The previous lesson, unknowing animal cells through behavior focused on dogs and cats. These are animals we have the closest relationships with, and we're very familiar with their behavior. But what about animals who don't share our homes, and aren't considered part of our families? Can we see a sense of self in them too? I've done firsthand research only with dogs and cats. But drawing on work by other researchers, I can offer some examples. The primatologist Frans de Waal and psychologist Sarah Brosnan, have done studies on perceptions of fairness in capuchin monkeys. In a study published in nature, de Waal and Brosnan gave monkeys small rocks as tokens they can exchange for food, particularly grapes. In one experiment, two monkeys in adjacent cages were given rocks, which they exchange for a grape. Then one monkey received a grape, but the other received a cucumber slice. You can see the result in the video. The monkey who got the cucumber hurled it out of her cage. She started shaking the bars of the cage. Evidently, if the monkeys are alone, they will happily eat either a grape or a cucumber. But I'm seeing that another monkey received the grape, something better than a cucumber for doing the same task, they react with anger. They don't like being treated unfairly. Psychologists and primatologists are interested in this aversion to inequity for what it reveals about the evolutionary origins of human cooperation and morality. What interests me about this experiment is what it suggests about self-awareness. To feel slighted, to see an exchange as unfair, requires an awareness of self and other. It's not terribly surprising to see this similarity to humans and other primates. But what evidence of the self do we see in wild animals outside of the laboratory? I'm going to use the framework of the four components of the core self from the previous lesson, as we go through some examples. The first component of the core self is agency, the active self-experience. Agency involves the sense of having control over one's own actions, and an awareness of the felt consequences of those actions. Among wildlife, indications of agency appear when animals make choices in their actions. Animals who live in permanent social groups provide ample evidence of this capability. Popular wisdom about wild animals portrays their lives as full of violent confrontations. However, research reveals that life is not ruled by a drive to kill. For instance, spotted hyenas compete fiercely and frequently over food, but rely on their group for long-term survival and reproduction. They commonly engage in friendly reunions after fights, vocalizing, licking, body rubbing, and initiating play. Reconciliation not only repairs damaged relationships between individuals, it also reduces tensions within the group, ensuring the social cohesion necessary to survive. The second component of the core self is coherence, the embodied self-experience. Coherence refers to that capacity to identify self and other as physical entities unto themselves. It gives agency somewhere to live. Wild animals too can recognize distinct others. Female elephants can make subtle distinctions between human voices and adapt their behavior based on the level of threat posed by the associated human groups. For example, in the Amboseli National Park, Maasai herders often conflict with elephants while grazing or watering their cattle, and sometimes the Maasai kill elephants in retaliation. Another group, the agricultural Kamba, have fewer conflicts with elephants. When researchers played Maasai and Kamba voices repeating a short phrase, the elephants responded to the Maasai voices by retreating and defensively bunching together. Moreover, the elephant's behavioral response is depended on sex and age. The voices of Maasai women and boys who pose little threat to elephants, were significantly less likely than male voices to produce these responses. The third component is affectivity, the emotional self-experience. You can think of the role of affectivity in this way. If agency refers to experiences of self as initiator of action, and coherence locates that action within a body, then affectivity associates embodied action with emotion. Evidence suggests that animals can also associate feelings with distinct experiences, and understand that they are the sources of the feelings, suggesting this constellation of agency coherence and affectivity. For example, in 2012, a viral video showed a crow sliding on a jar lid. The bird slid down a rooftop on the lid, dragged it back to the top, and went down a second time before the close of the one-minute video. Although we can't say how the bird labeled the experience, he or she clearly enjoyed it. Judging by the effort taken to repeat it, he or she knew that he or she was the source of the experience. The fourth component is self history, the continuous self-experience. This exists through the mechanisms of memory to preserve the meaning of events, interactions, objects, others and their associated emotions. Among wild animals, particularly strong evidence of memory appears in elephants. But non-mammalian species also demonstrate the capacity for memory. Many species of birds store food through caching, and recall the locations of a large number of caches dispersed spatially and chronologically. Recognizing distinct others and reconciling after fights, indicates that animals can distinguish self from other. Alerting others to predators and storing food suggests that they plan for the future. If the future exists for them, then they can see themselves as objects. If they can see themselves as objects, then they have selves. The similarities between human and non-human animals extend to our inner lives. Before we close, I'd like to raise a point. When I studied selfhood among pets, I could document the four self experiences in the same animal. In the case of wild animals, I can't make the same claim. I've given examples of agency in hyenas, coherence in elephants, affectivity in crows, and memory in birds. I have no examples of all four capacities in one animal or one species. I don't think this rules out the possibility of the self however, it opens a door for more research.
