Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (28 page)

The highest level of joint intentionality in the animal kingdom is perhaps achieved by killer whales. After spy-hopping to get a good look at a seal on an ice floe, several of them will line up and swim toward the floe at high speed in perfect unison. Their behavior creates a massive wave that washes the seal off the floe straight into some waiting mouths.

On land, lions, wolves, wild dogs, Harris’s hawks (teams of which control the pigeons at London’s Trafalgar Square), capuchin monkeys, and so on, exhibit plenty of tight teamwork, too. The Swiss primatologist Christopher Boesch has described how chimpanzees hunt colobus monkeys in Ivory Coast: some males act as drivers, while others take up distant positions high up in a tree as ambushers waiting for the monkey troop to escape in their direction through the canopy. Since these hunts take place in the dense jungle of Taï National Park, and both the chimps and the monkeys are dispersed, it is hard to pinpoint what is going on in three-dimensional space, but it appears to involve role division and the anticipation of prey movement. The prey is captured by one of the ambushers, who potentially could quietly slink away with the meat but does exactly the opposite. During the hunt the chimps are silent, but as soon as a monkey is captured, they erupt in a pandemonium of hooting and screaming that draws everyone in, leading to a large cluster of males, females, and young jostling for position. I once stood under a tree (in a different forest) while this happened, and the deafening noise above me left little doubt about how highly chimps prize their meat. Sharing appears to favor hunters over latecomers—even the alpha male may go empty-handed if he failed to participate. The chimpanzees seem to recognize contributions to success. The communal feast that ensues is the only way to sustain this sort of cooperation, because why would anyone invest in a joint enterprise if not for the prospect of a joint payoff?
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These observations obviously contradict the view that chimpanzees, and other animals, lack joint action based on shared intentions. One can imagine the head butting between two scientists with such diametrically opposite views as Boesch and Tomasello, who have offices in the same building. Was their appointment as codirectors of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig an experiment on how human collaboration fares in the face of disagreement? Given these divergent perspectives, let me return to the experiments that led Tomasello to his human uniqueness claim. After testing both children and apes on a cooperative pulling task, he concluded that only the children exhibit shared intentionality.

The question of comparability has come up before, however, and fortunately there are photographs of the respective setups.
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One shows two apes in separate cages, each with a little plastic table in front of him that he can pull closer with a rope. Oddly, the apes do not occupy a shared space, as in Crawford’s classical study. Their cages are not even adjacent: there is distance and two layers of mesh between them—a situation that hampers visibility and communication. Each ape focuses on its own end of the rope, seemingly unaware of what the other is up to. The photo of the children, in contrast, shows them sitting on the carpeting of a large room with no barriers between them. They, too, are using a pulling apparatus, but they sit side by side in full view of each other and are free to move around, touch each other, and talk. These different arrangements go a long way toward explaining why the children showed shared purpose, and the apes did not.

Had this comparison concerned two different species—rats and mice, say—we would never have accepted such dissimilar setups. If rats had been tested on a joint task while sitting side by side and mice while being kept apart, no sensible scientist would permit the conclusion that rats are smarter or more cooperative than mice. We’d demand the same procedure. Comparisons between children and apes get exceptional leeway, however, which is why studies keep perpetuating cognitive differences that, in my mind, are impossible to separate from methodological ones.

In view of the ongoing controversy, we decided to move away from pair-wise testing—whether separate or together—and develop a more naturalistic setup. I sometimes refer to it as our proof-in-the-pudding experiment, since we sought to determine once and for all how well chimps handle conflicting interests: what happens to cooperation in the face of competition? The only way to see which tendency prevails is to provide an opportunity for the chimpanzees to express both at the same time.

My student Malini Suchak came up with the right apparatus to test a colony of fifteen chimps at the Yerkes Field Station. Mounted on the fence of their outdoor enclosure was an apparatus that required very precise coordination to be moved closer to obtain rewards: either two or three individuals had to pull at exactly the same time at separate bars. To coordinate with two partners was harder than with only one, but the apes had no trouble either way. They were sitting spaced out but in full view of one another. Since the whole group was present, there were many possible partner configurations. The apes could decide who to work with while also being on the alert for competitors, such as dominant males or females, as well as freeloaders who might steal rewards without doing any work. They could freely exchange information and freely choose partners, but also freely compete. No large-scale experiment of this kind had ever been tried.

If it is true that chimps can’t overcome competition, the test should produce total chaos! The colony should descend into a bickering bunch of apes, fighting over rewards and chasing one another away from the test site. Competitiveness should kill all shared objectives. I knew chimps long enough, however, that I didn’t worry much about the outcome of this test; I had studied conflict resolution among them for decades. Despite their poor reputation, I had seen too many scenes of chimpanzees trying to keep the peace and reduce tensions to worry that they would all of a sudden abandon such efforts.

