Theory of Mind in Chimpanzees: Exploring Animal Cognition and Behavior

This essay delves into the complex question of whether non-human animals, particularly chimpanzees, can understand and attribute thoughts to others, a concept known as the theory of mind. It examines the ongoing debate within the field of animal cognition, referencing key works by Ponivelli and Vonk, and Fitzpatrick, who offer differing perspectives on chimpanzees' mindreading abilities. The discussion encompasses the theoretical framework of the theory of mind, contrasting the 'theory-theory' and 'simulation theory' approaches to understanding how humans and potentially animals, interpret others' mental states. The essay explores experimental studies, such as those involving dominant and subordinate chimpanzees, to assess their ability to reason about others' perceptions and knowledge, including the crucial distinction between behavior reading and true mindreading. Furthermore, it analyzes the arguments for and against the attribution of mental states in chimpanzees, considering criticisms of existing research and exploring the potential for alternative explanations of observed behaviors, ultimately aiming to contribute to the understanding of animal cognitive capabilities.

Running head: CAN NON-HUMAN ANIMALS THINK ABOUT OTHERS’ THOUGHTS?
CAN NON-HUMAN ANIMALS THINK ABOUT OTHERS’ THOUGHTS?
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Introduction
The paper aims to discuss the question whether nonhuman animals think about the
thoughts of others. The focus of the paper will be on the chimpanzees and their ability to think
about others’ thoughts. In doing so, the paper will include the works titled Chimpanzee Minds:
Suspiciously Human and The Primate Mind Reading Controversy: A case study in Simplicity and
Methodology in Animal Psychology. While the former is the work of Danial J. Ponivelli and
Jennifer Vonk, Simon Fitzpatrick has authored the latter.
The question whether human babies especially very young children and infants associate
beliefs to others or false beliefs to others has been controversial. However, even more
controversial has been the question whether nonhuman animals such as the chimpanzees attribute
beliefs to others especially false beliefs to others. One of the more important questions is whether
the nonhuman animals associate any sort of mental states to other people. These questions have
arisen due to the several studies that have shown uncanny behavior of the chimpanzees towards
humans. Some studies have found that the great apes, the closest primates to human, which
includes the chimpanzees as well, have demonstrated the ability to make distinctions between
true and false beliefs (Buttelmann et al.). Apart from that, it has also been found that the great
apes are good mind readers. A study has found that the primates could possess the theory of
mind, which the humans have thus far possessed (Krupenye et al.). The study found that the
group of great apes had the ability to attribute false beliefs to the humans.
According to the professors at Harvard, nonhuman animals do have the ability to think
like humans. They too found that animals like chimpanzees perceive the world quite similar to
humans (News.harvard.edu). The professor further states that nonhuman animals possess

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interesting thoughts although the humans could not understand these thoughts because the
animals convey it through shrieks, grunts and other type of vocalizations. In the work of
Ponivelli and Vonk, they have argued although chimpanzees are able to form concepts associated
with “statistical regularities in behavior”, there has been no explanatory examination, which
show any gain in such assumption. The authors propose a paradigm shift in the studies to
overcome the limitation. Fitzpatrick on the other hand, has argued that the studies on primate
mind reading are divided where one section of the researchers provide evidence in favor of the
debate while others against it. The essay will however present considerations both in favor and
against the attributes.
Discussion
In order to understand and explain the question, it is important to understand the theory of
mind, which the humans proudly boast possessing. The theory of mind refers to the capability to
associate mental states such as intents, beliefs, emotions, desires and knowledge amongst others
to oneself and others. The theory of mind is a significant aspect of human life because it is used
in the daily human interactions in terms of social by which the humans could evaluate, judge and
interpret others’ behaviors. However, people with acute psychological disorders might not
possess similar ability to attribute thoughts and beliefs to others. The theory of mind concept
evolved in both philosophical and scientific field of study. In philosophy, two contrasting
thoughts related to the theory of mind have evolved. While one thought is the ‘theory-theory’,
other is the simulation theory. The theory-theory relates to the development of the understanding
in humans about the outside world. The theory states that humans have a fundamental view or a
naïve thought about the world to construe the mental thoughts to other beings. This is known in
the world of philosophy as “folk psychology” (Ratcliffe). Folk psychology asserts that the

