Abstract
This paper considers the question of whether chimpanzees possess at least a primitive sense of normativity: i.e., some ability to internalize and enforce social norms—rules governing appropriate and inappropriate behaviour—within their social groups, and to make evaluations of others’ behaviour in light of such norms. A number of scientists and philosophers have argued that such a sense of normativity does exist in chimpanzees and in several other non-human primate and mammalian species. However, the dominant view in the scientific and philosophical literature is that psychological capacities for social norms evolved uniquely in the human lineage, after our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos. After reviewing some of the existing evidence for normative capacity in chimpanzees, I defend the thesis of chimpanzee normativity against three key theoretical objections that have been presented in the literature, each of which have played a part in motivating the dominant sceptical position. I argue that, while we still have much to learn about the nature and extent of the normative capacities of other animals, there is strong prima facie evidence for social norms and normative evaluation in chimpanzees and the main theoretical objections to chimpanzee normativity are not at all compelling.
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Notes
I focus on chimpanzees not because I think that they are the only non-human species likely to possess normative capacities. Such capacities are, in my view, probably quite widely shared in the animal kingdom. However, chimpanzees (and bonobos) are plausible candidates, given their evolutionary proximity to human beings. Chimpanzees are also the most intensely studied of all non-human animals when it comes to social cognition, so it is here that we find the most extensive existing evidence for normative capacity.
A similar problem also arises in relation to the normative force of epistemic values and principles (e.g., rules of deductive inference), and rules of meaning (e.g., rules governing the usage of linguistic expressions).
Andrews (2020) has perhaps gone the furthest in arguing for normative capacities in chimpanzees and other apes, on the back of an account of human and non-human social cognition referred to as “naïve normativity”. According to this account, predicting the future behaviour of others is itself frequently a normative exercise, since it often requires us to reason about what agents should or should not do in the relevant situation, given prevailing social norms (“should” here isn’t simply being used in the sense of the “should” of prediction or regularity, such as in “it should snow tomorrow”). Hence, attributing normative capacities to chimpanzees is, according to Andrews, part of the best explanation for their facility at predicting the behaviour of their groupmates. Sultanescu and Andrews (2013) also argue that ape gestural communication is best explained on an account of intentional content, derived from Ginsborg (2011), that equates concept possession with having a primitive notion of appropriateness.
Dog owners will be familiar with the “play bow” that domestic dogs will perform before initiating play behaviours and immediately after performing behaviours (such as biting) that might be construed by partners as aggressive. Functionally analogous play initiation and maintenance signals are found in a great many species (Bekoff 2004).
Rudolf von Rohr et al. did not find that subjects were more aroused by the infanticide clip, though only a behavioural (not a physiological) measure was used. They explain this by noting that the clips featured unfamiliar chimpanzees, and that chimpanzees (like humans) have a strong in-group bias, which made them less aroused than they might have been had the clip featured familiar individuals.
To say that mental representations of norms in the norm system are implicit is thus not to say that they aren’t actual or real representations inside the heads of agents, just that they aren’t accessible to conscious thought. Hence, the use of the term “implicit” here is different from that where it might be said that a person implicitly believes, “no camels are astronauts”, or, “elephants are heavier than air”—i.e., be disposed to act as if they hold such a belief, but not actually have a mental representation inside their head with that specific content.
There has been general convergence towards some form of dual-systems account of human normative cognition, although whether the distinction between the two systems corresponds to the popular System 1 / System 2 model of intuitive/automatic vs. reflective/controlled cognitive systems (e.g., Kahneman 2011) is up for debate (see Sripada and Stich 2006; Mikhail 2011; Greene 2013).
Andrews (2009, 2013) and Musschenga (2013) have previously suggested that the norms of animal communities are likely implicit rather than explicit (see also, Danón 2019). Andrews (2020) presents a model of implicit normativity that modifies Bicchieri’s requirements. Although Schlingloff and Moore cite Andrews (2009), for some reason, they don’t appear to take seriously such an implicit account of normative cognition. Musschenga advocates a System 1 / System 2 model of human psychology and holds that animals likely only have System 1 normative reasoning capacities. Since there are some reasons to doubt the existence of distinctively System 2-like reasoning in humans (see Carruthers, 2011), I’m sceptical about the usefulness of the System 1 / System 2 distinction for thinking about the differences between human and animal minds.
There is a large literature on exactly what level of cognitive sophistication is necessary for shared intentionality and exactly what level of shared intentionality (if any) is actually required for various types of joint action (for reviews, see Zawidzki 2013; Butterfill 2016). I will assume that, at a minimum, shared intentionality requires one to be able to form nested representations of goals and intentions: one’s own, those of another, and those of a plural agent composed of oneself and the other (we). Tomasello et al. (2005) emphasize that shared intentionality is also partly motivational as well as cognitive: individuals must want to share mental states with others and want to engage in joint actions with them.
