Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (49 page)

Currently, our understanding and measurement of human intellectual capacity is oriented toward group skills and toward activities that can be elicited on command, regardless of the state of engagement. Indeed, being able to engage one’s focus on the questions of the examiner, rather than on one’s own interest, is the primary measure of test-taking ability, and test-taking ability is the primary measure of intelligence. When we find that animals do not do well when compared to people in this way, we must
not assume that we have really measured their intellect. Perhaps we have measured only our own limited ability to engage them.

As researchers have become more interested in self-awareness they have begun to recognize that it is closely linked to other-awareness and that language skills are predicated on awareness of both self and others. Why would anyone bother to tell anyone else something unless they assumed that the other person did not already know what it was they were about to say?

This idea—that the knowledge states of the speaker and the listener can in fact be different—has been given the term “theory of mind.” How can we know if animals believe that other animals have minds? Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten of the University of Saint Andrews have suggested that the key lies in the ability to deceive. If one animal sets about to deceive another with intent, it must recognize that the other has a mind that is composed of knowledge states different from its own.

Lies are notorious in the animal kingdom. Nonpoisonous butterflies imitate the wing patterns of the monarch butterfly, so as to avoid being eaten by birds who have learned to leave the poisonous monarch alone. Plovers pretend to have a broken wing in order to lead potential predators away from their young. While it is clear that the butterfly that imitates the monarch is not doing so intentionally, it is less clear with the plover.

Scientists have assumed that the broken wing display is an innate pattern, carried out with little understanding in time of danger. However, this view has recently been challenged by Carolyn Ristau of Rockefeller University, who points out that like all supposedly innate patterns, the bird appears to be making decisions that vary from instance to instance and that do take into account characteristics of the predator. There are also great differences among plovers in how, where, and when they elect to lead predators, and some are far better deceivers than others. Yet none of these facts tells us whether the plover knows that it is deceiving the predator. The only time that plovers appear to have broken wings, however, is when there is a predator present.

Other animals engage in deceptive acts that are no less situation-specific. Byrne and Whiten have coined the term “tactical deception” to separate acts that are deceptive but apparently without reasoned intent, from those where the intent of the perpetrator is clearly to mislead. They define tactical deception as “an individual’s capacity to use an ‘honest act’ from his normal repertoire in a different context, such that even familiar individuals are misled.”
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Byrne and Whiten became interested in deception after seeing several instances of it among a troop of baboons they were observing in the Drakensberg Mountains of southern Africa. For instance, one day they saw Paul, a juvenile male, approach Mel, a mature female, who was engaged in unearthing a succulent tuber. Paul looked around: No other baboons were in sight, but they were not far away. Suddenly, Paul let out a piercing scream, as if he were in danger. Predictably, Paul’s mother, who was dominant to Mel, rushed to the scene and drove Mel away. Paul then calmly ate the abandoned tuber. “Watching the incident, it was difficult to suppress an intentional interpretation,” Byrne and Whiten commented later.
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Had Paul concluded, “If I scream, my mother will assume Mel is attacking me; she’ll run to defend me; and I will be left with the juicy tuber to eat”? or had he merely been upset that he was not getting any of the tuber for himself and screamed out of frustration?

The work of Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth with vervet monkeys in the Amboseli National Park in Kenya represents a long-term attempt to understand the minds of monkeys in their natural habitat. They too, have seen behaviors that appear to be intentional deception, though they have concluded that the monkeys only partially understand what they are doing. As an example, they cite the behavior of Kitui, a low-ranking male at Amboseli. One day a new male seemed poised to join the group from elsewhere, an event that would surely have been a threat to Kitui’s already low social status. When he saw the male, Kitui gave a leopard-alarm call even though there was no leopard in sight. The call had the effect of keeping the new male in the trees and delaying his entry into the group. “So far, so
good,” observed Cheney and Seyfarth. “The alarm calls appeared deceitful because they signal danger that Kitui, but not the interloper, knew to be false, and they kept the interloper temporarily at bay.”
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But Kitui’s behavior was not consistent. Instead of remaining in his own tree throughout, which is what vervets do when a genuine leopard alarm is made, Kitui descended, crossed open ground, and climbed a tree near to the new male, alarm-calling all the time. He had got only part of the story right, not unlike the child who vigorously denies raiding the cookie jar, with crumbs evident all over her face.

Overall, Cheney and Seyfarth concluded that “vervets’ cognitive abilities are limited compared with our own and that there is no evidence that the monkeys have a ‘theory of mind’ that allows them to recognize their own knowledge and attribute mental states to others.”
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Another illustration of this conclusion is the vervet’s failure to take account of the listeners’ state of knowledge or ignorance when making alarm calls: The caller is uninfluenced by how much others know about what danger is threatening.