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humans have the capability to elaborate and envisage the behavior and mental state of other
humans. On the other hand, the simulation theory assets that humans have the capability to
foresee and explain other people’s behavior though activating the mental processes. These
mental processes, if carried out into action, could create similar behavior. This similar behavior
includes intentional behavior and the expression of emotions as well. According to the theory,
children especially young children and infants use own emotions of theirs to assume what others
would do in certain situations. In primates too, it has been observed that they are able to project
the behavior of other primates although it might not always be their mental state.
Fitzpatrick also talks about the theory of mind particularly the mind reading capabilities
in nonhumans, primates in particular. The author states that mind reading is a kind of “higher
order cognition, involving reasoning process and mental states whose contents concern other
agent’s mental states” (Fitzpatrick). Mind reading is something that is associated with humans
especially. In humans, mind reading plays a major role in their ability to envisage and explain
other agents’ behavior. ‘Visual perspective-taking’ is the central area that comparative
psychologist researchers look for when they want to research about the possible capabilities of
mind reading in nonhuman animals especially primates. The author argues that primates have
often engaged in behaviors that suggest their capability of mind reading. Some examples of this
are seen in situations where the primate hides food from others and follow others’ gaze to locate
an object of curiosity. Nonetheless, the author states that the problem is with the observations of
such situation are that the mind reading ability demonstrated by the primates could just be
behavior reading ability. As opposed to mind reading, behavior reading does not involve any
mental phenomena. It only involves the first order reasoning. To cite an example, chimpanzees
could learn from experiences about a competitor who might be more likely to to take a piece of

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food, which is placed right in front of it. in the same way, the primate might learn that specific
actions of the other primate’s eyes towards a certain location is interrelated with the presence of
some interesting object in that location. The author hence states that most experimentalists have
attempted to produce behavioral studies for mind reading that could cancel the “purely first-order
explanations for success in relevant task”. This has however been extremely difficult to prove,
the author further stated.
The author further argues that the studies during the 1990s provided results that
evidenced against the visual perspective taking abilities in the chimpanzees (Fitzpatrick). The
studies revealed that chimpanzees do not have the capability to reason regarding what others
could see and could not see. Nevertheless, in recent year, it has been found that the results of the
previous studies could be challenged. The ground for this challenge is that competition for food
dominates chimpanzees’ social life as opposed to the communicative cooperative interactions.
The argument that has been put forward is that subjects might fail to perform well in the tasks
similar to those done in the 1990s not for the reason that they did not have the ability to reason
about the perception of others but for the reason that they did not understand the task itself.
Fitzpatrick provides evidences in favor and against both the considerations of nonhuman animals
attributing mental states to others. The author includes a critique of Ponivelli and Vonk to
provide arguments against the assumption. He states that the two authors have found the main
problem to be the unavailability of methods to observe directly mental states. This causes
problem in interpreting the behavior of the chimpanzees because the subordinate chimpanzees
could only interpret specific mental states in the dominant chimpanzees only in situation where
they could observe the dominants. Brian Hare, Josep Call, Bryan Agnetta and Michael
Tomasello on the other hand, conducted studies on dominant and subordinate chimpanzees that

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have been used by Fitzpatrick in his article. In the study, the authors put a subordinate and a
dominant chimpanzee in a room to examine their social behavior and problem-solving attitude.
The dominants and subordinates were put in a room with two pieces of food. They place the
subordinate and dominant chimpanzees in two cages with both on the opposite sides. Amongst
the two pieces of food, one was visible to both subordinate and dominant chimpanzees while the
other was visible only to the subordinate chimpanzees. The authors initially prevented the
chimpanzees to enter the middle room by putting guillotine doors in between them. When the
doors were raised slightly, both the dominant and subordinate chimpanzees could see the food.
The subordinates were given a head start to examine the reaction of the dominants. The
assumption that the dominants have claim over all the food and punish the subordinates who
challenge them was proven true. The prediction of the authors was that if the subordinate
chimpanzees were able to reason the visual perspective of the dominant chimpanzees, they
would go for the food that is only visible to them and not to the dominants. The authors made
correct predictions it was found when the subordinates did exactly what the authors had
expected. The authors hence concluded from their studies that chimpanzees have the capability
to perceive what others could or could not perceive. In addition to that, they also concluded that
the chimpanzees are aware about others’ knowledge about any situation. The author however
finds that Povinelli and Vonk have completely rejected the studies and experiments of Hare and
others because these failed to provide solid evidence of mindreading. Povinelli and Vonk put
forward the argument that the two pieces of food experiment with the subordinate and dominant
chimpanzees is purely first-order reasoning where the subjects formed a direct deduction from
the observable hints to a prediction of behavior with the absence of any “reasoning about others’

