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Nature’s Cheats

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Anna is digging in the ground for a potato, when along comes Paul. Paul looks to see what Anna’s doing and then, seeing that there is no one in sight, starts to scream as loud as he can. Paul’s angry mother rushes over and chases Anna away. Once his Mum has gone, Paul walks over and helps himself to Anna’s potato.

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Does this ring a bell? I’m sure it does. We’ve all experienced annoying tricks when we were young – the brother who stole your toys and then got you into trouble by telling your parents you had hit him. But Anna and Paul are not humans. They’re African baboons, and playing tricks is as much part of monkey behaviour as it is of human behaviour.

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Throughout nature, tricks like this are common – they are part of daily survival. There are insects that hide from their enemies by looking like leaves or twigs, and harmless snakes that imitate poisonous ones. Such behaviour, developed over hundreds of thousand of years, is instinctive and completely natural. Some animals, however, go further and use a more deliberate kind of deception – they use normal behaviour to trick other animals. In most cases the animal probably doesn’t know it is deceiving, only that certain actions give it an advantage. But in apes and some monkeys the behaviour seems much more like that of humans.

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What about Paul the baboon? His scream and his mother’s attack on Anna could have been a matter of chance, but Paul was later seen playing the same trick on others. This use of a third individual to achieve a goal is only one of the many tricks commonly used by apes. Another tactic is the ‘Look behind you!’ trick. When one young male baboon was attacked by several others, he stood on his back legs and looked into the distance, as if there was an enemy there. The attackers turned to look behind them and lost interest in their victim. In fact, there was no enemy.

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Studying behaviour like this is complicated because it’s difficult to do laboratory experiments to test whether behaviour is intentional. It would be easy to suggest that these cases mean the baboons were deliberately tricking other animals, but they might have learnt the behaviour without understanding how it worked. So the psychologists talked to colleagues who studied apes and asked them if they had noticed this kind of deception. They discovered many liars and cheats, but the cleverest were apes who clearly showed that they intended to deceive and knew when they themselves had been deceived.

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An amusing example of this comes from a psychologist working in Tanzania. A young chimp was annoying him, so he tricked her into going away by pretending he had seen something interesting in the distance. When the chimp looked and found nothing, she ‘walked back, hit me over the head with her hand and ignored me for the rest of the day’.

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Another way to decide whether an animal’s behaviour is deliberate is to look for actions that are not normal for that animal. A zoo worker describes how a gorilla dealt with an enemy. ‘He slowly crept up behind the other gorilla, walking on tiptoe. When he got close to his enemy he pushed him violently in the back, then ran indoors.’ Wild gorillas do not normally walk on tiptoe. Of course it’s possible that the gorilla could have learnt from humans that such behaviour works, without understanding why. But looking at the many cases of deliberate deception in apes, it is impossible to explain them all as simple imitation.

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Taking all the evidence into account, it seems that deception does play an important part in ape societies where there are complex social rules and relationships and where problems are better solved by social pressure than by physical conflict. The ability of animals to deceive and cheat may be a better measure of their intelligence than their use of tools. Studying the intelligence of our closest relatives could be the way to understand the development of human intelligence.