A project from a team led by Amalia Bastos at the University of St Andrews aims to investigate the evolutionary origins of normative thinking. The project will explore "ought-thoughts," which are the ability to distinguish “what is” from “what should be” in nonhuman animals. Instead of seeking human-like morality, the project focuses on foundational cognitive precursors shared across species. This allows for a theoretical shift beyond anthropocentric definitions of norms to study simpler phenomena like expectations of conformity and fairness.

The project team will test for these precursors in three phylogenetically diverse species with complex social cognition: chimpanzees (closest human relatives, evidence of cultural norms); dogs (domesticated, ritualized play with rule-based interactions); and kea parrots (avian model with ape-like fission-fusion societies and play behavior).

The team plans to do this using a "signature-testing" framework to identify cognitive mechanisms through behavioral patterns, errors, and biases, avoiding binary pass/fail approaches, and to combine these behavioral tasks with eye-tracking. The project is organized into six work packages.

Work Packages 1-3 test if animals (chimpanzees, dogs, and keas) adopt behaviors because they are demonstrated by the majority of their social group. Work Package 4 examines why animals copy high-status individuals (success vs. status salience) using animated chimpanzee agents in touchscreen tasks. Work Packages 5-6 ask if animals are surprised by unjust punishment in third-party interactions using species-specific animated play scenarios.

This project pioneers a pluralistic approach to animal normativity, potentially revealing shared cognitive precursors and foundations of morality across distantly related species. It addresses longstanding debates in cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy while advancing methodologies for cross-species comparison. These findings will offer novel insights into how animals socially acquire new behaviors and whether they expect deviations in acceptable and expected social behavior to be punished fairly, greatly broadening our understanding of the evolutionary foundations of normativity.

Photo: © Amalia Bastos Photography