Machiavellian Intelligence
When I began observing the world’s largest chimpanzee colony, at Burgers’ Zoo in 1975, I had no idea that I’d be working with this species for the rest of my life. Just so, as I sat on a wooden stool watching primates on a forested island for an estimated ten thousand hours, I had no idea that I’d never again enjoy that luxury. Nor did I realize that I would develop an interest in power relations. In those days, university students were firmly antiestablishment, and I had the shoulder-long hair to prove it. We considered ambition ridiculous and power evil. My observations of the chimps, however, made me question the idea that hierarchies were merely cultural institutions, a product of socialization, something we could wipe out at any moment. They seemed more ingrained. I had no trouble detecting the same tendencies in even the most hippielike organizations. They were generally run by young men who mocked authority and preached egalitarianism yet had no qualms about ordering everyone else around and stealing their comrades’ girlfriends. It wasn’t the chimps who were odd, but the humans who seemed dishonest. Political leaders have a habit of concealing their power motives behind nobler desires such as a readiness to serve the nation and improve the economy. When the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes postulated the existence of an insuppressible power drive, he was right on target for both humans and apes.
The biological literature proved to be of no help understanding the social maneuvering that I observed, so I turned to Niccolò Machiavelli. During quiet moments of observation, I read from a book that had been published more than four centuries earlier. The Prince put me in the right frame of mind to interpret what I was seeing on the chimpanzees’ forested island, though I’m pretty sure the Florentine philosopher never envisioned this particular application.
Among chimpanzees, hierarchy permeates everything. Whenever we set out to bring two females inside the building—as we often do for testing—one will be ready to get going on the task at hand while the other will hang back. The second female will barely take rewards and won’t touch the puzzle box, computer, or whatever else we’re using. She may be just as eager as the other, but she defers to her “superior.” There is no tension or hostility between them, and out in the group they may be the best of friends. One female simply dominates the other.
Among the males, in contrast, power is always up for grabs. It is not conferred on the basis of age or any other trait but has to be fought for and jealously guarded against contenders. Soon after my long stint as chronicler of their social affairs, I put pencil to paper to produce Chimpanzee Politics, a popular account of the power struggles that I had witnessed.1 I was risking my nascent academic career by ascribing intelligent social maneuvering to animals, an implication I had been trained to avoid at all cost. That doing well in a group full of rivals, friends, and relatives requires considerable social skill is something we now take for granted, but in those days animal social behavior was rarely thought of as intelligent. Observers would recount a rank reversal between two baboons, for example, in passive terms, as if it happened to them rather than was brought about by them. They would make no mention of one baboon following the other around, provoking one confrontation after another, flashing his huge canine teeth, and recruiting help from nearby males. It is not that the observers did not notice, but animals were not supposed to have goals and strategies, so the reports remained silent.
Deliberately breaking with this tradition, describing chimps as schmoozing and scheming Machiavellians, my book drew wide attention and enjoyed many translations. The U.S. Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, even put it on the recommended reading list for freshmen congressmen. The account met with far less resistance than I had dreaded, including from fellow primatologists. Obviously, the time was ripe, in 1982, for a more cognitive approach to animal social behavior. Even though I learned about it only after my own book, Donald Griffin’s Animal Awareness had come out just a few years before.2
My work was part of a new Zeitgeist, and I had a handful of predecessors to lean on. There was Emil Menzel, whose work on chimpanzee cooperation and communication postulated goals and hinted at intelligent solutions, and Hans Kummer, who never ceased to wonder what drove his baboons to act the way they did. Kummer wanted to know, for example, how baboons plan their travel routes, and who decides where to go—those in front or those in the back? He broke down the behavior into recognizable mechanisms, and stressed how social relationships serve as long-term investments. More than anyone before him, Kummer combined classical ethology with questions about social cognition.3
I was also impressed by In The Shadow of Man by a young British primatologist.4 By the time I read it, I was familiar enough with chimpanzees to be unsurprised by the specifics of Jane Goodall’s description of life at Gombe Stream in Tanzania. But the tone of her account was truly refreshing. She did not necessarily spell out the cognition of her subjects, but it was impossible to read about Mike—a rising male who impressed his rivals by loudly banging empty kerosene cans together—or the love life and family relations of matriarch Flo, without recognizing a complex psychology. Goodall’s apes had personalities, emotions, and social agendas. She did not unduly humanize them, but she related what they did in unpretentious prose that would have been perfectly normal for a day at the office but was unorthodox with regard to animals. It was a huge improvement over the tendency at the time to drown behavioral descriptions in quotation marks and dense jargon in order to avoid mentalistic implications. Even animal names and genders were often avoided. (Every individual was an “it.”) Goodall’s apes, in contrast, were social agents with names and faces. Rather than being the slaves of their instincts, they acted as the architects of their own destinies. Her approach perfectly fit my own budding understanding of chimpanzee social life.
Yeroen’s allegiance to the young alpha was a case in point. Not that I could resolve how and why he had made his choice, in the same way that it was impossible for Goodall to know if Mike’s career might have been different in the absence of kerosene cans, but both stories implied deliberate tactics. Pinpointing the cognition behind such behavior requires collecting a mass of systematic data as well as performing experiments, such as the strategic computer games that we now know chimps are extraordinarily good at.5