Playing dumb is being smart

BY Mark Bekoff
Animal Scene

People are continually amazed at the social, learning and cognitive skills of numerous animals. Animals are said to be smart when they perform such tasks as counting objects, forming concepts in which differences or similarities are recognized, making and using tools, deceiving others or using complex forms of communication.

So, are animals smart enough to "play dumb?" Can they appraise their social situation and change their behavior depending on who's around? Yes. Wolves store and retrieve food more when others aren't looking. Rhesus monkeys won't emit food calls in the presence of other monkeys. And chimpanzees often ignore food and lead researchers to think they're dumb, only to retrieve the food when other group members aren't around.

Recently, Drs. Christine Drea and Kim Wallen discovered that low-ranking rhesus monkeys will also play dumb in certain social situations. It's just too simplistic and anthropocentrically arrogant to assume that animals other than humans don't control their behavior according to who's watching.

Drea and Wallen studied monkeys as they learned to discriminate boxes that contained food from those that didn't. They compared the performance of monkeys tested in the presence of all members of their social group with their performance in groups of only more dominant or only more subordinate monkeys. They then reversed the situation and tested monkeys on the same problem — a monkey previously tested in the company of only dominant individuals was then tested in the company of only subordinate monkeys and vice versa.

The results of this creative study are very interesting. Dominant monkeys performed well in all conditions but subordinate monkeys performed well only when they were apart from higher-ranking animals. Because all monkeys had previously learned the task, Drea and Wallen concluded that the subordinate monkeys were indeed playing dumb — they were voluntarily inhibiting their behavior depending on who was around. Subordinates who learned the discrimination when alone showed a performance decline when intimidating higher-ranking animals were nearby; an individual's dominance status relative to other monkeys made it advantageous to play dumb.

Social context clearly influenced performance on a previously learned task. The presence of dominant monkeys suppressed the expression of knowledge by subordinate animals and monkeys of different social classes were influenced differently. This study opens up the door for future field studies on a wider array of species, including humans. There's also a strong message for those interested in human learning and the expression of scholastic accomplishments.

For humans it's known that social status, gender and racial differences can lead competent individuals to inhibit academic or athletic performance. These findings stress that learning must be studied in the absence of intimidation, because humans, monkeys, and perhaps individuals of other species inhibit themselves when they're in uncomfortable social situations. Had monkeys only been studied in the presence of dominant individuals, Drea and Wallen might have concluded that subordinate individuals were dumber than dominant animals, not that they were simply playing dumb for good reasons.

Low-ranking monkeys, when playing dumb, are really playing smart; they decide when to let others know what they know. And so do humans, often to an individual's detriment when they withhold knowledge because they fear retribution from potential bullies. What they do isn't an expression of what they actually know. Certainly, the long-term consequences of withholding knowledge could be very disadvantageous in an educational system that doesn't factor in the context in which performance is assessed.

Marc Bekoff (marc.bekoff@colorado.edu) teaches in Environmental, Population, and Organismic Biologyat CU-Boulder.