The mismeasure of ape social cognition

Abstract

In his classic analysis, Gould (The mismeasure of man, WW Norton, New York, 1981) demolished the idea that intelligence was an inherent, genetic trait of different human groups by emphasizing, among other things, (a) its sensitivity to environmental input, (b) the incommensurate pre-test preparation of different human groups, and (c) the inadequacy of the testing contexts, in many cases. According to Gould, the root cause of these oversights was confirmation bias by psychometricians, an unwarranted commitment to the idea that intelligence was a fixed, immutable quality of people. By virtue of a similar, systemic interpretive bias, in the last two decades, numerous contemporary researchers in comparative psychology have claimed human superiority over apes in social intelligence, based on two-group comparisons between postindustrial, Western Europeans and captive apes, where the apes have been isolated from European styles of social interaction, and tested with radically different procedures. Moreover, direct comparisons of humans with apes suffer from pervasive lapses in argumentation: Research designs in wide contemporary use are inherently mute about the underlying psychological causes of overt behavior. Here we analyze these problems and offer a more fruitful approach to the comparative study of social intelligence, which focuses on specific individual learning histories in specific ecological circumstances.

Multimodal communication and language origins: integrating gestures and vocalizations

“…In comparison, much, although not all, of primate communication is primarily imperative (Grice, ; Hurford, ; Tomasello, ). However, it is possible that we have just not conducted the appropriate experiments yet to distinguish between imperative versus declarative signal use in non‐human animals (Lyn, Russell & Hopkins, ; Crockford, Wittig & Zuberbühler, ; Leavens, Bard & Hopkins, ). The scarcity of declarative events in wild apes and their infrequent occurrence in enculturated individuals suggests that apes have the biological capability to declare, but specific environmental triggers must be present for their expression (Lyn et al ., ).…”

The ontogeny of intentional communication in chimpanzees in the wild

“…Since we are not able to directly observe animals’ and pre‐linguistic children's psychological states (Scott‐Phillips, ; but see Krupenye, Kano, Hirata, Call, & Tomasello, , for evidence of false‐belief understanding in apes), it remains an inherently challenging task to determine if communication is goal‐oriented or not. However, this problem also applies to observations of communicative behaviour in pre‐linguistic children, and it is crucial to devise the same objective measures for non‐human and human testing groups to enable comparability (Leavens, Bard, & Hopkins, ). The fine‐grained study of proximate mechanisms in communication, such as underlying developmental processes, might shed some light on the extent to which human intentionality truly differs from other animal species.…”

“…rearing histories) substantially affect the development of social‐cognitive skills in primates (for review see Bard & Leavens, ). Recently, the criticism has been put forward that comparative research on social cognition has mostly ignored the detrimental effect of impoverished social and physical environments on cognitive development (Leavens et al., ). The failure to examine groups in the same testing settings may have led to the universal conclusion that humans’ enhanced task performances are due to evolutionary rather than developmental histories (Leavens et al., ).…”

The Method of Validation by Zenith

“…Others have claimed that humans have unique representational capacities that are manifested early in childhood (e.g., Povinelli, Bierschwale, and Čech, 1999). For over 20 years, these claims for human cognitive exceptionalism have relied on differences in response profiles between young humans and substantially older great apes when challenged with tests of their social awareness-age differences are confounded with species classifications (Leavens, Bard, & Hopkins, 2017).In this talk, I will describe the method of Validation by Zenith; this technique identifies a maximum capability response profile in humans, against which the performances of younger humans and animals can be compared. This method assumes that human adults respond to cognitive challenge with the most sophisticated psychological processes in the animal kingdom.…”

“…Others have claimed that humans have unique representational capacities that are manifested early in childhood (e.g., Povinelli, Bierschwale, and Čech, 1999). For over 20 years, these claims for human cognitive exceptionalism have relied on differences in response profiles between young humans and substantially older great apes when challenged with tests of their social awareness-age differences are confounded with species classifications (Leavens, Bard, & Hopkins, 2017).…”