What is the Lloyd Morgan royalty, and how is it used in research?

For quite some time now, attempts have been made to explain the relationship between animal behavior and properly human thought. That is to say, there have been many times that mental states have been attributed to animals, both primates and others.

The problem with this is that, sometimes, too much has been inferred, seeing in each action of some animal species the result of complex mental processing.

The Lloyd Morgan Canon It is a principle that, before complex mentalistic explanations of animal behavior are given, a simpler explanation is more likely to help understand their behavior. Let's understand it a little better below.

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What is the Lloyd Morgan Canon?

Also known as the law of parsimony in animal behavior and thought, the Lloyd Morgan Canon is a principle that is applied in animal research, especially in animal psychology.

This law establishes that an action carried out by an animal does not have to be interpreted as if it were the result of the exercise of a superior psychic faculty

if it can be interpreted as the result of inferior psychic activity.

The maxim is not to attribute complex mental processes to animals to the slightest behavior that is observed in them similar to that of humans. Our behavior and that of the rest of the species, at times, may seem similar, but that does not mean that behind from their behavior there is complex thought, awareness, planning or that they can infer what others think individuals. The basic premise of Lloyd's canon was to always try to explain the behavior of other species using the simplest explanation.

The reason why Lloyd Morgan raised this statement has a lot to do with the scientific context in which he lived, specifically the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. At that time the theory of Darwin's evolution had become very popular, and not a few wanted to see some glimpse of primitive human behavior in other species, especially in primates. A whole scientific current had emerged that attributed anthropomorphic behaviors to a wide repertoire of species, some phylogenetically quite distant from humans.

This is why Morgan wanted to be cautious and proposed this maxim. According to him, what the science of his time should do was try to explain animal behavior with the least complex explanation possible, if there was one. Theories that are too complex and have not been proven end up being difficult to handle, and far from expanding knowledge and research, they hinder them.

Morgan applies his idea in his book habit and instinct (1896), focusing on animal learning. Far from proposing mentalist explanations for why animals behave the way they do, he chooses to limit himself to explaining behavior that can be attributed to trial-and-error associations. Morgan makes a distinction between innate reactions, which we could well consider instinctive, and reactions acquired through imitation as a source of acquiring experiences.

Morgan himself considered that his psychological study of time made use of two types of inductions. On the one hand, we have retrospective introspection, which is the one that starts from subjective data, while on the other, we have the most objective induction, based on the observation of phenomena external.

His science of time proceeded from both methods, interpreting animal behavior in terms of the researcher's subjective experience. So that, if the observer attributes mental states to the observed animal, he may make the mistake of thinking that there is evidently thought.

The Psychologist's Version of Ockham's Razor

Lloyd Morgan's canon can be considered a kind of psychologist's version of Ockham's famous razor. This principle formulated in the fourteenth century by the famous English philosopher William of Okcham maintains that entities should not be multiplied if it is not necessary. That is to say, if enough variables are available to explain a phenomenon, there is no need to include more than those.

If we have two scientific models that can explain the same natural event, applying the razor, the one that is the simplest will be the one worthy of consideration.

Naturally, both Ockham's razor and the Lloyd Morgan canon are not without their critics. The main one is that sometimes, when studying a complex phenomenon, it is impossible to select the most suitable model. simple that explains it without incurring in bad science, especially if the phenomenon cannot be approached empirically. That is, since the simple explanation given cannot be falsified, since there is no way to verify it, affirming that this explanation must be the most probable is pseudoscientific behavior.

The other criticism is that simplicity does not necessarily have to correlate with plausibility. Einsein himself pointed out that It is not the simplicity of the explanation that should be taken into greater consideration, but how explanatory it is for the phenomenon studied.. Also, talking about “simple” models is somewhat ambiguous. Is a model with a single but very complex variable a simple model? Is having multiple variables but all of them easy to manipulate/check a complex model?

scientific utility

As we mentioned, the study of animal behavior and, more recently, the cognition of human species has been increasing, considering all kinds of mentalist explanations. This is why, in order to avoid giving too anthropocentric explanations to the behavior of other species, running the risk of affirming that other living beings have self-awareness or thoughts similar to those our, the Lloyd Morgan royalty has become a necessary requirement in research.

