Skip to content
Skip to main content

About this free course

Download this course

Share this free course

Living psychology: animal minds
Living psychology: animal minds

Start this free course now. Just create an account and sign in. Enrol and complete the course for a free statement of participation or digital badge if available.

6.4 Chimpanzees’ understanding of false belief

The food competition paradigm has also been adapted to try to test whether chimpanzees appear to understand false beliefs. As described in Section 6.3, Hare and colleagues (2001) created a version of the task where dominant chimpanzees either witnessed (informed condition) or did not witness (uninformed condition) the location where the food was placed. A second version of this task used in this study included a procedure whereby the dominant chimpanzee always witnessed the initial location of the reward, but then the reward was moved to a second location (unwitnessed, hence creating a ‘false belief’, rather than simply ignorance). The subordinate chimpanzee witnessed the food placement and movement in all conditions, and so knew exactly where the food was placed at all times. The subordinate chimpanzee was also able to see that the dominant chimpanzee had witnessed where the food was, and whether or not it had witnessed the food being moved to the new location, which varied depending on the experimental condition.

Pause for a moment and think about what would be evidence that the subordinate chimpanzee has an understanding of false belief in this study.

How would you expect the subordinate chimpanzee to behave in the conditions where the dominant chimpanzee had witnessed the food being moved from its original location, compared with where it did not witness this relocation of the food? It would seem reasonable to predict that if the subordinate chimpanzee realised that the dominant competitor actually had a false belief about the location of the food (in the condition where it did not see the food being moved), the subordinate chimpanzee would be more likely to approach the food on its own, compared with the condition where the food movement had been witnessed by the dominant animal.

However, the researchers found that this was not the case. The subordinate chimpanzee was no more likely to approach the food when the dominant chimpanzee had not seen it being moved, than when they had seen it being moved. This suggests that chimpanzees may not understand false beliefs. This task can be interpreted as testing the subordinate animal’s ability to keep track of what knowledge the dominant one had, and then decide to retrieve the food or not according to this information.

Taking the results of the procedures reported by Hare and colleagues (2001) all together, the findings suggest that chimpanzees were able to distinguish between the informed and uninformed conditions, indicating that they have an understanding of their competitor’s knowledge versus ignorance (what they don't know). However, they were unable to distinguish between the uninformed and the misinformed (false belief) conditions − providing no evidence for understanding that their competitor had a false belief.

Other studies using similar experimental designs (also based on food competition tasks) have supported Hare and colleagues’ conclusion that chimpanzees seem to understand knowledge and ignorance, but not false belief (Kaminski et al., 2008). Juliane Kaminski and colleagues (2008) compared chimpanzees’ performance with that of 6-year-old children undertaking a very similar competitive task (but competing for toys rather than food). The children showed understanding of knowledge and ignorance, and false belief.

Overall, the evidence from laboratory studies that sought to test for understanding of false beliefs in chimpanzees suggests that they do not understand these belief states (Call and Tomasello, 2008).

In this section of the course, you have considered a number of different research studies (using chimpanzees) that set out to look for evidence of ToM in animals, and thought about what these have allowed researchers to conclude. You have considered studies looking at the understanding of human goals and intention, visual perspective-taking (perception and knowledge) and false belief. Next, in Section 7, you’ll explore some issues around the methods used in ToM studies