Since Malini and the rest of us wished to see if the chimps could figure out the task on their own, she gave them no pretraining at all. All they knew was that there was a new apparatus and that food was associated with it. They proved remarkably quick learners, realizing that they had to work together and mastering both two-way and three-way pulls within days. Sitting next to one of the pull-bars, Rita would look up at her mother, Borie, who was asleep in a nest on top of a tall climbing frame. She’d climb up all the way to poke Borie in her ribs until she would come down with her. Rita would head for the apparatus, all the while looking over her shoulder to make sure Mom was following. Sometimes we had the impression that the chimps had reached an agreement without us knowing how. Two of them would walk side by side out of the night building, which is quite a distance away, and together head straight for the apparatus, as if they knew exactly what they were going to do. Talk about shared intentionality!

The main point of the study was to see if the apes would compete or cooperate. Clearly, cooperation won big time. We saw some aggression but virtually no injuries. Most fights were low level, such as pulling at someone to drag him or her away from the apparatus, chasing someone off, or throwing sand. Individuals also tried to gain access by grooming one of the pullers until this individual allowed them to take their spot. Cooperation at the apparatus went on almost nonstop, resulting in a total of 3,565 joint pulls.
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Freeloaders were avoided and occasionally punished for their activities, while overly competitive individuals quickly found out how unpopular their behavior made them. The experiment was conducted over many months, affording plenty of time for all the chimps to learn that tolerance paid off in terms of finding partners to work with. In the end, we found proof in the pudding that chimpanzees are highly cooperative. They have no trouble whatsoever regulating and dampening strife for the sake of achieving shared outcomes.

One possible reason that the behavior we observed was more in line with what is known from the natural habitat may be our colony’s background: by the time we tested them, our chimps had lived together for almost four decades. This is a long time by any standard, resulting in an unusually well-integrated group. But when we recently tested a newly formed group, in which many individuals had known one another for only a few years, we found the same high level of cooperation and low level of aggression. In other words, chimpanzees are generally good at conflict management for the sake of cooperation.

The current reputation of chimpanzees as violent and belligerent—“demonic” even—is almost entirely based on the way they treat members of neighboring groups in the wild: they occasionally carry out brutal attacks over territory. This fact has tainted their image, even though lethal combat is so rare that it took decades for scientists to agree on its occurrence. The rate of fatalities at any given field site is on average once every seven years.
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Moreover, it is not as if this behavior sets chimpanzees apart from ourselves. So why is it used as an argument against their cooperative nature, whereas in our own species intergroup warfare is rightly viewed as a collective enterprise? The same holds for chimpanzees—they almost never attack neighbors on their own. It is time for us to see them for what they are: talented team players who have no trouble suppressing conflicts within their group.

A recent experiment at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago confirmed their cooperative skills. Scientists let a group of chimpanzees fish with dipsticks for ketchup that was stored in the holes of an artificial “termite” mound. At the beginning of the experiment, there were enough holes for all members to feed independently, but then the number of holes was reduced by one each day, until there were very few left. Since each hole was monopolizable, it was thought that the chimps would compete and squabble over access to the dwindling resource. But nothing of the kind happened. They adjusted to their new situation by doing the exact opposite: they peacefully gathered around the remaining holes—usually two at a time, sometimes in trios—dipping their sticks into them in alternation, each chimp politely awaiting his or her turn. Instead of a rise in conflict, all the scientists observed was sharing and turn taking.
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When two or more intelligent, cooperative species meet around food resources, the outcome may also be cooperation rather than competition. Each species knows how to take advantage of the other. Fishing cooperatives, in which humans and cetaceans (whales and dolphins) work together, are probably thousands of years old, having been reported from Australia and India to the Mediterranean and Brazil. In South America they operate on the mud shores of lagoons. Fishermen announce their arrival by slapping the water, upon which bottlenose dolphins emerge to herd mullet toward them. The fishers wait for a signal from the dolphins, such as a distinctive type of dive, to throw their nets. Dolphins also do such herding among themselves, but here they drive the fish toward the fishermen’s nets. The men know their dolphin partners individually, having named them after famous politicians and soccer players.

Even more spectacular are the cooperatives between humans and killer whales. When whaling still occurred around Twofold Bay, in Australia, orcas would approach the whaling station to perform conspicuous breaching and lobtailing that served to announce the arrival of a humpback whale. They would herd the large whale into shallow waters close to a whaling vessel, allowing the whalers to harpoon the harassed leviathan. Once the whale was killed, the orcas would be given one day to consume their preferred delicacy—its tongue and lips—after which the whalers would collect their prize. Here too humans gave names to their preferred orca partners and recognized the tit-for-tat that is the foundation of all cooperation, human as well as animal.
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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. Sometimes animals coordinate as if they have agreed on a task division beforehand. We do not know how shared intentions and goals are communicated, but they do not seem to be orchestrated from above by leaders, as in humans. We develop a plan and put a hierarchy in place to manage its execution, which allows us to lay a railroad track across the country or build a huge cathedral that takes generations to complete. 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.

Fishy Cooperation

Cooperation experiments often ask cognitive questions. Do the actors realize they need a partner? Do they know the partner’s role? Are they prepared to share the spoils? If one individual were to hog all the benefits, this obviously would imperil future cooperation. So we assume that animals watch not only what they get but also what they get compared to what their partner gets. Inequity is something to worry about.