Topic 7: How Human Minds Make Sense of Animals PDF

 Topic 7: How Human Minds Make Sense of Animals Human psychology and knowing the truth about When you have completed this topic, you our world should: To ge...

 Topic 7: How Human Minds Make Sense of Animals Human psychology and knowing the truth about When you have completed this topic, you our world should: To get you started thinking about how human understand the concept of Social brains work, check out this Youtube clip. Constructionism and the idea that our perceptions of and relationships with animals are largely the result of social interactions be able to describe, using examples, how our perceptions of animals have changed across time and cultural development be familiar with the role that science played in our changing view of As you watch the video, note whether the girl animals, and particularly how the rise you see is spinning clockwise or counter- and fall of behaviourism influenced clockwise. After you have noted the direction in our views which she spins, have a closer look. This time, try looking slightly above the screen so that you know how the cognitive revolution are seeing the image in your peripheral vision. has changed how we currently view What did you see this time? animals If you do this activity in a group, what happens is that some people see the girl spinning clockwise and others see her spinning counter- Much of what we’ve been doing so far in this clockwise - and both groups are convinced that subject is investigating where we’ve come from they are correct. Sometimes if you look hard in terms of our relationships with animals. For enough or long enough, she changes direction. millennia we’ve all been evolving together, each species on its own path but all very inter- If you can’t get the spinning girl to change connected. One of the things you should have directions by watching her with your peripheral noticed is that our relationships with animals vision, watch this video. The video shows two keep changing. It should be evident by now that girls spinning together, with slightly different the exact same animal can be seen as a pet in shading. Each appears to spin in a different some places, as a pest in others, as food direction. somewhere else and as a source of fear The spinning girl videos show us that what we somewhere else again. It seems as if humans initially believe about something we perceive somehow divide the animal world into fairly can be totally wrong, or at least incomplete or arbitrary categories of good and bad, nice and incompatible with what other people perceive. nasty, edible and not edible, priceless and We all take in masses of information each worthless, and that this is based on context and moment and process it, but we decide what it culture just as much as it is on the actual means only partly on the basis of what the characteristics of the animals. This is the issue information is. Also having an influence is how that we are going to concentrate on in this topic. our individual brains work and things like our It is an important feature of human psychology existing beliefs about the world. One because we apply the same kind of logic to explanation for the spinning girl is that people other knowledge categories. doing most of their thinking with the left hemisphere of their brain see her spinning counter-clockwise, while those doing their the stories they tell, the books they write, the thinking with the right hemisphere see the lectures they give, the films they make and the reverse. web pages they construct. Whether or not this explanation is actually correct, it is nonetheless amazing that people can believe entirely different things even though they have access to exactly the same information. And this is just one simple example. You might recall another recent case from 2015, in which a photo of a dress went viral on the internet because some people saw it as blue and black, while others saw the exact same picture as showing a dress that was white and gold. You can read about that example, which generated quite a few scientific studies, at Wikipedia (just do a search for ‘the dress’). It seems amazing that humans disagree completely about many really important issues, including some where both sides are totally convinced that they know the ‘truth’. Social Constructionism Psychologists and philosophers have come up with dozens of explanations for why we do this. One of the well-known theories is called the theory of Social Constructionism. This is a theory of knowledge, concerned with concepts or practices that appear to be natural or obvious The fact that our knowledge is mostly socially to those who accept them, but which are really constructed is not necessarily a bad thing. You inventions or artefacts of the society in which might remember from a previous chapter that the people live. Social constructionism dates Stephen Mithen thought the ability of our brain back to 1966 when two sociologists, Peter to integrate different knowledge sources, to use Berger and Thomas Luckmann, published a knowledge from one dimension of reality to book called The Social Construction of Reality. make sense out of other dimensions, was THE In this book, Berger and Luckmann argued that SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT achievement of all knowledge, even the most basic common- modern humans. This is because most of the sense things that we really believe about the time our constructed knowledge base is critical world, is derived primarily from social to our success in the world. It helps us make interactions, from our conversations and quick decisions about how to act. If we see interactions with those around us. This is very something that looks like a fairly