Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

by Frans de Waal

The credo of experimental science remains that an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition? Those three are involved in everything animals do; hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them.

If you have seen something yourself and followed the entire dynamic, there usually is no doubt in your mind of what to make of it. But others may be skeptical and need convincing.

Cognition relates to the kind of information an organism gathers and how it processes and applies this information.

The role of learning is obvious, but what is special about cognition is that it puts learning in its proper place. Learning is a mere tool.

An organism’s cognition narrows down the information flow and makes it learn those specific contingencies that it needs to know given its natural history.

Biologists never tire of stressing the distinction between mechanism and function: it is very common for animals to achieve the same end (function) by different means (mechanism).

To understand how evolution works its magic across the evolutionary tree, we often invoke the twin concepts of homology and analogy. Homology refers to shared traits derived from a common ancestor. Thus, the human hand is homologous with the wing of a bat, since both derive from an ancestral forelimb and carry the exact same number of bones to prove it. Analogies, on the other hand, arise when distant animals independently evolve in the same direction, known as convergent evolution. The parental care of the discus fish is analogous to mammalian nursing but certainly not homologous, since fish and mammals do not share an ancestor that did the same.

The arrival of corvids on the scene illustrates how discoveries of mental life ripple across the animal kingdom, a process best summarized by what I’ll call my cognitive ripple rule: Every cognitive capacity that we discover is going to be older and more widespread than initially thought. This is rapidly becoming one of the best-supported tenets of evolutionary cognition.

Now that I think of it, my distrust of language goes even deeper, because I am also unconvinced of its role in the thinking process. I am not sure that I think in words, and I never seem to hear any inner voices. This caused a bit of an embarrassment once at a meeting about the evolution of conscience, when fellow scholars kept referring to an inner voice that tells us what is right and wrong. I am sorry, I said, but I never hear such voices. Am I a man without a conscience, or do I—as the American animal expert Temple Grandin once famously said about herself—think in pictures?

Since we routinely express ideas and feelings in language, we may be forgiven for assigning a role to it, but isn’t it remarkable how often we struggle to find our words? It’s not that we don’t know what we thought or felt, but we just can’t put our verbal finger on it.

no trait, not even our beloved linguistic ability, ever comes about de novo. Nothing evolves all of a sudden, without antecedents. Every new trait taps into existing structures and processes.

All in all, the neural differences seem insufficient for human uniqueness to be a foregone conclusion. If we ever find a way of measuring it, consciousness could well turn out to be widespread.

It allows us to look at a situation from the viewpoint of another, which is why I prefer the term perspective taking. We use this capacity to our own advantage but also to the advantage of others, such as when we respond to someone else’s distress or fulfill the needs of another person.

Human empathy is a critically important capacity, one that holds entire societies together and connects us with those whom we love and care about. It is far more fundamental to survival, I’d say, than knowing what others know.

Never mind that knowing what others want or need, or how best to please or assist them, is likely the original perspective taking, the kind from which all other kinds derive. It is essential for reproduction, since mammalian mothers need to be sensitive to the emotional states of their offspring, when they are cold, hungry, or in danger. Empathy is a biological imperative.

In children, an understanding of needs and desires develops years before they realize what others know. They read “hearts” well before they read minds. This suggests that we are on the wrong track in phrasing all this in terms of abstract thinking and theories about others.

Promptly, psychologists settled on a narrative in which overimitation—a new term for children’s indiscriminate copying—is actually a brilliant achievement. It fits our species’ purported reliance on culture, because it makes us imitate behavior regardless of what it is good for; we transmit habits in full, without every individual making his or her own ill-informed decisions. Given the superior knowledge of adults, the best strategy for a child is to copy them without question. Blind faith is the only truly rational strategy, it was concluded with some relief.

To know the friends of your opponents takes experience. It implies that individual A is aware not only of her own relations with B and C but also of the relation between B and C. I dubbed this triadic awareness, since it reflects knowledge of the entire ABC triangle. It is the same with us, when we realize who is married to whom, who is a son of whom, or who is the employer of whom. Human society could not function without triadic awareness.

The intelligence required to effectively deal with social networks may explain why the primate order underwent its remarkable brain expansion. Primates have exceptionally large brains.

This means that pair-bonds matter. Troubled pairs will be weak defenders, while bonded pairs will be strong ones. Since the song of a pair reflects their marriage, the more beautiful it is, the more their neighbors realize not to mess with them.

In other words, chimpanzees are generally good at conflict management for the sake of cooperation.

There is only one area in which human cooperation goes well beyond what we know of other species: its degree of organization and scale. We have hierarchical structures to set up projects of a complexity and duration not found elsewhere in nature. Most animal cooperation is self-organized in that individuals fulfill roles according to their capacities.

Relying on age-old evolved tendencies, we have shaped our societies into complex networks of cooperation that can take on projects of an unprecedented magnitude.

Apparently, no species can escape the logic of cooperation, whether it involves the selection of good partners or the balance between effort and payoff.

The Estonian-Canadian psychologist Endel Tulving defined episodic memory as the recall of what happened at which place and at what time. This has prompted research into memory of the three W’s of events: their what, when, and where.

Tulving proposed two criteria to recognize future planning. First, the behavior should not follow directly from present needs and desires. Second, it should prepare the individual for a future situation in a different context than the current one.

It all boils down to the social hierarchy, which is one giant behavioral regulator. If everyone were to act the way they wanted, any hierarchy would fall apart. It is built on restraint. Since social ladders are present in species from fish and frogs to baboons and chickens, self-control is an age-old feature of animal societies.

Anything related to consciousness has been hard to accept in other species. But this reluctance is problematic: not because we know so much more about consciousness, but because we have growing evidence in other species for episodic memory, future planning, and delayed gratification. Either we abandon the idea that these capacities require consciousness, or we accept the possibility that animals may have it, too. The fourth spoke on this wheel is metacognition, which is literally cognition about cognition, also known as “thinking about thinking.” When the contestants in a game show are allowed to pick their topic, they obviously name the one they are most familiar with. This is metacognition in action, because it means they know what they know.

Every animal needs to set its body apart from its surroundings and to have a sense of agency (awareness that it controls its own actions).

Whatever the truth about the sushi master’s education, the point is that repeated observation of a skilled model firmly plants action sequences in one’s head that come in handy, sometimes much later, when one needs to carry out the same task.

Young dolphins develop personalized whistles in their first year. Females keep the same melody for the rest of their lives, whereas males adjust theirs to those of their closest buddies, so that the calls within a male alliance sound alike.

In the utilitarian view of biology, animals have the brains they need—nothing more, nothing less. Even within a species, the brain may change depending on how it is being used, such as the way song-related areas seasonally expand and contract in the songbird brain.2 Brains adapt to ecological requirements, as does cognition.

The most parsimonious assumption we can make about behavioral and cognitive similarities between related species is that they reflect shared mental processes. Continuity ought to be the default position for at least all mammals, and perhaps also birds and other vertebrates.

We should start focusing on the processes behind higher capacities. They often rest on a wide range of cognitive mechanisms, some of which may be shared by many species, while others may be fairly restricted.