5 | P a g e
a cost for the leader, who normally would have reached the food about four times faster
if not hampered by a follower. This means the hypothesis that the leaders deliberately
slowed down in order to pass the skills on to the followers seems potentially valid. His
ideas were advocated by the students who carried out the video project with him.
E Opposing views still arose, however. Hauser noted that mere communication of
information is commonplace in the animal world. Consider a species, for example, that
uses alarm calls to warn fellow members about the presence .Sounding the alarm can be
costly, because the animal may draw the attention of the predator to itself. But it allows
others flee to safety.
“Would you call this teaching?” wrote Hauser. “The caller incurs a
cost. The naive animals gain a benefit and new knowledge that better enables them to
learn about the predator’s location than if the caller had not called. This happens
throughout the animal kingdom, but we don’t call it teaching, even though it is clearly
transfer of information.”
F Tim Caro, a zoologist, presented two cases of animal communication. He found that
cheetah mothers that take their cubs along on hunts gradually allow their cubs to do more
of the hunting
—going, for example, from killing a gazelle and allowing young cubs to eat
merely tripping the gazelle and letting the cubs finish it off. At one level, such behaviour
might be called teaching
— except the mother was not really teaching the cubs to hunt
but merely facilitating various stages of learning. In another instance, birds watching other
birds using a stick to locate food such as insects and so on, are observed to do the same
thing themselves while finding food later.
G Psychologists study animal behaviour in part to understand the evolutionary roots of
human behaviour, Hauser said. The challenge in understanding whether other animals
truly teach one another, he added, is that human teaching involves a “theory of mind”
teachers are aware that students don’t know something. He questioned whether Franks’
leader ants really knew that the follower ants were ignorant. Could they simply have been
following an instinctive rule to proceed when the followers tapped them on the legs or
abdomen? And did leaders that led the way to food
一
only to find that it had been
removed by the experimenter - incur the wrath of followers? That, Hauser said, would