large and easy to demonstrate. Do you know what a polar angry bull heading in our direction, we do not bear is? If you are like most people you’ve never have to take time to think about whether this actually met one, but you know what a polar really is a bull or whether this particular bull is bear is because you have read or heard about likely to cause us pain. Even if we’ve never had the animal from books, other people, any direct experience with a charging bull it is documentaries or the internet. Dinosaurs make better to take preventative action first and think an even better example. Do you know what about it later. Doing so is likely to have benefits sound a dinosaur makes? Do they roar or tweet in an evolutionary sense, which is exactly why or purr? Nobody on earth today has ever met a we are so good at it. dinosaur and sounds are not preserved archeologically like bones are – so how can we possibly answer this question? And yet we all do – constructing in our heads a model of what we expect dinosaurs to sound like, based on knowledge obtained from other people; from  so much so that they were hunted to extinction in many places. More recently our perceptions of wolves have changed again, such that they are now becoming the object of very expensive conservation efforts. Throughout all these transformations the wolves have stayed pretty much the same, but our understanding of them – their place in our reality – has altered dramatically. Similarly, there are times in our recent history when cats were perceived as pests, and other times when they were perceived as Gods. This illustrates to us how our perceptions of the world can change radically overtime – because we create what is real based on our shared understanding of what is going on around us – and how this can significantly influence how we think about animals and their relationships with us. To illustrate this point even further with a very contemporary example, consider the breed of dogs sometimes called Pit Bulls. Pit Bulls are said to be dangerous dogs, being listed as a restricted breed in Victoria and in many other places. If you do an internet search, while being very critical of the information you find, see if you can establish the truth about this breed rather than being persuaded by how they are Generally, reality is seen by social ‘socially constructed’ by the people who write constructionists as dynamic and constantly about them. Based on the information you find, evolving. As we learn more about the world and do you think you would be able to construct an the other things in it, we modify our reality to accurate representation of the breed? suit. This is why education is so important. It While on the topic of ‘socially constructed dogs’, allows us to fill our brains with all kinds of think back to an earlier topic when we discussed knowledge and skills, which then make it easier the possibility of eating dog meat. In some for us to react flexibly but sensibly when we countries this is a delicacy, with the dogs being encounter novel situations. On some occasions, used to produce meat being perceived quite though, our social constructions of people, differently from those used as pets and places and animals can be very dysfunctional. companions. Would you eat dog meat? Why or This is most likely to occur when we why not? Is it because dogs are intrinsically communicate only with people who are very like different from the animals we do commonly eat ourselves and who share almost identical in Australia, or do we simply think differently socially constructed realities. When this happens about dogs because of the way they are socially our understanding of reality is reinforced to the constructed within our culture? Would you be point where we stop being sceptical and start comfortable if a group of people in Australian just accepting that what we think we know, is proposed farming dogs for their meat? the actual truth. Remember that we come from a culture where You might be wondering what exactly this has we think nothing about butchering cows and to do with the psychology of human-animal other animals, practices that horrify people from relationships, but think back to earlier in the other cultures who experience a different subject when we explored how our perceptions socially constructed reality than our own. of wolves have been transformed over time. As a final example of how we socially create our Many Native American peoples have understanding of animals, let’s discuss sharks. If traditionally viewed wolves as respected role you had to describe a shark to an alien who models. Early Europeans perceived the same landed on earth with no prior knowledge, what animals as something to be feared and reviled, words would you use out of the following list? Kind, sneaky, dangerous, caring, cunning, warm, evil, awesome, cold, intriguing, hard, friendly, violent, malicious, fearful, and mesmerising. Now think about where you got your knowledge about sharks from. Have you ever personally met one? Have you studied sharks? Jaws is a 1975 horror film based on a novel by Peter Benchley and directed by Steven Spielberg. In the opening scene a young woman leaves a late-night beach party for a swim and disappears. When her remains are found the next day it is clear to the medical examiner that she was the victim of a shark attack. This To illustrate this, Rothfels draws on the information is suppressed by the town’s mayor experiences of Peter Benchley, who wrote the who does not want to disrupt the tourist season Jaws novel. Twenty-five years after the film was on which the community depends. A few days released, Benchley had become a shark later a young boy is attacked and eaten in full advocate. He and several shark attack