Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think 1st Edition

by Marc Hauser (Author)

13 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0805056693

ISBN-10: 0805056696

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Do animals think? Can they count? Do they have emotions? Do they feel anger, frustration, hurt, or sorrow? Are they bound by any moral code? At last, here is a book that provides authoritative answers to these long-standing questions. Most pop-science books tend to anthropomorphize and romanticize animals, presenting them as furry little humans or as creatures that cannot think or feel at all. Marc Hauser, an acclaimed scientist in the field of animal cognition, uses insights from evolutionary theory and cognitive science to examine animal thought without such biases or preconceptions. For example, do species that share food or travel in large groups have greater innate mathematical abilities? Hauser treats animals neither as machines devoid of feeling nor as extensions of humans, but as independent beings driven by their own complex impulses. In prose that is both elegant and edifying, Hauser describes his groundbreaking research in the field, leading his readers on what David Premack, author of The Mind of an Ape, calls "a masterful tour of the animal mind."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

What's that squirrel thinking as it runs across the street? Behavioral neuroscientist Marc D. Hauser asks big questions about little brains in Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think. While his subjects aren't accessible for interviews, he believes that we can gain insight into their interior lives by examining their behavior in the context of their social and physical environments. Thus, while comparing the actions of chimps, rats, honeybees, and human infants, he is careful to keep in mind that each of them has different needs that require different kinds of intelligence and emotion and ought not be judged by the same criteria. Looking at counting, mapmaking, self-understanding, deception, and other intelligent activities, Hauser shows that the birds and the bees have more on their minds than we've come to believe. Acknowledging the vast gulf of language that separates our species from all others, he still maintains that this tool is but one of many and is no better an indication of "superior" intelligence than is the bat's fantastically well-developed echolocation system. In the last chapter, Hauser looks at moral behavior and decides that animals can be "moral patients but not moral agents"--that is, their inability to attribute mental states to others keeps them blameless for their actions but their sensitivity to suffering earns them fair treatment from the rest of us. Whether or not you agree with that, you're sure to find Wild Minds a refreshing look at the thoughts of our mute cousins. --Rob Lightner

From Publishers Weekly

Deeply skeptical of popular tales of altruistic dolphins, psychic dogs and cats, empathetic elephants and moralistic apes, Harvard animal scientist Hauser believes that such stories are fraught with assumptions and misleading comparisons between animal and human minds. Aiming to strike a balance between those scientists who view animals as mindless, instinct-driven automata and laypersons who assume animals are just like us, Hauser, a professor of psychology, draws heavily on animal cognition studies, neuroscience and evolutionary theory to delve into animals' "wild minds," shaped by environmental pressures and specific social contexts. This "admittedly reductionistic approach" sheds new light on social learning in octopuses, baboons, birds, guppies and rats; on the imitative behavior of songbirds, dolphins and chimpanzees; on rhesus monkeys' reconciliation habits; and on communication in echolocating bats and dancing honeybees. Although Hauser believes that emotions play a central role in animals' decision making, his views are sometimes hard to distinguish from those of behaviorists: he insists that animals lack moral senses, a deep understanding of death or the capacity for empathy, sympathy, shame, guilt and loyalty, because they lack self-awareness--a conclusion with which many pet owners will sharply disagree. Though Hauser disdains anthropomorphizing and takes pains to avoid it, we learn that "the animal kingdom is filled with honest Joes and poker-faced cheaters," the latter including "extremely cagey" chickens and great apes with "unscrupulous, Machiavellian intelligence." An intriguing compendium of little-known animal research, this unconvincing inquiry raises more questions than it answers. Hauser's belief that animals are "Kafka-creatures, organisms with rich thoughts and emotions, but no system for translating what they think into something that they can express to others" ultimately serves to narrow his field of vision. B&w drawings. Agent, John Brockman. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product details

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (March 9, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0805056696
ISBN-13: 978-0805056693
Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.2 x 9.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 13 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #852,970 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #63 in Animal Psychology Science in Zoology
- #720 in Zoology (Books)
- #10459 in Behavioral Sciences (Books)

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The Guy with the Dogs

Great Book about Animal Intelligence, and the Study thereof

April 22, 2014

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

This book starts out describing how difficult it is to craft experiments with subjects that can't speak in such a way that they are not subject to interpretive biases of the experimenter. Includes numerous fascinating case histories, from Bees to gorillas.
I also recommend "Alex and Me" about a behavorial researcher and her subject Alex, an amazon gray parrot. It will open your mind to the complexities of even tiny brains, and cast further doubt on what "separates" humans from the other animals. (It's my view that this is inherently obvious; nothing "separates" us, we are just one species in a continuum of different animals.)

