Can animals lie? Some can take on the appearance of their deadlier cousins, and some can mimic others to lure in prey or scare off predators. As for deliberate manipulation, however, the jury is still out on a definitive answer. Nevertheless, that wasn’t enough to appease two scientists, Whiten and Byrne. In 1988, they collected data from around the world and published a paper based upon this premise: primates, who engage in some of the most intricate social interactions in non-human animals, are capable of faking each other out, if not deliberate deception. Multiple species were studied, including (but not limited to) gorillas, macaques, baboons, and chimpanzees.
Is this a trial-and-error product of social evolution? Or is it something more?
Whiten and Byrne took notes on three types of manipulation on the primates’ part: concealment, a scenario in which Primate A attempts to hide something from Primate B; distraction, in which Primate A guides Primate B’s attention away from their true objective; creating an image, in which Primate A changes their behavior to project a certain role upon themselves to hide their intent from Primate B; manipulation using a social tool, in which Primate A creates a scenario in social interactions and later uses it to deceive Primate B; and deflection to a fall guy, which is exactly what it sounds like. Within these five groups, they watched for signs that the primates were intentionally being deceptive. They even studied Primate A’s awareness of Primate B’s psychological state and their assumptions about what Primate B might do next.
In the end, although Whiten and Byrne do continue to make the case for higher primate intelligence, they subscribe to Morgan’s canon: one cannot assume that an action is the result of a higher cognitive function in an animal if a simpler explanation (in this case: evolution and social learning) is at hand.
Marissa Soto
November 13, 2018 — 12:43 am
The question of this title drew me to your article because I personally ask the same question: can animals lie? The experiment conducted by Whiten and Byrne in order to aim for an answer is interesting. The hiding of the object makes me think if my dog does this at home with her bone because it is taken from her a lot. She goes crazy with it, so we give her breaks from it.
Jasmine Berry
November 13, 2018 — 4:26 am
As a concept, I think it’s interesting to describe animal manipulation as lying. I think the motivations are different in animals compared to humans, which makes the application of the terms unequal in that regard. When animals lie, it is often to improve their own survival or reproductive fitness. When humans lie, they also gain some benefit but that benefit may not directly improve their survival or reproductive fitness, especially if the truth comes out.
Dennisha King
November 14, 2018 — 3:27 pm
This article is very interesting because humans do tend to assign anthropomorphic characteristics to dogs such as jealousy so it would make sense to also see some semblance of deception in dogs. When humans interact with their dogs, they sometimes use deception to get the dogs to behave in a certain manner so it would be important for there to more research conducted to see if this impacts the behavior of the dogs. For example, when dogs are young, some humans try to train the dog to know the difference between the playful and aggressive biting by crying out loud in pain or getting angry with the dog over a non-painful bite to ensure that the dogs learns to understand how much pressure to use when playing. Additionally, on social media there is a trend of people performing disappearing acts on their dogs as well as hiding from and misleading their dogs. It would be interesting if the dog’s ability to “lie” developed in response to their interactions with their humans.
Amber Mills
November 15, 2018 — 7:27 pm
I think it’s interesting to correlate manipulation of animals to them lying. I also think that with more research that this topic will be very interesting to learn about.