For Help Understanding Animal Behavior, Look to Occam's Razor

A few years ago, while I was still attending college, I attended a talk by the famous animal researcher Dame Jane Goodall.  During the presentation, a video was shown of a captive-born chimpanzee being released into the wild.  The chimpanzee slowly walked out of the small cage that it had been transported in, looked around at the vast jungle that surrounded it, and promptly threw its arms around one of the humans that had brought it to its new home.  Close to where I was sitting, one of my fellow students cooed with delight, "Aw look at that!"  They said, "He's thanking her!"

Internally I cringed, for that person had done what I had always been taught to avoid during my education; they had anthropomorphized an animal's behavior.  Anthropomorphization is the attribution of human qualities, traits, and thoughts to non-humans, often without sound justification.  In this case, the audience member believed that, by hugging, the chimpanzee was thanking the researcher because that is what a human being would do.  In reality, chimpanzees hug when they are stressed and afraid because doing so releases dopamine in the brain and thus relieves stress.  The chimpanzee in the video was terrified due to it being dropped in a foreign jungle and it clung onto a nearby person to calm itself.  The situation is a bit less cute when examined closer, but it is important to understand the reality of animal encounters.

A few weeks ago, I came across a 2010 article by Sara Shettleworth titled, "Clever Animals and Killjoy Explanations in Comparative Psychology".  In the article, Dr. Shettleworth describes her alarm at an increase in anthropomorphization in animal behavior and psychology.  Modern research in those fields have discovered that many animal species possess cognitive and behavioral abilities that were once thought to only be available to humans.  An easy way to understand these newfound abilities is to attribute "human-like" qualities to the species in question.  However this way of thinking is oversimplified.

A stressed chimpanzee being consoled by Jane Goodall
Source: The Daily Mail

By assigning broad and anthropomorphic explanations to phenomena, the researchers and scientific writers are actually stifling further investigation.  The behaviors in question are not enigmatic and mystical facilities but instead complex cognitive abilities that are built upon rudimentary mechanisms.  The anthropomorphic explanations, while they may be exciting headlines for readers, are a disservice to the real fascinating processes at work.