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Not definitive.

December 27, 2004

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is a report of ongoing studies, by many in different fields, of whether animals experience "moral emotions, feelings such as guilt, shame and embarrassment", if they're capable of inhibiting their own desires, if they "understand the impact of their" decisions, etc. I'm not sure how objective Mr. Hauser is however as, to me, he seems determined to have his opinion prevail as I can't recall one study he's accepted as valid. I'm sorry too that the studies are not definitive.

7 people found this helpful

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Laon

Thought without language

August 8, 2001

Format: Paperback

Vervet monkeys make one cry when a cheetah approaches; a different cry when an eagle flies overhead, and yet another cry when a human is near. It's a pity Marc Hauser makes no attempt, Edgar-Rice-Burroughs-style, to transliterate that last cry: I'd like to know the vervet word for "human".
But though Hauser acknowledges the many species that exchange sounds that are very close to being "words", he argues convincingly that they do not have language. That's disappointing, of course, for those of us with that Dr Doolittle urge for closer communication with animals, but clearly how things are. And despite the subtitle "What animals really hink" Hauser concludes that we are too different ever to truly know that: not only will we never settle down with a lion or dog and exchange views about politics and sex and art; but much of their behaviour will remain enigmatic to us. We simply can't imagine or empathise our way into knowing what they are thinking. Many people, anthropomorphising wildly, like to imagine that they can. But there are always alternative explanations for animal behaviour, and no way of checking which is the correct one. Nor do animals have a "moral sense", as is argued in the final section of the book. Though animals do cooperate, and will sacrifice themselves or their interests for the benefit of others. On that question I'm not so sure that the animal form of "ethics" is really qualitively different from the human, despite the cultural ideas we heap up around concepts of "morality". But that's an argument about human thought, and therefore outside the scope of the book.
In some ways the earliest parts of the book are the most interest. Animals don't have language, but they do have tools for understanding the world: dividing reality into classes of objects, engaging in rudimentary mathematics, and creating mental maps of the physical world.
This section of the book could be usefully read by anyone still believing, along with the previous generation of French philosophers, that a chair, for example, is a linguistic construct rather than an object of a certain kind. Animals deal with reality in ways that strongly suggest that their perception of the world, and their organisation of the world into different classes of things, by edibility, animate or inert, sharp or soft, green or blue, and so on, is at the fundamental building-block level similar to ours. Clearly there is a world without language, let alone text.
The book doesn't show us, as its sub-title claims, "What animals really think", but it does contain a great deal of fascinating information on how animals organise their information about the world, the kind of guesses they make about the behaviour of others, the cries and signals that became the building-blocks of our languages, and much else besides. And it's not the most misleading title in this genre: consider the "Penguin English Dictionary". A splendid resource, certainly, but penguins don't seem to respond to any of it ... Anyway, you can't use Hauser's book to "talk to the animals either", but at least you wll know more about why you can't. Recommended.
Cheers!
Laon

9 people found this helpful

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Peter A. Kindle

Subtitle should be how animals and human minds differ

January 15, 2003

Format: Hardcover

Hauser has written a remarkably accessible introduction to comparative psychology. While containing the main points one might expect in a textbook outline, he does an excellent job of presenting this information in an interesting narrative form.
Hauser begins with an introductory chapter that presents his basic approach and cautions against anthropomorphisms.
Chapters two through four comprise a unit that focuses on those mental capacities shared by animals and human beings. Both can identify objects and predict their movement. Both can distinguish quantity. Both can navigate through space. Perhaps it takes a course in cognitive psychology to appreciate these commonalities, but I believe that Hauser does an excellent job of presenting research results for lay consumption. His presentation of animal and human infant studies of the expectancy-violation principle is alone worth the cost of the book.
The second section, chapters five through seven, focus on mental capacities which seem to be qualitatively common in animals and humans, but quantitatively distinct. Hauser presents a well-balanced account of the evidence for self-awareness, teaching, and deception among animals.
The final section contains two chapters on mental capacities that appear to be almost unique to human beings - language and morality. Hauser's careful review of animal communication is amazing, as is his locus of morality in the ability to inhibit selfish tendencies to maintain social conventions.
I recommend this book without reservation. No reader will regret spending time with this book. It is quite stimulating.

25 people found this helpful

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Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think 1st Edition