of one another, but the contrast with other animals is not stark enough that extraterrestrials would automatically pick ToM as the chief marker that sets us apart.

While this conclusion is based on solid data from repeated experiments, let me add one anecdote that captures the phenomenon in an entirely different way. At the Yerkes Field Station—where apes live in grassy open-air enclosures in the warm Georgia weather—I developed a special bond with an exceptionally bright female chimp named Lolita. One day Lolita had a new baby, and I wanted to get a good look at it. This is hard to do since a newborn ape is really no more than a little dark blob against its mother’s dark tummy. I called Lolita out of her grooming huddle, high up in the climbing frame, and pointed at her belly as soon as she sat down in front of me. Looking at me, she took the infant’s right hand in her right hand and its left hand in her left hand. It sounds simple, but given that the baby was ventrally clinging to her, she had to cross her arms to do so. The movement resembled that of people crossing their arms when grabbing a T-shirt by its hems in order to take it off. She then slowly lifted the baby into the air while turning it around its axis, unfolding it in front of me. Suspended from its mother’s hands, the baby now faced me instead of her. After it made a few grimaces and whimpers—infants hate to lose touch with a warm belly—Lolita quickly tucked it back into her lap.