Tomasello (2016) also accords shared intentionality a crucial role in the development of normative capacities in human children. Hence, the evolutionary story just described is supposedly recapitulated, to some extent, in ontogeny: skills of shared intentionality allegedly emerge around a child’s first birthday, and, by the second birthday, children are able to see local interactions with others in normative terms (second-personal morality)—for instance, protest against a puppet that plays a game the “wrong” way. Understanding of wider group and cultural norms then emerges as children become able to participate in forms of collective intentionality.
Tomasello (2016) argues that chimpanzees are merely individualistic hunters and don’t actively coordinate their behaviour in the hunt with others. Individuals pursue their own hunting strategies, which sometimes results in successful, but accidental, coordination (e.g., chasing a monkey into the reach of another hunter). This picture is consistent with descriptions of hunting in some chimpanzee populations (see Muller and Mitani 2005), but is difficult to reconcile with Boesch and colleagues’ descriptions of Taï chimpanzees (Boesch 2002, 2005), and the fact that some chimpanzee hunts are individualistic certainly isn’t sufficient to show that chimpanzees can’t collaborate.
It should be noted that Tomasello (2018) has argued for a causal link between the development of shared intentionality in children and the emergence of a full-fledged understanding of false belief required to pass the classic verbal false-belief task. This has resulted in somewhat of a climbdown from attributing full-fledged false-belief understanding to chimpanzees to the claim that they possess the same mindreading capacities that children use to pass non-verbal false-belief tasks, prior to their being able to pass the classic verbal task. This involves basic understanding of others’ epistemic mental states (seeing, knowing, etc.), but not the ability to distinguish between others’ subjective perspective and objective reality, which, Tomasello holds, is necessary for full-fledged understanding of false belief and develops via participation in collaborative activity.
Zawidzki (2013) presents a similar picture, arguing that sophisticated mindreading capacities, such as propositional attitude attribution, could only have evolved after various mechanisms for so-called “mindshaping”, which function to regulate the minds of social organisms in a group in such a way as to make them sufficiently similar to each other for effective cooperation to be maintained, since, without such mental homogeneity, inferences to others’ propositional attitudes would be cognitively and epistemically intractable. The capacity to follow and enforce social norms is one such mindshaping mechanism. However, Zawidzki isn’t prepared to go as a far as Andrews in attributing normative capacities to other primates, suggesting that such capacities evolved uniquely in the human lineage.
Cultural evolutionary theorists (e.g., Henrich 2015) often distinguish between prestige and dominance by pointing out that prestige in human communities often isn’t correlated with mere physical ability to dominate others. However, dominance in chimpanzees isn’t just about physical strength, since coalition-building is vital for any would-be alpha. Even so, that chimpanzees preferentially copy those higher in the dominance hierarchy may be the product of a different, dominance-based, learning strategy than human prestige copying. But, this still shows strategic social learning similar in important respects to prestige transmission, and certainly doesn’t show that there isn’t prestige copying—as de Waal (1982, 1989) and others have documented, chimpanzee communities do appear to have influential and respected individuals, who aren’t necessarily at the top of the hierarchy or physically able to dominate others.
One background motivation here seems to be the idea that social norms can only exist in creatures that have cumulative cultural traditions. However, the story just sketched suggests that the question of cumulative culture in chimpanzees (Boesch 2012; Dean et al. 2014) and the question of normativity may be largely orthogonal. Simple social norms may exist with or without significant incremental accumulation of cultural complexity over generations.
Most of the existing work on chimpanzee social learning has focused on material culture (e.g., tool-use behaviours), though there has been work on the social learning of arbitrary conventional behaviours (e.g., Bonnie et al. 2007; Boesch 2012; van Leeuwen et al. 2014). There is much less work on social learning and emotion/affect. There is evidence for emotional contagion in chimpanzees: the tendency for emotional states like fear, agitation, etc. to spread from one individual to others nearby via automatic state matching (see Campbell and de Waal 2014, and references therein). There is also evidence that agonistic behaviour can spread through a group of chimpanzees, particularly in response to hearing vocalizations associated with agonistic emotions (Videan et al. 2005). However, currently, there is only suggestive evidence that affective dispositions and emotion elicitors are the sorts of things that can be socially transmitted (see Gruber and Sievers 2019).
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to two reviewers, Kristin Andrews, Dan Kelly, Pat Mooney, Tad Zawidzki, and audiences at John Carroll University, the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology meeting in Cincinnati, and the Norms in a Natural World Conference in Hradec Králové.
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Fitzpatrick, S. Chimpanzee normativity: evidence and objections. Biol Philos 35, 45 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09763-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09763-1