Derek's Blog When is a Chimp Smarter than a Child?
So here’s an interesting question: when is a chimpanzee smarter than a child? Such situations, it turns out, do occur, and under surprisingly everyday sorts of circumstances. A particularly striking recent example comes from the research of two comparative psychologists from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, Dr. Victoria Horner and Professor Andrew Whiten. Horner and Whiten showed that when it comes to learning how a simple “Puzzle Box” works by watching an adult, it’s easy to make chimps appear far cleverer than kids. All you have to do is make the Puzzle Box very, very simple.
For example, take a look at this Puzzle Box that my colleague Andrew Young and I built, based on Horner and Whiten’s model.
There’s not too much to it - it’s basically just a Plexiglas cube with a divider in the middle. Now imagine that you’ve been told that there is a prize inside the box; where is it and how would you get it out? Since there’s only one place in the box that is opaque (the blue tube in the lower compartment) it seems pretty clear that that is exactly where the prize has to be. And that big red door on the front just begs to be pulled off, so that seems like an immediately obvious and expedient way of finding out what’s inside.
All of that is true, but when Horner and Whiten showed a Puzzle Box just like this one to both chimpanzees and preschool-aged children, they added a twist. Before the chimps or kids could retrieve a prize, they saw an adult get one out for herself. Rather than just getting the prize out directly though, the adult did it in a very circuitous, roundabout way. Take a look at this picture and you’ll see what I mean:
The adult began by using a small wand to (1) tap on the bolt on top of the box, (2) push the bolt out of its frame, and then (3) tap on the floor of the empty upper compartment. Only after all of this rigmarole did the adult do the thing she actually had to do to get the prize, namely moving the door and sticking the wand inside the opaque compartment.
After the adult had her prize, both the kids and the chimps both had a chance to get a prize out for themselves. How did they choose to go about it?
The chimps, it turns out, weren’t impressed with the adults roundabout technique. Rather than imitating what the adult did , the chimps just cut right to the chase - they skipped over the unnecessary steps (the ones shown in yellow) and instead just did the necessary things to get the prize out (the steps shown in blue). Score one for our chimps relatives.
Based on what the chimps did, I think most people would expect - as I certainly did - that kids would take a similarly smart approach. But that’s not what happened at all. Instead, fully 80% of the children copied all of the adult’s actions, including the unnecessary steps that the chimps couldn’t be bothered to reproduce. The kids, in other words, approached the task in a way that was a lot less clever than the chimps.
Now to be sure, there are a number of simple explanations for this result. For example, maybe the kids just thought it would be fun to use all the parts of the box. Maybe they thought that they were supposed to copy the adult, and felt sheepish about ‘contradicting’ an authority figure by ignoring part of the display. Or maybe the kids are just in the habit of imitating, and simply copying all of the steps seemed like less work to them than thinking it through.
All of these are possible, and even plausible, explanations. They are pretty much what Dr. Horner and Professor Whiten themselves said about this curious result. But when I first came across this work, I wondered: might something deeper be going on? Is it possible that the kids aren’t copying the adult because the want to or think that they should, but instead because they are confused in some interesting way about how the Puzzle Box works? I’ll return to this question tomorrow as I begin describing the first in a series of experiments I did to get to the bottom of this mystery.
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