survivors view of everyone. Fear rips through the made a National Geographic Documentary community, prompting a shark hunting frenzy. showing what sharks are ‘really’ like and arguing The story culminates in a long battle between that we should all be very concerned about the three of the movie’s stars, located far from the rate at which sharks are heading towards coast in a smallish boat with no radio, and the extinction. In an interview he described how he giant man-eating shark – estimated to be more would never be able to write the Jaws novel now than 25 feet long. During this battle, the shark – not because he wouldn’t want to, but because shows every intention of deliberately killing the he doesn’t think about sharks in the same way three men. It succeeds in devouring one of them, so wouldn’t have the same ideas to begin with. but the others win out in what is portrayed as a In addition, Benchley felt that society had classic battle between good and evil. This battle changed in its perceptions of sharks so much manages to activate all of our fears about being that the movie would not work. In those days it alone at sea and being eaten by some kind of was perfectly acceptable to demonise an animal, animal monster. especially a shark. In the socially constructed reality of the time, sharks were horrible and threatening. Now, however, they are widely perceived as victims rather than as bad guys, as important figures in an ocean ecology that some perceive as being naturally sacred and stable but disastrously disrupted by human activities. As Benchley states: “Great White Sharks have survived, virtually unchanged, for millions of years. They are as highly evolved, as perfectly in tune with their environment as any living thing on the planet. For them to be driven to extinction by man, a relative newcomer, would be more than an ecological travesty; it would be In its day this movie had a huge social impact, a moral travesty.” Sharks, while deadly, are to the extent that beaches everywhere were portrayed by advocates, such as Benchley, as practically deserted during the following holiday magnificent, awe inspiring and beautiful rather season. The important thing for us, though, is than as evil villains. Meanwhile our film makers that, according to an historian, Nigel Rothfels, depict animals in very different ways than they who edited a book called ‘Representing did in the 70’s - think of films like Free Willy or Animals’, Jaws provides “a window through Finding Nemo. which we can see how human expectations of our relationships with animals are formed and How do we know what the 'real' truth is? how they, in turn, influence how we see those We have now explored several animal species animals” (p1). where our perceptions have varied enormously either across cultures or across time. There are behaved in certain ways by asking them to think countless other examples but the important out loud. This was called introspection and it point for you to grasp is more about predicting seemed like a good idea, but it was impossible the future than about reviewing the past. Surely, to know whether people were reporting once we agree that our perceptions of animals accurately, or even if they really knew what they have changed dramatically over the last 25 were thinking. Later on, some of the early years, we are forced to also agree that our psychologists noticed that there were often current views about animals may change again predictable patterns in the way people and in the next 25 years. According to Rothfels, “we animals react to what is going on around them. end up having to accept that our current, You might have heard of Ivan Pavlov. He was a scientific, heavily researched ideas about physiologist conducting a study into salivation animals are in a state of constant transformation in dogs when he noticed that the dogs started and that we do not really know what we think salivating even before the food used in his we know about them” (p. xi). experiment became available. To investigate this, he started ringing a bell before giving the dogs food. Pretty soon all he had to do was ring the bell to make the dogs salivate. Pavlov was also able to condition the dogs to expect food using a whole range of different objects, including tuning forks and metronomes as well as visual stimuli. The behaviour of the dogs seemed to be controlled by what was happening in the environment. The process demonstrated by Pavlov’s dogs is called Classical Conditioning. It is a learning process whereby a stimulus (e.g., presentation of food) that normally evokes a response (e.g. salivation) is paired with a secondary neutral stimulus (e.g., a ringing bell). After several pairings, the secondary stimulus (e.g., the ringing bell) evokes the naturally occurring response (e.g., salivation). Observations like this led to the formulation of an approach to psychology called behaviourism. One of the leaders in this field, John Broadus Watson, was initially interested in investigating the relationship between neurological development and learning and, to do this, he What do you think about this idea? Do you trust wanted to use rats. This was controversial what scientists tell you about animals or do you because, if psychology is about the mind and think that scientists are also influenced by the only humans have minds, as used to be cultural environment in which they live? To believed, then the only way to study it is to use explore this idea further we are going to delve people and the method of introspection briefly into a historical battle between the described previously. Rats are simply not scientific disciplines of psychology and suitable as experimental animals. Watson ethology. What you should discover is that what