Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(48)
The word fashion was first used in relation to animals by K?hler, whose apes invented new games all the time. They’d march single file around and around a post, trotting in the same rhythm with emphasis on one stamping foot, while the other foot stepped lightly, wagging their heads in the same rhythm, all acting in synchrony as if in a trance. For months our own chimps had a game we called cooking. They’d dig a hole in the dirt, collect water by holding a bucket under a faucet, and dump water into the hole. They’d sit around the hole poking in the mud with a stick as if stirring soup. Sometimes there were three or four such holes in operation at the same time, keeping half the group busy. At a chimpanzee sanctuary in Zambia, scientists followed the spread of yet another meme. One female was the first to stick a straw of grass into her ear, letting it hang out while walking around and grooming others. Over the years, other chimps followed her example, with several of them adopting the same new “look.”50
Fashions come and go in chimps as in humans, but some habits we find in only one group and not in another. Typical is the hand-clasp grooming of some wild chimpanzee communities, in which two individuals hold hands above their heads while grooming each other’s armpits with their other hands.51 Since habits and fashions often spread without any associated rewards, social learning is truly social. It is about conformity instead of payoffs. Thus an infant male chimp may mimic the charging display of the alpha male who always bangs a specific metal door to accentuate his performance. Ten minutes after the male has finished his performance—a dangerous activity, during which mothers keep their children near—the little son is let go. With all his hair on end, he goes to bang on the same door as his role model.
Having documented numerous such examples, I developed the idea of Bonding-and Identification-based Observational Learning (BIOL). Accordingly, primate social learning stems from an urge to belong. BIOL refers to conformism born from the desire to act like others and to fit in.52 It explains why apes imitate their own kind far better than the average human, and why, among humans, they imitate only those whom they feel close to. It also explains why young chimps, especially females,53 learn so much from their mothers, and why high-status individuals are favorite models. This preference is also known in our own societies, in which advertisements feature celebrities showing off watches, perfumes, and cars. We love to emulate the Beckhams, Kardashians, Biebers, and Jolies. Might the same apply to apes? In one experiment, Vicky spread brightly colored plastic chips around in an enclosure, which the chimps could collect and carry to a container in exchange for rewards. Exposed to the sight of a top-ranking group member trained to drop tokens into one container and a bottom-ranking one trained to use a different container, the colony massively followed in the footsteps of the more prestigious member.54
As evidence mounted regarding imitation in apes, other species inevitably joined the ranks, showing similar capacities.55 There are now compelling studies on imitation in monkeys, dogs, corvids, parrots, and dolphins. And if we take a broader view, we have even more species to consider because cultural transmission is widespread. To return to dogs and wolves, a recent experiment applied the conspecific approach to canine imitation. Instead of following human instructions, both dogs and wolves saw a member of their own species manipulate a lever to open the lid of a box with hidden food. Next, they were allowed to try the same box themselves. This time the wolves greatly outsmarted the dogs.56 Wolves may be poor at following human pointing, but when it comes to picking up hints from their own kind, they beat dogs. The investigators ascribe this contrast to attention rather than cognition. They point out that wolves watch one another more closely as they rely on the pack for survival, whereas dogs rely on us.
Clearly, it is time for us to start testing animals in accordance with their biology and move away from human-centric approaches. Instead of making the experimenter the chief model or partner, we better keep him or her in the background. Only by testing apes with apes, wolves with wolves, and children with human adults can we evaluate social cognition in its original evolutionary context. The one exception may be the dog, which we domesticated (or which domesticated itself, as some believe) to bond with us. Humans testing dog cognition may actually be a natural thing to do.
Moratorium
Having escaped the Dark Ages in which animals were mere stimulus-response machines, we are free to contemplate their mental lives. It is a great leap forward, the one that Griffin fought for. But now that animal cognition is an increasingly popular topic, we are still facing the mindset that animal cognition can be only a poor substitute of what we humans have. It can’t be truly deep and amazing. Toward the end of a long career, many a scholar cannot resist shining a light on human talents by listing all the things we are capable of and animals not.57 From the human perspective, these conjectures may make a satisfactory read, but for anyone interested, as I am, in the full spectrum of cognitions on our planet, they come across as a colossal waste of time. What a bizarre animal we are that the only question we can ask in relation to our place in nature is “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest of them all?”
Keeping humans in their preferred spot on that absurd scale of the ancient Greeks has led to an obsession with semantics, definitions, and redefinitions, and—let’s face it—the moving of goalposts. Every time we translate low expectations about animals into an experiment, the mirror’s favorite answer sounds. Biased comparisons are one ground for suspicion, but the other is the touting of absent evidence. I have lots of negative findings in my own drawers that have never seen the light since I have no idea what they mean. They may indicate the absence of a given capacity in my animals, but most of the time, especially if spontaneous behavior suggests otherwise, I am unsure that I have tested them in the best possible way. I may have created a situation that threw them off, or presented the problem in such an incomprehensible fashion that they didn’t even bother to solve it. Recall the low opinion scientists held of gibbon intelligence before their hand anatomy was taken into account, or the premature denials of mirror self-recognition in elephants based on their reaction to an undersize mirror. There are so many ways to account for negative outcomes that it is safer to doubt one’s methods before doubting one’s subjects.