I have observed similar incidents involving Kanzi’s mother, Matata. Once, when I was introducing a new person to Matata, she became jealous of the new person and refused to let her touch any item that she was fond of, including her blankets, her bowls, her food, and her mirror. One day we were sitting together on the floor when Matata decided to ask me to go get some food by holding her empty bowl out to me and making a food sound. I told Matata I would get her some food and left the room, leaving the bowl with her. I had been gone less than five minutes when suddenly Matata began screaming loudly. When I rushed back into the room the new person was holding Matata’s bowl and Matata was screaming at her and threatening to bite. Matata looked back and forth from me to this person and then to the bowl, screaming—intimating that the bowl had been grabbed from her in my absence and that I should support her in attacking this mean individual who had taken her bowl. Of course, given the gift of language, this person was able to explain that she had indeed done nothing. Matata had placed the bowl in her hands and then starting screaming for me as if she had been wronged.

When Matata saw us talking about what had happened, she began to look very crestfallen, concluding her ruse had not worked. She stopped screaming and moved to the corner where she suddenly became very preoccupied with grooming herself.

When Byrne and Whiten talked informally with fellow psychologists and primatologists, they heard similar reports. Few such reports make it into the pages of the scientific literature, however, because they are single observations that the researchers have no means of replicating. In behavioral science, one is supposed to be able to predict that a certain behavior is going to occur. Clearly, when one is dealing with deception, this is virtually impossible, since one almost never knows when deception is going to occur. In fact, if the deception is truly successful, the researcher as well as the other animals are so satisfactorily deceived that they do not know that it even occurred.

Byrne and Whiten conducted a survey of more than a hundred of their colleagues in 1985 and again in 1989, asking for anecdotal accounts of incidents that might be judged as tactical deception. The response was enthusiastic, and several hundred putative cases of deception were assembled. The question was: Did these cases reflect instances of deception with reasoned intent, or could there be other explanations? When Byrne and Whiten applied strict criteria to the supposed examples of deception, ruling out as carefully as they could possibilities of learning, they concluded that of the 253 cases assembled in the 1989 survey, only 16 could be said to reflect mind reading in the sense of tactical deception. All of these were in apes, and most with chimpanzees. Two are noted here.

During her lifelong monumental studies at Gombe National Park, in Tanzania, Jane Goodall observed many examples of putative deception. One of the most intriguing involved the chimp named Figan, who noted that a banana had been left in the crook of a tree. Unfortunately for Figan, Goliath, the Alpha male, was resting under that very tree. After glancing briefly at the fruit and then at Goliath, Figan moved some distance away, perhaps fearing that if the fruit were still in his line of sight, he wouldn’t be able to resist looking at it and would thus alert Goliath to its presence. After fifteen minutes Goliath
left, and without hesitating Figan retrieved the banana and ate it quickly.

The Dutch primatologist Frans Plooij observed a similar incident, also at Gombe. An adult male was alone in a feeding area when a box was opened electronically, revealing the presence of bananas. Just then a second chimp arrived, and the first one quickly closed the box and ambled off nonchalantly, looking as if nothing unusual were afoot. Like Figan before him, he waited until the intruder departed and then quickly opened the box to retrieve the bananas. Unlike Figan, however, he had been tricked. The other chimp had not left but had hidden, waiting to see what was going on. The deceiver had been deceived.

Evidence of self-awareness and of deception therefore suggests that apes think of themselves and others as having knowledge states that differ. Is there another window into the animal consciousness, one that perhaps requires less inference regarding intent on the part of the observer? One area that has begun to be studied is that of animal pretense or imagination.

All animals, like all children, love to play, and in play all of the elements of true aggression are acted out in pretense. It is as though all of what might happen, or could happen, is experienced many times on many planes prior to the actual occurrence, so that the animal or person is ready for the event when it actually does occur. Animal behaviorists have typically assumed that animals do not know they are pretending at aggression, as children do when they play at being superheroes. This is because children can say they are pretending while animals cannot. Many researchers even claim that it is not until four years of age that children can discuss the difference between pretense and reality. Prior to this time, what appears to be pretense to us is said to be reality to the child.

Games of pretend among apes are not as elaborate as those seen in children, but they are engaged in with enthusiasm nonetheless. Vickie, the first chimpanzee who participated in a
language project, was reported to have a great time pulling an imaginary toy with an imaginary string. On occasion, it even appeared that the imaginary toy became stuck, such as between the toilet and the wall, as Vickie ran around the room with it.

When he was young, Austin often pretended to eat imaginary food, occasionally even using an imaginary dish and an imaginary spoon. He would carefully place the nonexistent food in his mouth and then roll it around on his lips, watching it just as though it were real food. Sherman was not interested in imaginary food—he always wanted the real thing—but he loved to pretend that dolls, particularly King Kong dolls, were biting his fingers and toys as well as having fights with each other.

Most frequently, these pretend games were played alone, but not always. On one occasion, as Sherman and Austin were watching a King Kong movie on television, they began to pretend that King Kong was actually in a cage located in their room. This cage looked just like the one that Kong was in in the movie. At this point, Sherman and Austin stopped watching the television and began to make threat barks at the empty cage and to throw things at it, as though it housed Kong himself. Sherman even got out the hose and began to spray the cage.