argued, however, that psychologists should scientists know (believe) about animals is very forget about studying the mind and concentrate much a reflection of the questions they ask and on overt behaviour, which obviously does occur the way they interpret the information they in both humans and nonhuman animals and collect? which seems very similar in both. Watson was People started asking questions about how the convinced that all behaviour is basically the human mind works way back in the middle ages, same, being learned in response to with psychology first emerging as a scientific environmental cues and being totally controlled discipline in the mid 1800’s. Initially, by environmental outcomes rather than by psychologists tried to understand why people anything so esoteric as a mind. Here is one of If you need a refresher about Skinner and his Watson’s famous quotes. work with Skinner boxes, watch this video to see an example. In Skinner’s experiments a rat was put in a Skinner box and trained to press a lever to obtain food. Rats do this very well and can be taught to do all sorts of wonderful tricks to obtain the food reward. Behaviourists therefore concluded that animals were fairly uninteresting as individuals – that they are basically identical black boxes that respond to external cues in a totally predictable manner. Put the right stimulus in one end and the right response will inevitably come out the other, so we don’t need to worry about messy internal states like feelings and beliefs. “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, Skinner didn’t just use rats in his experiments. and my own specified world to bring them up in He also used pigeons. You can find old videos and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and on Youtube that show how pigeons were trained train him to become any type of specialist I to play a game of ping pong by rewarding them might select -- doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant- with food. On the basis of experiments like chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, these, psychologists formed a ‘socially regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, constructed’ understanding of animals as being abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors”.— little more than mechanical robots – just as Watson, John B, Behaviourism, University of Descartes had argued all those years ago. Chicago Press, 1930. Watson simply did not believe that people were born with particular talents or skills. He thought people and animals were born as blank slates and could be turned into practically anything if they were provided with an appropriate environment. Is this a view you share? If you need a refresher about Behaviourism and John B. Watson’s work, watch this video. In a set of studies with ‘little Albert’, Watson and his colleagues set out to test their ideas that phobias were learned fear responses. What happened to behaviourism? Because Watson was very influential in Although behaviourism was successful for many psychology, he attracted many bright young years, it was eventually challenged by three graduates to behaviourism, including Burrhus important developments. Frederic Skinner. Skinner also believed that First, in Europe a discipline called ethology psychology should be a science of behaviour, gained popularity. Ethology is a branch of not of mind, and he totally rejected the study of zoology that is particularly interested in internal mental states such as beliefs, desires, or understanding animal behaviour for its own goals. This had two important consequences. sake, not simply because of what it might tell us First, it meant that animals could be used for about human behaviour. Unlike psychologists, psychological experiments. Second, it meant ethologists work mainly in natural conditions that psychologists spent thousands of hours rather than in laboratories. Under these conducting experiments which tried to establish conditions early ethologists noticed some really exactly how animal behaviour is controlled by weird things. It seemed that animals did not external events. These experiments were learn many behaviours they exhibit. Instead, typically conducted in laboratories where these behaviours appear automatically when the conditions could be carefully controlled using a animal is placed in a certain situation. contraption called a Skinner box. For example, a famous ethologist called Konrad Lorenz was working with geese when he noticed that they spontaneously followed their mother others never give up, even if they get the exact almost immediately after they hatched. He same treatment as all the other animals in the performed experiments showing that they experiment. Differences in learning ability make actually followed the first thing that they saw sense if we look at learning from an evolutionary moving, whether it was their mother or not. This perspective. Of course there will be variation in was a hard-wired behaviour pattern, called how well some individuals learn, and of course imprinting, not something they learned. If you some species will develop specific learning would like to learn more about Konrad Lorenz capacities, in accordance with the selective and his work read “King Solomon’s Ring”. pressures that they face. This presents difficulties for the behaviourist framework. Third, there was a huge argument between Skinner and another scientist called Noam Chomsky about the acquisition of language in humans. Skinner tried to argue that language acquisition in humans could be explained within a behaviourist framework, with different words and sentences being learned through our interactions with others. Chomsky argued, however, that we are able to produce an