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.

6.1 How can researchers test Theory of Mind in animals?

Psychologists attempting to study ToM in animals need to find methods that do not rely on language skills, as have many of the studies looking at ToM in humans (for example, the vast body of work in developmental psychology that has considered when various ToM skills develop in children).

Activity 10 Do you think animals understand others’ minds?

Timing: Allow 10 minutes for this activity

Stop and reflect for a moment on how you might decide whether an animal has an understanding of others’ mental states. You may want to think of your pet (if you have one), or a pet you have come into contact with, and describe anything you have observed that would lead you to think that they do or do not understand others’ mental states − such as emotions, perceptions, knowledge, intentions and so on.

To use this interactive functionality a free OU account is required. Sign in or register.
Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Discussion

Perhaps you came up with some anecdotal examples, such as your pet dog or cat seeming to understand when you are angry or upset. You may have thought of instances, e.g. from watching wildlife television programmes, where animals seem to deliberately try to deceive another animal, to give it a ‘false belief’, for example, by pretending to hide food in one place, but secretly moving it to another place. In one account, the primatologist Jane Goodall describes how a monkey who had spied fruit in a tree refrained from retrieving it, or even looking at it, until the other monkeys present had left the area (Goodall, 1971). Might this suggest that the monkey understood that its own behaviour would affect the knowledge (i.e. mental states) of the other monkeys?

As humans, we assume that our own conspecifics have understanding of other minds. So it may be difficult for us not to think animal behaviours and abilities are evidence for their understanding of others’ minds, which, as you learned in Section 2 of this course, has been referred to as anthropomorphising.

But how do we know that an animal behaving in a particular way has not just learned to respond to aspects of their environment based on physical cues (physical stimuli in the animal’s environment), without any actual understanding of others’ minds? For example, an animal who ‘hides’ food out of sight of another animal may have simply learned that if it hides the food when the other animal is present, the chance of that food being taken is high, whereas if it hides the food in the absence of other observers, the food is available for them to enjoy later. This explanation does not assume that the animal hiding the food has any concept of another’s mental states (desires, knowledge, etc.). Many behaviours that animals display could be explained as learned behavioural responses or, perhaps innate (or instinctive) behavioural responses in reaction to certain stimuli.

Activity 11 Which animals might have Theory of Mind (ToM)?

Timing: Allow 10 minutes for this activity

The animals from Activities 3 and 7 of this course are listed here again. Which, if any, do you think might have a ToM?

Different aspects of ToM include, for example, the understanding of false beliefs (that people can hold a belief that is not consistent with reality), and that what people can see, leads them to have certain beliefs about, and knowledge of, the world.

  • Chimpanzees
  • Cats
  • Crows
  • Lizards

Discussion

You might have thought that chimpanzees are most likely to have an understanding of other minds (or a ToM), given that they are close relatives of humans in evolutionary terms. If you own a pet cat, you might perhaps think they have at least some ability to detect certain emotional states that you (or other animals) might be experiencing.

What about lizards or crows? You may well have been less willing to attribute ToM to these animals. Only very recently have researchers turned to study ToM in crows and lizards, and to date the research is limited and inconclusive. You'll discover as you work through the next few sections of this course, that it has been quite a challenge to devise tests that can answer questions about whether animals have ToM. The majority of studies have been carried out on chimpanzees: Section 6.2 will introduce some of this research.