Investigating Indirect and Direct Reputation Formation in Asian Elephants (Elephas maximus)

Abstract

Reputation is a key component in social interactions of group-living animals and appears to play a role in the establishment of cooperation. Animals can form a reputation of an individual by directly interacting with them or by observing them interact with a third party, i.e., eavesdropping. Elephants are an interesting taxon in which to investigate eavesdropping as they are highly cooperative, large-brained, long-lived terrestrial mammals with a complex social organisation. The aim of this study was to investigate whether captive Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) could form reputations of humans through indirect and/or direct experience in two different paradigms: (1) a cooperative string-pulling task and (2) a scenario requiring begging. Fourteen captive Asian elephants in Thailand participated in an experimental procedure that consisted of three parts: baseline, observation, and testing. In the observation phase, the subject saw a conspecific interact with two people—one cooperative/generous and one non-cooperative/selfish. The observer could then choose which person to approach in the test phase. The elephants were tested in a second session 2–5 days later. We found no support for the hypothesis that elephants can form reputations of humans through indirect or direct experience, but these results may be due to challenges with experimental design rather than a lack of capacity. We discuss how the results may be due to a potential lack of ecological validity in this study and the difficulty of assessing motivation and attentiveness in elephants. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of designing future experiments that account for the elephants' use of multimodal sensory information in their decision-making.

Wolves and dogs fail to form reputations of humans after indirect and direct experience in a food-giving situation

“…Our study adds to the literature reporting no evidence of eavesdropping in dogs [15,[25][26][27]] and other animals, including Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) [40], cats (Felis silvestris catus) [53,55] and some results on non-human primates [5,8,11]. The mixed results on eavesdropping in animals may be due to the different methodologies used, for example, whether the setup was a food-giving situation (e.g., [5,8,21,22,26] or a helping situation (e.g., [23,24]) and whether the subject observed human-human (e.g., [11,25,27,55]) or human-animal interactions (e.g., [15,28,40,53]). We argue that using human-animal interactions enhanced the relevance of the interactions, especially since the WSC animals live in packs and regularly see conspecifics interacting with different people, like trainers (hand-raisers/very familiar), researchers (familiar) and visitors (unfamiliar).…”

“…Our study adds to the literature reporting no evidence of eavesdropping in dogs [ 15 , 25 – 27 ] and other animals, including Asian elephants ( Elephas maximus ) [ 40 ], cats ( Felis silvestris catus ) [ 53 , 55 ] and some results on non-human primates [ 5 , 8 , 11 ]. The mixed results on eavesdropping in animals may be due to the different methodologies used, for example, whether the setup was a food-giving situation (e.g., [ 5 , 8 , 21 , 22 , 26 ] or a helping situation (e.g., [ 23 , 24 ]) and whether the subject observed human-human (e.g., [ 11 , 25 , 27 , 55 ]) or human-animal interactions (e.g., [ 15 , 28 , 40 , 53 ]). We argue that using human-animal interactions enhanced the relevance of the interactions, especially since the WSC animals live in packs and regularly see conspecifics interacting with different people, like trainers (hand-raisers/very familiar), researchers (familiar) and visitors (unfamiliar).…”

“…The experiment consisted of four sessions (described below) and generally followed that of Jim et al [ 40 ]. We conducted sessions on separate days with a break of 2 days minimum between each session, but due to unavoidable logistical problems, some animals experienced Sessions 1 and 2 on the same day and Sessions 3 and 4 on the same day with a 2-hour break between sessions and a break of 6 days between the two testing days (see Fig 2 for an overview of the full procedure).…”

“…Our sample size was very small, which limited the power of our statistical analyses. Studies investigating reputation formation in animals often have small sample sizes (e.g., there are between 4 and 17 individuals in [5,[8][9][10]40,53]) and it can be difficult to interpret the results because conducting a GLMM may be problematic if there are not enough data to measure the response accurately, or there may not be enough power to analyse the results adequately and thus show false positive or false negative results. To counteract this problem, we also conducted exact binomial tests to analyse the behaviour of each subject, which indeed showed that some individuals behaved in a way consistent with forming a reputation of the two partners.…”