infinite number of sentences, all unique in structure and meaning. Since these could not possibly all be learned solely through the type of trial-and- error experiences used by behaviourists, he Similar behaviour patterns were observed in argued that we must have internal mental other species, confirming that animals are born structures that help to guide our behaviours – knowing how to act in biologically relevant exactly the kinds of things that behaviourism circumstances. This is something that E.O Wilson had tried so hard to reject. also discussed, and it makes perfect sense because, if every single animal had to learn after it was born how to behave, this would be very risky in evolutionary terms. The important point here, however, is that the presence of pre- existing behaviours directly contradicted the framework of reality created by the behaviourists. What resulted has been an ongoing debate about the relative importance of instinct (nature) and learning (nurture) in development. Second, holes started showing up in the behaviourist framework. People noticed that some species learned some tasks far more easily than others even when the training provided So what? was identical. For example, while it is really easy The rise and fall of behaviourism is relevant to to teach pigeons to peck coloured lights in our study of human-animal relationships sequence, it is practically impossible to teach because our knowledge of animals was strongly them to push levers with their beaks in the same influenced by many years of strict behaviourism. way. Rats learn to avoid food that makes them If scientists believe that animals are just black feel bad on the basis of smell or taste, but not boxes, reacting unconsciously to stimuli in the on the basis of its shape or location. Even within environment, then they aren’t really very a species there are large individual differences. interesting to study. Also, why should we worry In a famous experiment examining what is called if a few dozen species go extinct, if one species learned helplessness, Martin Seligman showed is virtually the same as any other but in different that most animals exposed to an unavoidable packaging? Over time, however, many scientists electric shock eventually stop trying to get out have gradually changed their minds about of the cage they are in. Surprisingly, however, whether animals are exciting to study or not, rejecting behaviourism in favour of other something real on the outside – that we share approaches that have enabled them to the planet with millions of animal species that investigate what might be going on inside the are more diverse that we can probably imagine. ‘black boxes’. One of these approaches is How our brains make sense of the ‘real’ animals cognitive psychology, a branch of psychology in the environment, though, depends more than particularly concerned with studying internal we might like to admit on our social experiences; mental processes, such as problem solving, on what we’ve learned from those around us. memory, knowledge, perception and language. Our ability to learn about things without having Another is cognitive ethology, a branch of to directly experience them is one of our ethology concerned with observing animals greatest strengths as a species, but it brings under fairly natural conditions in an effort to with it the danger that we can learn to believe understand their thought processes, things that are just completely wrong, or that consciousness, beliefs, or rationality. Even may differ markedly from what other people admitting that these mental events exist is a big believe in different times or places. Even our shift in how scientists think about animals, so it scientists reflect this tendency, accounting for is little wonder that we have seen a recent why our understanding of animals has changed revolution in this area. This is something we are so much over recent times. Importantly, this going to explore later on, after we investigate means that our understanding of animals is also how animals are currently perceived by humans, likely to change in the future. Twenty years from but if you want to get started, the Wikipedia now or one hundred years from now or even two entry for animal cognition offers a good thousand years from now we might think very overview. There is even an entire scientific differently about some of the ways we use and journal called ‘Animal Cognition’. It’s an open interact with animals, so we need to keep this in access journal so you can easily access some mind when we make decisions about animals in really interesting research findings as they come society, both now and in the future. to light. For example, in January 2021, there were articles published on whether cats learn by copying people, and on whether dogs or pigs are more likely to seek human help when confronted with an unsolvable task. Such research questions would have been impossible to get published back in the days of strict behaviourism. Summary In this topic we initially explored some interesting examples of how our views about animals have changed over recent years. This builds on the material covered in the last two topics, the major theme being that all animals are more-or-less invented by us. This does not mean that animals exist only inside our heads. I think we can all agree that there is definitely References and/or Supplementary resources: Berger, P. & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise on the sociology of knowledge. Penguin University Books. Bredar, J. & Benchley, P. (2000). Great white deep trouble. National Geographic Television, CNBC. Lorenz, K. (2002). King Solomon’s Ring. Routledge. Rothfels, N. (Ed.) (2002). Representing animals. Indiana University Press