7.2 Studies on animals’ understanding of false belief: deception

As you learned in Section 6.4 of this course, comparative laboratory studies using the food competition paradigm have failed to provide evidence that chimpanzees understand that others can have false beliefs; although they do suggest that chimpanzees have some understanding of others’ perception and knowledge.

Another strategy for looking for signs of false belief understanding in animals, is to consider whether they seem to engage in acts of deliberate deception. In humans, the ability to deceive is closely linked to the understanding that other people can have false beliefs. For example, a footballer who strives to instil in a goalkeeper a false belief about which way the ball will be heading. This deliberate attempt to instil a false belief in another is known as deception. This raises the question as to whether animals also display evidence of deliberate deception, and if so, whether this might indicate that they, too, understand that others can have false beliefs.

This next video discusses evidence that animals can deceive, drawing upon naturalistic examples rather than laboratory studies. It considers what this evidence might tell us about animal understanding of others’ mental states.

Watch the video and then answer the questions in Activity 13.

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Transcript: Do animals lie?

NARRATOR

Deceit is rife amongst animals, but it’s probably instinctive behaviour controlled by genes. Deceit in humans, on the other hand, is a conscious action that requires planning.

PROF. ROGER SCRUTON

Deception involves a very complex mental process involving an assessment of what the other thing a person is thinking, an assessment of how to make him think something else, and so on. I doubt that animals do this.

NARRATOR

But if some animals have a sense of self and of others, as many now agree, could they also lie like us?

PROF.CECILIA HEYES

There’s no doubt that animals are capable of functional deception, of behaving in a way which leads another animal to make a mistake.

NARRATOR

Mimicry in the animal world is one of the most common examples of deception. It probably has no conscious basis at all. Animals copy the looks of one another to save their own skin. This octopus is the very master of disguise. It alters not only its shape but even its behaviour to impersonate a whole range of other sea creatures like a flounder flattening itself to the sea bed. And when pestered by an aggressive damsel fish, it can turn itself into a poisonous sea snake.

But some animals, like this magpie, appear to use mimicry to deceive for the sheer fun of it.

DR MIRIAM ROTHSCHILD

One of the things he can mimic very well was the warning signal of the ducks on the pond when the fox, which lived in the garden, used to go past and too near. And then they used to give us a wonderful quack, quack, quack loud signal. And the magpie learned to imitate this.

And it amused him, obviously, to make this noise and see my dogs, who were always taken in and thought it was the ducks, jump off the bed and rush into the garden to catch the fox. And the moment he succeeded in getting the dogs off the bed, he used to preen himself, which he only did when he was enjoying something very much.

PROF. ROGER SCRUTON

Animals can certainly look as if they’re trying to deceive us by behaving in ways which do deceive us. And there may be good evolutionary reasons why they should behave in this way, either to avoid capture or themselves to capture something. But it doesn’t follow from the fact they appear to be doing something that they really are doing something.

NARRATOR

Deceptive activity can be used to manipulate the behaviour of another animal. Fireflies do so by actively sending the wrong signals. This female from a larger species mimics the sexual flash code of a smaller species to attract a male. Seduced, the male approaches to mate. She responds by eating him alive. All this clever bluff is vital for survival, but is this really lying?

PROF. JOHN WEBSTER

The practice of deception in animals, be it a chimpanzee hiding a banana or a heron throwing out ground bait, is really very convincing evidence to me that animals are thinking. They’re not simply reacting to circumstances, but they have a concept of what they’re trying to achieve, and they’re moving the actions towards that perceived goal. That’s more or less what we do.

NARRATOR

This heron has learnt the art of angling. It casts a piece of bread and positions itself in exactly the right place to deceive a fish. But is this deception learnt through trial and error?

PROF. CECILIA HEYES

Animals could certainly come to deceive through associative learning. In that case, they wouldn’t be deceiving with the knowledge that they leave the deceived with a false belief. They simply learn that if they behave in a certain way, that makes the other animal behave in the way that they want.

NARRATOR

But can animals really understand what deception means and how it can affect the thoughts and actions of others? This plover nests in an open but well-camouflaged spot. If the bird is seen by a possible intruder, the nest would be at risk. So she runs away in a frenzy in an attempt to distract the threat. Her wing appears broken. She monitors the intruder’s position. And when she’s lured the intruder far enough away, she abandons the play acting, and returns to the eggs.

Research concludes that plovers act in a fixed way in this specific context, but true deceit requires flexibility in a number of situations. Can animals do this? Chimpanzees operate within strict social rules. To transgress them requires conscious thought and planning.

DR JANE GOODALL

Chimpanzees certainly lie. The best example that we have from Gombe of a chimpanzee learning to control his emotions happened when Figan was just a young boy. That’s Fifi’s brother. And we were handing out bananas by hand in those days long ago, and on this particular occasion, all the big males got the bananas, and Figan didn’t get any. He wandered off a bit sadly.

The following day he stayed back, and as he saw us reaching to give him a banana, he just – he simply couldn’t control his excitement, and [MONKEY NOISES]. The food sounds came out, so of course, the big males came back, and Figan lost his banana. The following day, he stayed behind again, and this time, although we could hear the sounds in his throat, he was swallowing them, and they were completely silent. And he got his banana.

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Do animals lie?

The issue of whether animals intentionally deceive, by setting out to manipulate another’s mental state, remains debated. Some theorists have argued that intentional deception is a uniquely human cognitive ability (e.g. Cheney and Seyfarth, 1990; Tomasello and Call, 1997).

In naturalistic contexts, such as when an animal refrains from giving a food call so as not to alert other animals to the presence of the food (as you saw illustrated by the chimpanzee example in the video you have just watched), deceit might be a behaviour that they have learned maximises their own chances of getting the food (Heyes, 1998).

Controlled experimental studies investigating deception in animals, such as those which have tested whether chimpanzees can learn to refrain from indicating the location of hidden food, have found that it typically takes very many trials for the animals to learn to do this. This has led some psychologists to suggest that an associative-learning explanation might be more plausible than one that involves the animals having an actual understanding of how they can manipulate others’ mental states (as noted by Hare et al., 2006). However, Hare and colleagues (2006) used an adapted study design, from which they report finding evidence that chimpanzees can purposefully attempt to manipulate the mental states of others.

So it seems that both laboratory-based and naturalistic studies of ToM in animals are open to different competing interpretations. This has led to debates between theorists about which interpretation is the most plausible. Considering data from a range of different methodological approaches seems likely to be a good strategy in trying to answer questions about the nature of animal minds.