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.

The Rise of Anthropomorphism

The assignment of human traits to non-humans is not a new trend.  It was actually begun, in a scientific perspective, by Charles Darwin and his followers.  Darwin wanted to prove the evolutionary continuity between man and animal that his theory of evolution purported.  So he collected anecdotal examples of animals behaving "human-like" and used them as evidence that animals think in similar ways as human beings.  

Darwin's methods, in this aspect of his work, were extremely unscientific and allowed for unverified conclusions to be disseminated.  In response, the early comparative psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan created a rule that served as a form of Occam's Razor for psychology.  It was dubbed Lloyd Morgan's Canon and it stated, "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 in the psychological scale".  In more simple terms the rule is saying that a behavior cannot be interpreted as evidence for higher intelligence if there exists a less complex explanation. 

C. Lloyd Morgan and his impressive beard
Source: Wikipedia

From then on, the fields of animal behavior and psychology favored empirical data and scientific procedure over the anecdotal in order to draw their conclusions.  However, recent times have found a rise in anthropomorphization and a contradictory sentiment has emerged in the study of animal cognition.  When behaviors that seemingly require a "human" level of thought are explored, the explanations that use simple mechanisms and processes are disregarded as "killjoy" conclusions.  To some, the existence of simple mechanisms needed to power cognitive abilities somehow disproves the continuity between man and animal.  

To be clear this is a false sentiment.  In actuality, the prevalence of elementary processes builds the case for continuity because the same mechanisms that we find in animals are the ones that power our own impressive cognition. 

Killjoy Explanations: Less Fun but Important

There is a great quote by Dr's Holldobler and Wilson from their book The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies which says 

The extremes of higher-level traits may at first appear to have a life of their own, one too complex and fragile to be reduced to their basic elements and processes by deductive reasoning and experiment.  But such separatist holism is in our opinion a delusion, the result of still insufficient knowledge about the working parts and processes.

This quote is as true for the mysteries of how animals think as it is for the mysteries of how insects create colonies.  We often look at animals and their behaviors and wonder "What is going on in their minds?  What are they thinking?"  But we forget that behavior is equally controlled by sensory cues, predispositions, reflexes, and past history as it is by cognition.  What we should be asking is, "what mechanisms are in motion that allow this animal to accomplish that task?"  I know its a much less sexy question to ponder but it is a more scientific way to explore.

"Homeward Bound": An example of how we commonly anthropomorphize animal thought
Source: Disney

To illustrate how we can think of animal behavior differently, I would like to explore the prevalence of "Theory of Mind" solutions.  Theory of mind is a cognitive ability in which an individual has "the understanding that other individuals have minds: beliefs, desires, intentions, and so on."  Theory of mind is one of those phenomena that researchers are desperately trying to prove exists in animals because it would garner a lot of attention.  Unfortunately, we cannot merely ask animals about the minds of others, so we must infer on animal thoughts based upon the behaviors that they exhibit.  In analyzing behavioral data, it is extremely hard to distinguish cognitive reasoning from responses to behavioral cues and this has resulted in much controversy about which explanations are true.  Although the explanations involving behavioral cues are often better supported by the data and follow Lloyd Morgan's Canon, many still cling to conclusions that support theory of mind because they are exciting.

In her article, Dr. Shettleworth gives the example of breeding male songbirds.  Male songbirds learn who their neighbors are during fighting in the spring and later ignore these neighbors during all other seasons.  However, if the male songbird hears a neighbor's identifying song from a different direction, they will respond aggressively.  An explanation that assumes that such birds possess theory of mind will conclude that the male heard the song in a different location, presumed that the neighbor is on the move, and then thought "he wants to take my territory".  The killjoy but more plausible explanation based on behavioral cues is that songbirds memorize the songs of others through a combination of vocal and spatial cues.  Thus, if a neighbor's song is heard from a novel direction, a breeding male will identify it as an unknown male because the spatial cues have changed.

Human beings want animals to have theory of mind because we have theory of mind.  Paradoxically, the presence of this complex behavior in animals would make their behavior easier to understand because we understand this type of thought.  The opposite is true; all animal cognitive behavior, including that of humans', is built upon simple mechanisms.  This makes the task of understanding how cognition is organized harder to accomplish.

Reversing Anthropomorphism:

What the "killjoy" explanations in comparative psychology are telling us is that, instead of finding "human-like" abilities in animals, we are finding "animal-like" mechanisms in humans.  Dr. Shettleworth concludes that, "Contemporary research tracing the origins and functions of social and emotional responses is connected with a wide-ranging literature showing that, more often then is commonly acknowledged, human behavior expresses unconscious responses to simple cues similar to those that influence other species".  Thus, the anthropomorphic explanations that I have long been warned against using on animals may not be appropriate for humans either.

The truth is that there is no real difference between "human-like" and "animal-like" behaviors or abilities.  The processes that are present in less cognitively developed animals are the same ones that enable humans to have theory of mind and complex empathic abilities.  The theories that acknowledge such components are not killjoys at all but instead are proof of the evolutionary continuity between human and animal minds that Darwin strove to substantiate many years ago.  We must reject the anthropomorphic interpretations that over-simplify psychology and instead adhere to the strict empirical standards that have long been the bedrock of science.