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mental states” (Fitzpatrick). Subordinates, according to the two authors, hence the primates or
chimpanzees did not exhibit any type of mind reading behavior as predicted by Hare et al.
While analyzing the theories of Ponivelli and Vonk and Hare et al. Fitzpatrick argues that
hare et al. have provided a much better explanation about the question. The author argues that
Hare et al. have been able to provide a greater plausibility to their argument and Ponivelli and
Vonk’s criticism of the assumption has been based mostly without any concrete evidence. He
states that their criticism and arguments are majorly misguided.
Ponivelli and Vonk discuss the similarity of mental ability between the humans and the
chimpanzees. According to them, first probability is the mind of the chimpanzees is similar to
the mind of the human beings, which has been proved scientifically as well. This assumption is
supported through the biological parsimony that both chimpanzees and humans possess. It is also
a common understanding that the human mind evolved from the mind of a common ancestor that
was alive some six million years ago. Secondly, the authors argue that the human mind might
have evolved a different mental system, which seems to distort the mind of the chimpanzee thus
retreating out of obligation in its own image. They argue that this notion must be taken with
seriousness. The humans have clearly distanced away from their ancestors and the change could
be visible from head to toe. The humans have been able to change their structure from the
muscles, to the bones and overall body structure, doing away with the extra problematic organs
to evolve as a modified version of their ancestors. Along with this, their minds also evolved
thrice more rapidly than those of the chimpanzees. Therefore, it is but obvious that humans have
a greater ability to think and associate thoughts to others than do the chimpanzees. The authors
then talk about the mental states of the chimpanzees as compared to the humans. They state that
chimpanzees, similar to human beings, create abstract representations of others’ behavior

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(Ponivelli and Vonk). They talk about the concept of “threat display” in which, the chimpanzees
demonstrate a great sense of the things that follows a threat display. These include charging
forward, being hit and so on. As they explain, “this behavior abstraction hypothesis posits that
chimpanzees construct abstract categories of behavior, make predictions about future behaviors
that follow from past behaviors and adjust their own behavior accordingly” (Ponivelli and
Vonk). These hypotheses further bring forth the question whether the chimpanzees are able to
interpret behavior from mental states perspective. The authors provide a systematic explanation
of the behaviors demonstrated by the chimpanzees to bring forward this question.
However, they state that these behaviors demonstrated by the chimpanzees are only
behavioral abstractions and it could not be stated that the chimpanzees possessed the theory of
mind. The authors provide a confusing debate surrounding the theory of mind of the
chimpanzees. Later in the paper, they answer the question stating that the theory of mind evolved
uniquely in the humans and not in the chimpanzees and they separated from their ancestors.
Although both chimpanzees and humans inherited similar mental structures for creating
behavioral abstractions, the same could not be said about their mental abstractions. The humans
and chimpanzees hence already had the behavioral abstractions but the humans later added
another system for the codification of the behavior “in an additional mentalistic fashion”
(Ponivelli and Vonk). They argue that both humans and chimpanzees had similar set of
behavioral abstractions while the humans provided an addition to it and included the theory of
mind. The idea that the human beings construe some specific assemblage of behavior as an
evidence of the theory of mind might therefore be a trivial consequence of the notion that the
humans evolved the theory of mind to exploit the existing systems for behavioral abstractions.
From this, it could be understood that the authors rightly rejected the notion about the nonhuman

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animals having the ability to attribute thoughts to others. Jose Luis Bermudez further supports
the notion of Ponivelli and Vonk sating that the form of mindreading “that exploits the concepts
of propositional attitude psychology is only available to language-using creatures” (Bermúdez).
By this, the author tried to mean that the theory of mind or the ability of mindreading is available
only to human beings who use language to communicate. The author rejects the idea that
nonhuman animals such as chimpanzees could attribute thoughts or false beliefs to others. In his
work also, the author mostly focuses on the behavioral abstractions of the nonhuman animals
stating that most animals demonstrate high level of social behavior. However, this does not mean
that they possess the theory of mind. The author then questions the folk psychology or the
common-sense psychology stating that social understanding, coordination involves numerous
forms, and that “proceed without attributions of propositional attitudes” (Bermúdez). Human
beings could predict about others’ behavior but that would not make them displaying forms of
propositional attributes. For example, if a human visits a restaurant and sees the waiter come
with his pad, he would easily predict the behavior. This does not make it a propositional attitude.
The author thus makes the conclusion that propositional attitude is not possible to exist if there is
an absence of language. Therefore, the author states that the nonhuman animals do not possess
the capability of mindreading. However, they do possess substantive mindreading. Substantive
mindreading takes place when the creature’s behavior “is systematically dependent on its
representations of the psychological states of other participants in the interaction” (Bermúdez).
Furthermore, the authors state that the ability of the chimpanzees to manipulate one
another has been considered the most widely accepted evidence for the chimpanzees’ second-
order mental states. The complicatedness of the certain examples of chimpanzee “deception” has
regularly tempted the summary that the most reasonable interpretation of this behavior is that the

