Conceit and Deceit

The door-knocking duck and the free-living monkey bringing the bucket to the professor seem to be envisioning an outcome they desired, a state of affairs different from the immediate reality they were simply observing. Sometimes animals can even communicate their desires to us. When our dogs come looking for us in different rooms, they are imagining finding us. They’re seeking something more suited to their interests than what they have at the moment, and they know what they’re seeking. Their mental pictures, imagined scenarios of cause and effect and desired outcomes, are their thinking. Imagining a route to something desired—first this, then that—might even be a glimmer of storytelling. What else are these “folks” saying?

Jude and Chula sound and look like they’re battling as they growl and bite. Guests to our home have asked in alarm, “Are they fighting?” But the pupsters know they’re playing, and so do we. We easily hear it because we understand their tone of growl; we’re in on their joke. We all understand the intent. We humans also appreciate our own verbal play. As humans, we understand metaphor and detect the difference between the humor of a well-meaning joke and the offense of a sarcastic one. But we don’t hold a monopoly on judging subtle cues.

 

 

You might already have taken in stride the idea that dogs and apes indicate and understand intent. But what about, say, a fish? A tasty fish, at that. The more we learn—well, it can rock our boat.

We think of apes as smart because apes are smart—and because they look like us. But the science of cognition is becoming peppered with reports of “apelike performance” in some other animals. Newest among them: certain fishes. Our rarefied list of beings who use gestures to direct the attention of companions—humans, bonobos, dolphins, ravens, African hunting dogs, wolves, domestic dogs—must now include groupers. Yes, the same fish that’s in countless fried fillet sandwiches; they’re among the smartest.

When its intended prey escapes into a coral crevice, the grouper rotates and points down in the direction of the hiding prey. If no help is forthcoming, the grouper might go to where it knows a giant moray eel is resting in its day lair and rapidly shake to say, “Follow me.” The eel, who can get into the squeezes, often follows the grouper to the hiding prey. To make sure the moray is following, the grouper turns to check. If the moray isn’t quite getting the message, the grouper will sometimes “try and push it in the direction of the previously indicated crevice.” When they get to the hiding prey, the grouper faces the spot and shakes its head. The grouper and the eel don’t share the catch, but they split the proceeds: sometimes the moray gets the hiding fish, sometimes the hiding fish bolts and the grouper nabs it.

If no moray is nearby, the grouper might recruit a Napoleon wrasse, who can break the coral, or an emperor fish. The groupers signal until they get help, then immediately stop signaling. These gestures are intentional and directed to another fish, whose response is voluntary. At least two species of groupers do this. Researchers say that the groupers “regularly hunt collaboratively with other fish species” in the Red Sea and also “collaborate with octopuses” on Australia’s imperiled Great Barrier Reef. Furthermore, the groupers’ patience, waiting above hidden prey for up to twenty-five minutes for a passing potential partner, suggests “an ape-like level in a memory task.” In new experiments, researchers found that groupers so quickly learned which moray was a good or poor collaborator that groupers’ abilities in choosing the more effective partner are “nearly identical to that of chimpanzees.”

 

 

Groupers’ hunting collaborations come as news—surprising news, at that. But the groupers have probably been guiding their hunting partners for a few million years. Flexible interspecies cooperation of the sort shown by groupers and their partners is so rare, even humans engage in it with only two or three species. Honeyguides are birds who lead badgers and humans to beehives so they can share the feast of a broken-into hive. Humans hunt with dogs or falcons (formerly a few people hunted with cheetahs), but those animals never initiate the relationship; humans control and contrive it. Dolphins, however, have controlled and contrived their own situations, using humans—and, in a couple of cases, seemingly training humans—to help them catch food.

In both Brazil and Mauritania, dolphins drive mullet schools towards a line of fishermen. On the coast of Brazil, the dolphins seem to have trained the fishermen; along Mauritania’s shore, the fishermen seem to have trained the dolphins. Brazilian bottlenose dolphins use head and tail slaps to direct the humans about when and where the fishermen should cast their nets. The dolphins nab fish that become confused or injured by the nets. Only a small proportion of the lagoon’s dolphins do this—they learn from their mothers to be fishers of men—and the fishermen know them well enough to give them names, such as Caroba and Scooby. Mauritanian fishermen who spot mullet beat the water with sticks to call bottlenose and humpback dolphins, who then herd the mullet against their nets and share the profits. They’ve been in business together since 1847.

