Observational learning in chimpanzees and children. I watched a program about this years ago and it’s still in my head. I thought it was going to be about whether a kid or a chimp would be better at the challenge. There was a black box. They taught both the chimp and the kids a sequence of pulling levers and sliding switches to get a reward out of the black box. Both the kids and the chimp got proficient.
The kicker came when they unveiled the black box and it was made of see-through plexiglass. They ran the experiment again. It became obvious when the box was transparent that every one of the steps except the last didn’t really do anything. All the subject had to do was skip to the end and pull that last lever and get the reward. The surprising thing was that the chimp figured that out right away and went straight for the reward, but the kids went on performing all the now obviously unnecessary steps.
To me, it seemed that the chimp was smarter in that situation than the kids, and that’s what they were trying to demonstrate, but the researchers concluded something entirely different. The researchers showed that learning was so important to the kids that they would continue to do what they were taught, even if it didn’t make sense in that instance. Humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even if later they figure out that what they learned doesn’t make immediate sense. The chimp, on the other hand, didn’t value accumulated learning, and only performed tasks that were appropriate to the situation at hand. The chimp discarded the learning as soon as it saw the learning wasn’t productive; and that’s a giant difference between chimps and humans. Humans pass along accumulated knowledge for complex situations and that body of knowledge grows with each generation. Chimps, not so much. The quickest road there isn’t necessarily what gets you the farthest.