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chimpanzees are reasoning about the perception of others. They state that this behavior
demonstrated by the chimpanzees made the people believe about the second-order mental states
of the chimpanzees. Other scholars have shied away from this argument stating that they could
notice the triviality of the experiments and assumptions. It was trivial, according to them, to
think that the organizations could form deceptive behaviors in the lack of reasoning about mental
states. owing to this deadlock, the anecdotal approach of assuming the mind reading ability of
the chimpanzees have gone out of touch giving way to the predominantly experimental approach.
In a way, the authors denounced the experiments of Hare et al. where the scholars had used the
anecdotal approach to find that the chimpanzees have the ability to think about others’ thoughts.
Ponivelli and Vonk further argue that the most fundamental issue with anecdote approach was
never identified and this problem later crept into the experimental approach as well. By this, the
authors mean to state that both the anecdotal and experimental approach to identify and explain
the theory of mind of the chimpanzees have failed to accumulate strong evidence. Most of those
studies have only brought forth the behavior-reading capabilities of the primates and not the
mind-reading capabilities. The authors argue that it becomes difficult to understand, which
behavior of the chimpanzee is more parsimonious, that is, economical. While those who argue
that the results show parsimonious behavior of the chimpanzees state that they behave so by
“learning all sorts of individual stimulus-response chains” (Ponivelli and Vonk). This in contrast
to the human behavior where the humans manipulate the mental states of others to make them do
something in their favor. The non-skeptics, which the authors call as naïve believers, state that
chimpanzees do behave and think like humans and they also have the ability to think about
others’ thoughts. Apart from these assumptions, the authors argue that it is more economical to
claim that the primates are analyzing about the mental states of others than to assume that they

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are representing links between individual and particular responses and behaviors. Hence, the
naïve believers say that the same way behaviorism was rejected; the assertion of the skeptics
must also be rejected. The problem with the thoughts of the naïve believers is that they fail to
infer that the same way the chimpanzee would have been reasoning about the others’ mental
states, the other agent could have also had an alternating behavioral abstraction, which could
have yielded the same result. Therefore, the author argue that until the behavioral abstraction
hypothesis is discarded, those who accept as true that deceptive chimpanzees possess a theory of
mind must hypothesize two aspects – that the chimpanzees possess behavioral abstraction and
that the chimpanzees possess mental states representations. The lack here is that of the analogy
that is associated with the debate on behaviorism. All would agree that the mind of the
chimpanzee has mental representations or intervening variables. However, the question arises as
to whether these intervening variables are variables of the mental states and behavioral
abstractions or of behavioral abstractions only. The authors significantly state that they do not
aim to deny the probability of forming an imaginary dataset where the economy of expression is
achieved through assuming second-order mental states considered intervening variables. The
authors rather argue that for the total amount of the behavioral data for chimpanzees that needs to
be explained, positing that the primates have intervening variables, which are behavioral
abstractions would be enough. They provide an example of the primates stating that when a male
subordinate chimpanzee hides his erected penis that signals his desire to mate with a female
chimpanzee, with his hand in the presence of a dominate primate. The authors ask whether the
dominant’s behavior of turning away or seeing or not seeing is just his behavior or the reasoning
he associates with his mental state. Furthermore, the authors argue that for the reason each
anecdotal example of deception postulates the behavioral abstractions to be present, the study

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loses economy of expression by further assuming that the second-order mental state is also
present.
After analyzing the arguments of all the authors who have worked on the chimpanzees, it
could be stated that the deductions are quite confusing. While it could be argued that the
argument put forth by Hare et al. and Fitzpatrick are more plausible because the authors have
conducted elaborate experiments and research to confirm the question to be yes, Ponivelli and
Vonk too have included elaborate discussion and arguments that could not be ignored. The
authors however, have conducted researches on the primates and deducted that the deceptive
behaviors could not be considered their ability to represent mental states or think about others’
thoughts. These are just behavioral-abstractions that they have demonstrated. In contrast to this,
Fitzpatrick finds from his observations that mind reading is seen as “more of generative capacity
than behavior-reading thus allowing subjects to adapt to novel situations in way that goes beyond
the contingencies of their previous experience” (Fletcher and Carruthers. The author also has a
point because there have been many cases where the chimpanzees have demonstrated mind
reading without having any experiences.
Conclusion
Therefore, to conclude, it could be argued that the considerations that chimpanzees
attribute mental states to others are more believable than the considerations against it. However,
it also needs to be stated that the arguments put forward against these considerations have strong
basis. The essay used two works in particular to provide a clear discussion on the question
whether nonhuman animals think about others’ thoughts. The paper discussed the question
whether nonhuman animals think about the thoughts of others. The focus of the paper was on the