Most extraordinarily, for about a hundred years, starting in the mid-1800s, the world’s largest dolphins—killer whales—had humans trained to be their hunting partners in Australia’s Twofold Bay, near a town called Eden. The killer whales apparently herded large whales into the bay, then actually went and alerted human whalers, who’d come in for the attack. The killer whales understood that they’d get a share of the whalemen’s kills. The killer whales reportedly even grabbed the ropes attatched to harpooned whales to further slow the stricken giants, helping to subdue them.

 

 

Conventional wisdom holds that only humans can consciously plan. But when jays store perishable and nonperishable foods, they use up the perishable food stashes first. This means that they evaluate and then act on their categorization of different foods’ time-sensitiveness. At Sweden’s Furuvik Zoo, one particular chimp would gather stones together, planning to use them later on to bombard unsuspecting human zoo-goers (fortunately, chimpanzees have terrible aim). Over the span of a decade, he made hundreds of piles of ammo. Each morning before the zoo opened, keepers had to search the chimpanzee exhibit to remove his collections of stones. At another zoo, an orangutan figured out that by wrapping a piece of wire around the latch of a locked furnace room door and pulling, he could let himself and his orang friends out for a frolic in the zoo’s trees. He did this several times before baffled zookeepers figured out how he was getting out. Meanwhile, he’d kept his wire hidden, fully intending to continue using this tool he’d so insightfully crafted.

 

 

The orangutan was being crafty, sneaky, and a bit deceptive. Deception involves conscious attempts to instill a false belief in another mind. That’s why deceit shows that humans have a “theory of mind.” Humans excel at dishonesty, so we deal with deception—lying politicians, tricky salespeople, our children—every day. Nature is full of deception, from camouflage to clever lies. Even in intentional deception, humans aren’t unique.

When a bird called the fork-tailed drongo sees mammals such as meerkats or birds such as babblers with food, the drongo mimics their specific alarm calls, sending them fleeing to cover so the drongo can swoop in and steal their morsels. Plovers are shorebirds who use a “broken-wing act” to draw predators away from their nests in the sand and their chicks. Their main goal, in acting disabled, is to foil the predator by creating a false impression. They vary the intensity and direction of their act according to how well the predator is falling for the deception. I’ve seen it many times; I’ve often been the plovers’ target. They know their business.

Living in social groups gives you motives to lie and someone to lie to. Vervet monkeys sometimes cry “Leopard” when their troop is losing a fight with another troop. The shrewdly strategic false alarm sends everyone scrambling into the trees, ending the fight. One vervet monkey was known to sometimes screamed “Eagle!” in order to clear the competition out of a fruit tree. The other monkeys would scatter—and he’d quickly stuff his face. Similarly, monkeys knowing of treats hidden in a box “ignored” the box when other monkeys were around, so others would not see how to open it.

Among chimpanzees in the famed Gombe Stream National Park, researchers used a remote control to open a locked food box. One chimpanzee happened to be next to the box when they opened it. But, seeing that a more dominant male was coming, he closed the box and moved away. Once the dominant male had passed, the first chimp reopened the box and loaded up with bananas. But the dominant male had hidden himself just out of sight; he swooped in and scooped up the fruit.

In experiments where rhesus monkeys can steal a grape from either of two humans, they steal from the person who is situated such that they cannot see what the monkey is doing. This shows that the monkeys believe that the human would object to their theft and that they need to be sneaky about it. Similarly, monkeys prefer to take food from containers that don’t make noise. Stealthy stealing shows that they understand that it’s best not to alert anyone to their larceny. Similarly, dogs are less likely to snatch forbidden food when a human is watching than when the human is looking away or is absent. They understand that we understand, and that our goals can differ.

You don’t have to be a mammal to fool your friends. When western scrub jays notice that another jay has watched them hiding food, they will move the food after the watcher leaves—but only if they themselves have robbed another bird’s food. They must form a concept of stealing based on their own experience and basically realize, “That bird might steal my food.” Sometimes they only pretend to move the food. Jays who’ve been watched but have never stolen another jay’s hidden food don’t move their own food. This requires projecting their own larcenous motivations onto another bird’s possible decisions. The jay has to imagine another jay’s viewpoint. Scientists call this “mental attribution” of “perspective taking,” and they make a big deal of it. To the jay, it’s not a big deal; it’s just what you have to do in a world where “people,” including jaybirds like themselves, can’t be trusted. They know that the other bird can know. And they know that what goes around can come around, and perhaps that life can be unfair.

 

 

A sense of fairness puts some animals into another exclusive club. A researcher offers a capuchin monkey a slice of cucumber. Mmm; the monkey likes cucumber. The researcher gives an adjacent monkey a grape. Monkey One watches Monkey Two enjoy the grape. When offered another cucumber slice, Monkey One takes it, then throws it back at the researcher. Unfair! Cucumbers are fine, unless your colleagues are getting something sweeter. Ravens, crows, and dogs are also sensitive to fair payment for the same task. Humans too, of course, can be aware of what’s fair—when we want to. Why don’t all humans see it as unfair when women are forced to accept less pay for equal work? Maybe another thing that “makes us human” is our ability to create double standards.

