Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (7 page)

Romanes knew the mental operations required for such behavior, he said, by extrapolating from his own. The weakness of his introspective approach was, of course, its reliance on one-time events and on trust in one’s own private experiences. I have nothing against anecdotes, especially if they have been caught on camera or come from reputable observers who know their animals; but I do view them as a starting point of research, never an end point. For those who disparage anecdotes altogether, it is good to keep in mind that almost all interesting work on animal behavior has begun with a description of a striking or puzzling event. Anecdotes hint at what is possible and challenge our thinking.

But we cannot exclude that the event was a fluke, never to be repeated again, or that some decisive aspect went unnoticed. The observer may also unconsciously have filled in missing details based on his or her assumptions. These issues are not easily resolved by collecting more anecdotes. “The plural of anecdote is not data,” as the saying goes. It is ironic, therefore, that when it was his own turn to find a protégé and successor, Romanes chose Lloyd Morgan, who put an end to all this unrestrained speculation. Morgan, a British psychologist, formulated in 1894 the probably most quoted recommendation in all of psychology:

In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower on the psychological scale.
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Generations of psychologists have dutifully repeated Morgan’s Canon, taking it to mean that it is safe to assume that animals are stimulus-response machines. But Morgan never meant it that way. In fact, he rightly added, “But surely the simplicity of an explanation is no necessary criterion of its truth.”
¹⁷
Here he was reacting against the mindset according to which animals are blind automata without souls. No self-respecting scientist would talk of “souls,” but to deny animals
any
intelligence and consciousness came close enough. Taken aback by these views, Morgan added a provision to his canon according to which there is nothing wrong with more complex cognitive interpretations if the species in question has already been proven to have high intelligence.
¹⁸
With animals such as chimpanzees, elephants, and crows, for which we have ample evidence of complex cognition, we really do not need to start at zero every time we are struck by seemingly smart behavior. We don’t need to explain their behavior the way we would that of, say, a rat. And even for the poor underestimated rat, zero is unlikely to be the best starting point.

Morgan’s Canon was seen as a variation on Occam’s razor, according to which science should seek explanations with the smallest number of assumptions. This is a noble goal indeed, but what if a minimalist cognitive explanation asks us to believe in miracles? Evolutionarily speaking, it would be a true miracle if we had the fancy cognition that we believe we have while our fellow animals had none of it. The pursuit of cognitive parsimony often conflicts with evolutionary parsimony.
¹⁹
No biologist is willing to go this far: we believe in gradual modification. We don’t like to propose gaps between related species without at least coming up with an explanation. How did our species become rational and conscious if the rest of the natural world lacks any stepping-stones? Rigorously applied to animals—and to animals alone!—Morgan’s Canon promotes a saltationist view that leaves the human mind dangling in empty evolutionary space. It is to the credit of Morgan himself that he recognized the limitations of his canon and urged us not to confuse simplicity with reality.

It is less known that ethology, too, arose amid skepticism about subjective methods. Tinbergen and other Dutch ethologists were shaped by the hugely popular illustrated books of two schoolmasters who taught love and respect for nature while insisting that the only way to truly understand animals was to watch them outdoors. This inspired a massive youth movement in Holland, with field excursions every Sunday, that laid the groundwork for a generation of eager naturalists. This approach did not combine well, however, with the Dutch tradition of “animal psychology,” the dominant figure of which was Johan Bierens de Haan. Internationally famous, erudite, and professorial, Bierens de Haan must have looked rather out of place as an occasional guest at Tinbergen’s field site in the Hulshorst, a dune area in the middle of the country. While the younger generation ran around in shorts holding butterfly nets, the older professor came in suit and tie. These visits attest to the cordiality between both scientists before they grew apart, but young Tinbergen soon began to challenge the tenets of animal psychology, such as its reliance on introspection. Increasingly, he put distance between his own thinking and Bierens de Haan’s subjectivism.
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Not being from the same country, Lorenz showed less patience with the old man, whom he—in a play on his name—mischievously dubbed
Der Bierhahn
(German for “the beertap”).

Tinbergen is nowadays best known for his Four Whys: four different yet complementary questions that we ask about behavior. But none of them explicitly mentions intelligence or cognition.
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That ethology avoided any mention of internal states was perhaps essential for a budding empirical science. As a consequence, ethology temporarily closed the book on cognition and focused instead on the survival value of behavior. In doing so, it planted the seeds of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral ecology. This focus also offered a convenient way around cognition. As soon as questions about intelligence or emotions came up, ethologists would quickly rephrase them in functional terms. For example, if one bonobo reacted to the screams of another by rushing over for a tight embrace, classical ethologists will first of all wonder about the function of such behavior. They’d have debates about who benefited the most, the performer or the recipient, without asking what bonobos understood about one another’s situations, or why the emotions of one should affect those of another. Might apes be empathic? Do bonobos evaluate one another’s needs? This kind of cognitive query made (and still makes) many ethologists uncomfortable.

