Table 1.
Representative claims of evolutionarily based human uniqueness in social cognition based on direct ape–human comparisons are confounded with systematic group differences in testing environment, task preparation, sampling protocols, testing procedures, and/or age of subjects at testing
| Source | Putative mental state (p)a | Confounds (Y = present, N = absent) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Envir.b | Task Prep.c | Sampl.d | Test. Proc.e | Age | ||
| Povinelli and Eddy (1996)f | Seeing leads to knowing | Y | Y | Y | Y | N |
| Povinelli et al. (1997)g | Appreciation of internal mental focus | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Tomasello et al. (1997)h | Understanding communicative intentions | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Call and Tomasello (1999)i | Understanding false belief | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Povinelli et al. (1999)j | Understanding attention as a mental state | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Warneken et al. (2006)k | Shared intentionality | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Herrmann et al. 20071 | Understanding communicative intentions | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Liszkowski et al. 2009m | Common conceptual ground | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| van der Goot et al. (2014)n | Common conceptual ground | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
Refutations: Most of these studies, except Povinelli et al. (1999), asserted a theoretical rationale comprising a major premise of the form: if p then q, and reported an absence of a behavior (~q) in apes, and therefore, refutations are empirical demonstrations that these index behaviors have been displayed by apes (q); Povinelli et al. (1999) asserted that if organisms understood visual attention at a high level (p), then they expected the absence of a discrimination of gaze direction in their probe condition C (~q)—in their study humans failed to discriminate gaze direction (~q), but chimpanzees did discriminate gaze direction (q), therefore the refutation by Thomas et al. (2008) involved the demonstration by reductio ad absurdum that human adults discriminated gaze direction (q) like the chimpanzees in Povinelli et al. (1999), and therefore, according to the argument of Povinelli and colleagues, human adults displayed a low-level, non-mentalistic understanding of visual attention
ap = antecedent in the conditional: if p then q
bEnvir. Testing environment
cTask Prep. Task preparation (i.e., pre-experimental, task-relevant experience)
dSampl. sampling procedure
eTest. Proc. Testing procedure
fRefuted by Bulloch et al. (2008), Hostetter et al. (2007)
gRefuted by Lyn et al. (2010), Mulcahy and Call (2009)
hPartially refuted (pointing comprehension) by Lyn et al. (2010), Mulcahy and Call (2009)
irefuted by Krupenye et al. (2016)
jRefuted by Thomas et al. (2008)
kRefuted by Bard et al. (2014a), Warneken et al. (2007)
lRefuted by Russell et al. (2011)
mRefuted by Bohn et al. (2015, 2016), Lyn et al. (2014)
nRefuted by Leavens et al. (2015)