Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(70)

Most fascinating are the many ways in which children and animals cope with temptation. They are not passively sitting and staring at the object of desire but try to occupy themselves by creating distractions. Children avoid looking at the marshmallow, sometimes covering their eyes with their hands or putting their head into their arms. They talk to themselves, they sing, they invent games using their hands and feet, and they even fall asleep so as not to have to endure the terribly long wait.31 The behavior of apes is not so different, and one study found that if given toys, apes are able to hold out longer. Toys help them take their attention off the candy machine. Or take Griffin, who about one-third through one of his longest waits threw the cup with cereal across the room. This way he didn’t have to look at it. On other occasions, he moved the cup just out of reach, talked to himself, preened himself, shook his feathers, yawned extensively, or fell asleep (or at least closed his eyes). He also sometimes licked the treat without eating it, or shouted “Wanna nut!”

Some of these behaviors don’t fit the situation at hand and fall under what ethologists call displacement activities, which occur when a drive is thwarted. This happens when two conflicting drives, such as fight and flight, arise at the same time. Since they cannot both be expressed, irrelevant behavior takes the pressure off. A fish spreading its fins to intimidate a rival may all of a sudden swim to the bottom to dig into the sand, or a rooster may interrupt a fight only to start pecking at some imaginary grains. In humans, a typical displacement activity is to scratch one’s head when asked a tough question. Scratching is also common in other primates during cognitive tests, especially challenging ones.32 Displacement activity occurs when motivational energy seeks an outlet and “sparks over” into extraneous behavior. The discoverer of this mechanism, the Dutch ethologist Adriaan Kortlandt, is still honored at the zoo in Amsterdam where he used to watch a colony of free-ranging cormorants. The wooden bench on which he spent hours following his birds is known as the “displacement bench.” I recently sat on it and obviously couldn’t resist yawning, fiddling, and scratching myself.

But this is not the whole explanation of how animals cope with delayed gratification, and why they preen themselves or yawn. There are cognitive interpretations, too. Long ago the father of American psychology, William James, proposed “will” and “ego strength” as the basis of self-control. This is how the behavior of children usually is interpreted, as in the following description of the marshmallow test: “The subject can wait most stoically if he expects that he really will get the deferred larger outcome in the waiting paradigm, and wants it very much, but shifts his attention elsewhere and occupies himself internally with cognitive distractions.”33 The emphasis here is on a deliberate, conscious strategy. The child knows what the future holds and wills his mind off the temptation in front of him. Given how similarly children and some animals behave under the same conditions, it is logical to favor the same explanation. Demonstrating impressive willpower, animals too may be aware of their own desires and try to curb them.

To explore this further, I visited Michael Beran, an American colleague at Georgia State University. Mike works at a lab in a large stretch of forest in Decatur, in the middle of the Atlanta area, with roomy accommodations for chimpanzees and monkeys. It is known as the Language Research Center, so named since Kanzi, the symbol-trained bonobo, was its first resident. At the same location, Charlie Menzel conducts tests of spatial memory on apes and Sarah Brosnan studies economic decision making by capuchins. The Atlanta area may well have the world’s highest concentration of primatologists, since they are also found at Zoo Atlanta, in nearby Athens, Georgia, and of course at the Yerkes Primate Center, which historically sparked all this interest. As a result, we have expertise on a wide range of topics.

I asked Mike, who has worked extensively on self-control,34 why articles in this field so often start out with the connection to consciousness, then quickly move to actual behavior without ever returning to the issue of consciousness. Are the authors teasing us? The reason, Mike felt, is that the link with consciousness is rather speculative. Strictly speaking, the fact that animals achieve a better outcome by waiting doesn’t prove that they realize what will happen in the time ahead. On the other hand, their response doesn’t depend on gradual learning, since they generally show it right away. This is why Mike regards self-control decisions as being future-oriented and cognitive. We may not have proof beyond all doubt, but the assumption is that the apes make these decisions based on the anticipation of a better outcome: “To argue that the behavior of apes is entirely under external stimulus control is silly to me.”

Another argument for a cognitive interpretation is their behavior during long waits, which last up to twenty minutes, while candies drop at regular intervals into a bowl. The waiting apes like to play with things during this time, which suggests recognition that they need self-control. Mike described some of the weird things they do to keep themselves busy. Sherman (an adult male chimpanzee) would pick up a candy from the bowl, inspect it, then put it back. Or Panzee would disconnect the tube through which the candies roll in. She’d look at it and shake it before putting it back onto the dispenser. Given toys, they would use them as a distraction to make the wait easier. Such behavior hints at anticipation and strategizing, both of which suggest conscious awareness.

Mike’s interest in this topic was triggered by a legendary experiment on reversal pointing by the American primatologist Sarah Boysen with Sheba, a chimpanzee. Sheba was asked to choose between two cups with different amounts of candy. The catch, however, was that the cup that she’d point at would go to another chimp, leaving her with the alternative cup. Obviously, the smart strategy would be for Sheba to reverse her pointing, indicating the cup with the smaller number of candies. Yet unable to overcome her desire for the fuller cup, she never learned to do so. When the candies were replaced by numbers, however, things changed. Sheba had learned the numbers 1 through 9, knowing the amounts of food associated with them. Presented with two different numbers, she never hesitated to point at the smaller one, showing that she understood how the reversals worked.35