Blaming the Horse

It is curious that ethologists looked down on animal cognition and emotions as too speculative, while feeling on safe ground with behavioral evolution. If there is one area rife with conjecture, it is how behavior evolved. Ideally, you’d first establish the behavior’s heredity and then measure its impact on survival and reproduction over multiple generations. But we rarely get anywhere close to having this information. With fast-breeding organisms, such as slime molds or fruit flies, these questions may be answerable, but evolutionary accounts of elephant behavior, or human behavior for that matter, remain largely hypothetical since these species don’t permit large-scale breeding experiments. While we do have ways of testing hypotheses and mathematically modeling the consequences of behavior, the evidence is largely indirect. Birth control, technology, and medical care make our own species an almost hopeless test case for evolutionary ideas, which is why we have a plethora of speculations about what happened in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA). This refers to the living conditions of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, about which we obviously have incomplete knowledge.

In contrast, cognition research deals with processes in real time. Even though we cannot actually “see” cognition, we are able to design experiments that help us deduce how it works while eliminating alternative accounts. In this regard, it really isn’t different from any other scientific endeavor. Nevertheless, the study of animal cognition is still often considered a soft science, and until recently young scientists were advised away from such a tricky topic. “Wait until you have tenure,” some older professors would say. The skepticism goes all the way back to the curious case of a German horse named Hans, who lived around the time Morgan crafted his canon. Hans became its proof positive. The black stallion was known in German as
Kluger Hans
, translated as Clever Hans, since he seemed to excel at addition and subtraction. His owner would ask him to multiply four by three, and Hans would happily tap his hoof twelve times. He could also tell you what the date of a given weekday was if he knew the date of an earlier day, and he could tell the square root of sixteen by tapping four times. Hans solved problems he had never heard before. People were flabbergasted, and the stallion became an international sensation.

Clever Hans was a German horse that drew admiring crowds about a century ago. He seemed to excel at arithmetic, such as addition and multiplication. A more careful examination revealed, however, that his main talent was the reading of human body language. He succeeded only if he could see someone who knew the answer.

That is, until Oskar Pfungst, a German psychologist, investigated the horse’s abilities. Pfungst had noticed that Hans was successful only if his owner knew the answer and was visible to the horse. If the owner or any other questioner stood behind a curtain while posing their question, the horse failed. It was a frustrating experiment for Hans, who would bite Pfungst if he got too many answers wrong. Apparently, the way he got them right is that the owner would subtly shift his position or straighten his back the moment Hans reached the correct number of taps. The questioner would be tense in face and posture until the horse reached the answer, at which point he would relax. Hans was very good at picking up these cues. The owner also wore a hat with a wide brim, which would be down as long as he looked at Hans’s tapping hoof and go up when Hans reached the right number. Pfungst demonstrated that anyone wearing such a hat could get any number out of the horse by lowering and then raising his head.
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Some spoke of a hoax, but the owner was unaware that he was cuing his horse, so there was no fraud involved. Even once the owner knew, he found it nearly impossible to suppress his signals. In fact, following the report by Pfungst, the owner was so disappointed that he accused the horse of treachery and wanted him to spend the rest of his life pulling hearses as punishment. Instead of being mad at himself, he blamed his horse! Luckily for Hans, he ended up with a new owner who admired his abilities and tested them further. This was the right spirit, because instead of looking at the whole affair as a downgrading of animal intelligence, it proved incredible sensitivity. Hans’s talent at arithmetic may have been flawed, but his understanding of human body language was outstanding.
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As an Orlov Trotter stallion, Hans appears to have perfectly fit the description of this Russian breed: “Possessed of amazing intelligence, they learn quickly and remember easily with few repetitions. There is often an uncanny understanding of what is wanted and needed of them at any given time. Bred to love people, they bond very tightly to their owners.”
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Instead of being a disaster for animal cognition studies, the horse’s exposé proved a blessing in disguise. Awareness of the Clever Hans Effect, as it became known, has greatly improved animal testing. By illustrating the power of blind procedures, Pfungst paved the way for cognitive studies that were able to withstand scrutiny. Ironically, this lesson is often ignored in research on humans. Young children are typically presented with cognitive tasks while sitting on their mothers’ laps. The assumption is that mothers are like furniture, but every mother wants her child to succeed, and nothing guarantees that her body movements, sighs, and nudges don’t cue her child. Thanks to Clever Hans, the study of animal cognition is now more rigorous than that. Dog labs test the cognition of their animals while the human owner is blindfolded or stands in a corner while facing away. In one well-known study, in which Rico, a border collie, recognized more than two hundred words for different toys, the owner would ask for a specific toy located in a different room. This prevented the owner from looking at the toy and unconsciously guiding the dog’s attention. Rico would need to run to the other room to fetch the mentioned item, which is how the Clever Hans Effect was avoided.
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We owe Pfungst a profound debt for demonstrating that humans and animals develop communication that they are unaware of. The horse reinforced behavior in his owner, and the owner in his horse, whereas everyone was convinced that they were doing something else entirely. While the realization of what was going on moved the historical pendulum to swing firmly from rich to lean interpretations of animal intelligence—where it unfortunately got stuck for too long—other appeals to simplicity have fared less well. Below I describe two examples, one concerning
self-awareness
and the other
culture
, both concepts that, whenever mentioned in relation to animals, still send some scholars through the roof.

Armchair Primatology

When American psychologist Gordon Gallup, in 1970, first showed that chimpanzees recognize their own reflection, he spoke of self-awareness—a capacity that he said was lacking in species, such as monkeys, that failed his mirror test.
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The test consisted of putting a mark on the body of an anesthetized ape that it could find only, once awake, by inspecting its reflection. Gallup’s choice of words obviously annoyed those leaning toward a robotic view of animals.