Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

by Frans de Waal

The lesson is that before scientists test any animal, they need to know its typical behavior.

Uexküll urged us to look at the world from the animal’s standpoint, saying that this is the only way to fully appreciate animal intelligence.

Operant conditioning tends to reinforce what is already there. Instead of being the omnipotent creator of behavior, it is its humble servant.

Are we open-minded enough to assume that other species have a mental life?

The assumption that an empty stomach improves learning is curious.

short intervals between behavior and consequence have always been regarded as essential, no one was prepared when, in 1955, the American psychologist John Garcia claimed he had found a case that broke all the rules: rats learn to refuse poisoned foods after just a single bad experience even if the resulting nausea takes hours to set in.44 Moreover, the negative outcome had to be nausea—electric shock didn’t have the same effect. Since toxic nutrition works slowly and makes you sick, none of this was particularly surprising from a biological standpoint. Avoiding bad food seems a highly adaptive mechanism.