It must be understood that since psychology is a science, it has always tried to address whether other species can think like human beings. This is not a subject without controversy and, in fact, if human-like consciousness is demonstrated in animals for daily consumption, such as cows, pigs or chickens, would lead to a great ethical debate, fueled especially by associations in defense of rights animals.

On many occasions, these same associations use supposed scientific studies to reaffirm their positions, something that is legitimate. However, if the research itself has attributed overly human mental traits to species that, unlike, for example, chimpanzees, do not have a intelligence or highly sophisticated self-awareness, without applying Morgan's canon or relativizing his statements, it is very difficult for us to talk about an article scientist.

The mentalism and behaviorism debate, although it has been moderate in recent decades, has been a classic in the history of psychology. Behaviorism was a current that in its most radical version was nourished by the Morgan canon, dignifying psychology as a science. Focusing only on the observable of the animal instead of attributing motives, thought or perceptions of any kind to it allowed psychology to stop being as scattered as it had been with psychoanalysis.

Today there is no doubt that considering mental processes in animals is not necessarily bad or pseudoscientific. However, the problem, as we said, is exaggerating the mental capacity of certain animals, attributing to them a psychological process that, most likely, they cannot house in their brain. There are many animal behaviors that may seem motivated, that there is a complex thought behind it, but it may just be coincidence.

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Cases in animal behavior

On many occasions it has happened that mentalist explanations have been proposed for phenomena that, seen more critically, correspond to less sophisticated behavior. Below we will see two cases that, although they are not the only ones, explain quite well the idea of ​​why the simplest should be used when studying animal behavior.

1. Pairing in penguins

Many species carry out courtship and mating rituals. These behaviors, in principle, are intentional. As a rule, the males strut in front of many females inviting them to mate with him. In the case of females, most species look for the male with the best characteristics and, thus, have strong and sexually attractive offspring when he reaches maturity.

The king penguins of the Kerguelen Islands also have courtship rituals and in most cases mate for life. But interestingly, some penguin couples are gay. There are male penguins that court other males and mate, but naturally they will not have offspring..

This phenomenon is not strange in this species and, for this reason, an attempt was made to give a sophisticated mentalist explanation. These homosexual behaviors would occur when the penguin population had disparate sex ratios, such as having many more males than females. Male penguins, being aware of this, would try to balance the scales by sacrificing their reproduction and mating with other males.

However, this explanation ran into a small problem: penguins of this species do not seem to know the sex of their conspecifics. In fact, these clumsy birds are all alike, making it difficult at first glance to tell if there are more males or more females.

Applying Lloyd Morgan's canon, instead of assuming mental processes in these birds, as would be the idea of ​​majority and minority, which would happen in the homosexual pairing would be that these penguins are really homosexual or a male has courted another male and this "has followed the lead" current".

2. fight between butterflies

Competition between animals, especially males, is a highly studied behavior. The reasons that push two individuals to fight are, fundamentally, defense of the territory, search for possible partners, a female or food. In some species the fight changes depending on the reason behind it. It is not the same to fight for a female than to do it for territory or food, since in the fights for reproductive purposes one tries to be as attractive and strong as possible.

The male butterflies also fight. In many species, two ways of fighting have been found for alleged sexual purposes. One occurs in the air, with the two males fighting as they fly. The other occurs when there is a cocoon that is still immature but harbors a female.

While the second way of fighting seems like a way to fight for a female, the first doesn't have to. be so, and applying the Lloyd Morgan canon, other investigations have raised a third option that is very interesting.

Although most butterflies are sexually dimorphic, some species are unable to distinguish between males and females. It seems that sometimes a male butterfly meets another flying male butterfly, and as the sexual impulse drives it desperately to look for a mate, it approaches and tries to copulate with her.

Seen from the outside, and the observer knowing that they are two male butterflies, it can be thought that they are really fighting but, what could be really happening is that they are copulating, or one tries to force to the other In addition, the physical fight between males is usually so soft that it resembles copulation between males and females.

Bibliographic references:

• Heyes, C. m. (1998). Theory of mind in nonhuman primates. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21(1): pp. 101 - 134
• Premack, D. & Woodruff, G. (1978) Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 4:pp. 515 - 526.
• Dennett, D. c. (1983) Intentional systems in cognitive ethology: The “Panglossian paradigm” defended. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 6:pp. 343 - 390.