Why animals are smarter than we think

When I was growing up, one of my favorite things to hear from an adult was that I was smart. It made me feel special — like I was capable of doing things that other people weren’t. 

In hindsight, that pride came with baggage: pressure to do well academically, and a sense of competition that wasn’t always necessary. Like many, I grew out of it. But many people in power still have a preoccupation with intelligence and conventional ways of measuring it. 

Now, though, the way that we think about intelligence and markers of it, such as IQ, are shifting in important ways. David Robson, the author of The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes, says that traditional markers like IQ are not the only factors when considering how smart someone is. “There’s practical intelligence, which is much more about how good you are at planning projects and executing those projects,” he explains. He even says that people with high IQs tend to be more susceptible to things like confirmation bias.

Philosopher Jeff Sebo goes further, arguing  that even focusing our discussion of intelligence on people is too narrow. He’s the author of the book The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why, and he says that making humans the bar for intelligence is a mistake. “Intelligence in general is the ability to process information and solve problems and adapt to the environment,” he told Vox. Animals’ brains “might not look exactly like ours, but they can help animals solve problems and navigate their environments and adapt to their situations really effectively.”

So what does animal intelligence actually look like? And what can we learn from it? We answer that and more on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Sebo, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545. 

What is it about one animal’s intelligence that makes us want to protect it versus another animal that can end up on our dinner table? I think of dogs versus cows and pigs or dolphins versus fish. 

There are many factors that shape how much empathy we have for non-human animals of various kinds. Are they cute and do they look like us? Do they remind us of ourselves? What role do we assign them in our lives? 

We have more empathy by default for animals who play companion roles in our lives as opposed to animals who play commodity roles in our lives. This is why we can often have much more empathy for some animals over others, even if they display the same markers of sentience and the same markers of intelligence. 

What’s a discovery about an animal’s mind that might surprise people? That might make us think of that animal differently than we maybe do? 

There are really interesting studies showing that bees are capable of play behaviors. You can go online and see a video of a bee rolling a wooden ball around in a way that displays all the hallmarks of play activity. This is done seemingly for the pure joy of rolling a wooden ball around. 

Likewise, there are studies showing that animals like insects have remarkable capacities for perception and learning and memory and adaptive, flexible decision-making and communication with each other. Animals that we might have written off as simple, as mechanistic, are in fact incredibly complex, seemingly sensitive, seemingly intelligent. I think that has allowed people to have a little bit more empathy for some of these animals than they otherwise might.

How much of what we call animal intelligence is actually just animals doing the things that people happen to be good at? What kind of abilities are we overlooking when we think of animals and intelligence? 

We do tend to look for markers of intelligence that we associate with human intelligence and that can sometimes lead us to overlook markers of specifically non-human intelligence. This can happen in so many different ways. 

For example, for many years, the gold standard for self-awareness tests was a mirror self-recognition test. You would put a mark on the forehead of an animal and place them in front of a mirror and see if they notice the mark and if they try to remove the mark and that can signal a certain kind of self-awareness. 

It took us a long time to appreciate that this might not be the best way to test self-awareness in many animals for a variety of reasons. Many animals are not primarily visual, so we might need to think about how to perform this kind of test with their sensory modalities. Also, many animals might not particularly care about whether they have a mark on their forehead, so we should probably not treat an attempt to remove that mark as a standard for self-awareness. 

We hear that pigs are intelligent or that octopuses could solve puzzles and we think, “Oh wow, we should be treating these creatures better.” I wonder, is there a problem with that argument? Because what happens to the animals that just never impress us? 

I think that learning more about animal intelligence and challenging our preconceived notions about animals is good, but I think it would be a mistake to treat a certain level of intelligence — and especially a certain level of human-like intelligence — as a necessary condition for moral consideration. 

That might lead us to extend respect and kindness to elephants and chimpanzees and other relatively human-like animals while neglecting the other animals who are conscious and sentient, capable of feelings and emotions, and that have forms of agency and decision-making, even if it might not look like ours. 

I think that bar should be lower and should at the very least include consciousness and sentience.

This is making me realize that I may not be clear on what it means to be sentient. How do we know if an animal’s sentient or not? 

This is very difficult to know for sure, because sentience is the capacity for positive and negative experiences like pleasure, pain, happiness, and suffering. The only experiences that any of us can directly experience are our own. 

With non-human animals, we can collect behavioral evidence, internal evidence, developmental evolutionary evidence. For example, behaviorally, we can ask, “Do they nurse their own wounds? Do they respond to analgesics and antidepressants the way that we do?” And then developmentally, evolutionarily, we can ask, “In their ancestral environments, did they face pressures that they could overcome if they developed the ability to experience pleasure, pain, happiness, and suffering?” None of this is proof, none of it establishes certainty, but when we find a lot of this evidence in an animal, that at least increases the probability. 

In terms of ethics and policy, what matters is we should not wait for certainty that someone can suffer before taking basic steps to address welfare risks for them. If there is at least a realistic possibility that someone can suffer based on the evidence, then we should take reasonable proportionate steps to mitigate welfare risks for them when we make decisions that affect them. 

I personally don’t think of plants as sentient, but one of the things I love about my monstera is whenever it’s moved around in my apartment, it turns itself towards the sun. Does it make sense to call them intelligent when they do things like that? 

At least in a certain broad sense, I think that it does. Plants are remarkably sophisticated. Many plants have capacities for perception, for collecting information from the environment, for learning and memory, for retaining some information, for communication, sending signals to other nearby plants, and even for adaptive decision-making, for growing toward things that are good for them and away from things that are bad for them. 

Now, this might not mean that plants are sentient, but whether or not it feels like anything to be a plant, they might still be agentic and intelligent in the sense of being able to process some information, being able to adapt to their environment in some ways. I think that can be worth acknowledging. 

What would that change about our world and how it functions? 

I think that if we seriously considered non-human sentience and welfare, then it would have transformative implications for how we live, but ones that could be very good for humanity as well. 

Consider how we relate to food and consider how we relate to wildlife. On the food side, industrial animal agriculture is a leading driver of animal suffering, but then it is also a leading driver of public health and environmental risks for humans. It creates more antibiotic resistance, more disease outbreaks, more extreme weather events via climate change, more biodiversity loss via deforestation. 

Similarly, we build an infrastructure primarily for humans, and that can lead to a lot of unnecessary conflict with wildlife. Wildlife can die because they fly into buildings or fly into cars or are trapped in light pollution or trapped in parks with no exit for them if there is a flood or a fire. 

If we simply considered their interests when building our infrastructure, then we might be able to build an infrastructure that can be good for human and non-human residents at the same time. But it does require considering human and non-human interests together when making decisions that affect everybody.