 

 

Apes are more than just clever; they’re often insightful, strategic, and political. Sometimes that’s shown during a high-stakes operation between the humans who would fool them fatally and the apes who cheat the cheaters to stay alive. A baby gorilla trips a poacher’s snare and dies. Days later, conservation workers watch a four-year-old male named Rwema break a bent tree branch that is the trigger stick of a snare, while a female of about the same age named Dukore disables the snare’s noose. The pair then see another snare nearby. Rwema and Dukore, joined by teenager Tetero, disable that trap, with a speed and “confidence” that cause a watching researcher to think this isn’t the first time they’ve saved themselves some grief. (Who is the better person, the human who set the snare or the gorillas humanely protecting themselves and their family?)

 

 

Spotted hyenas live in societies far more complicated than those of wolves or any other carnivore. Spotted hyena clans have up to ninety members, all of whom recognize each other individually. They understand and use kin and rank relationships when making decisions. Spotted hyenas also lie. Researchers studying free-living hyenas have observed scenes like these: While higher-ranking hyenas are feasting, a low-ranking hyena falsely calls out an alarm that scatters them, then races directly to the carcass to snatch a few fast bites before its clanmates realize there’s no danger. To disrupt hyenas who are fighting with her offspring, a mother sometimes utters a false alarm call. A subordinate hyena who knows where food’s hidden sometimes leads other accompanying hyenas astray, later returning alone to claim the prize. Researchers were watching a group that was traveling when a low-ranking male saw a leopard crouching motionless in a creek bed beside the carcass of a young wildebeest it had killed. None of the other hyenas noticed. The low-ranking male hyena looked directly at the leopard and its kill as he continued past. When all the hyenas were well beyond the creek, the low-ranking male turned and loped straight back, commandeering the carcass from the leopard without having to contend with competition from higher-ranking companions.

Yet—incredibly—the researchers describing all this conclude: “However … spotted hyenas appear to show no understanding of the thoughts or beliefs of others.”

What? They’ve just described hyenas’ skills of deception. Inexplicably, the researchers state, “We have no evidence that hyenas know anything at all about [other hyenas’] current mental state or future intentions … unless they directly perceive sensory cues that provide them with such information.”

Well, where does one start? Perceiving sensory cues—seeing you, watching you interacting—is the only way I can “know anything at all about” your current mental state or your intentions. Isn’t that—obvious? My question: Why do researchers judge the mental performance of other animals against a standard that humans could not possibly reach? Lying proves that the liar understands that another can have competing interests—and that you can keep them ignorant so you can benefit. That is “theory of mind.”

 

 

In Tanzania, each of two rival higher-ranking male chimpanzees need the support of one particular subordinate male to maintain their dominance. Each courts the subordinate’s favor by allowing him access to fertile females. By shifting his allegiance whenever the male he’s been backing gets a little stingy, the lower-ranking male keeps the sex coming his way. In another instance, researcher Craig Stanford watches a lower-ranking chimpanzee seem to stage a dominance challenge. This gets the real dominant male so carried away displaying his dominance to the whole group that he doesn’t realize the lower-ranking chimpanzee has used the confusion to sneak a little sex with a willing lass. Reviewing dozens of studies over three decades on the question of what chimpanzees know about others, one team concluded what the chimps themselves already know: “Chimpanzees understand both the goals and intentions of others as well as the perception and knowledge of others.” Chimpanzees pursue power, and they keep track of favors given and received “as relentlessly as some people in Washington,” says Frans de Waal. He observes, “Their feelings range from gratitude for political support to outrage if one of them violates a social rule,” adding that “the emotional life of these animals is much closer to ours than once held possible.”

Does that closeness reflect well on the chimps—or poorly on us? Chimpanzees hold a mirror up to us, challenging us to see the ape reflected. Often, we don’t recognize ourselves. Chimpanzees can be as darkly, murderously ambitious as Roman senators, as if there is a human pent up inside them, brachiating toward Eden and our birth, a genie waiting to be released from its bottle and let loose upon the world. But we humans are already out of the bottle. In who we are, in how we are, we have much reason to feel pride and shame. If cruelty and destructiveness are bad, humans are by a wide margin the worst species ever to infest this planet. If compassion and creativity are good, humans are by a wide margin the finest. But we are neither simply good nor bad; we are all these things together, and imperfectly so. The question for all is: Which way is our balance trending?