Lying and Aping Apes

A female guppy courted by two males ends up associating with one of them while another female follows the entire process from an adjacent tank. When this guppy "voyeuse" is introduced to the same males to see which one she likes better, she follows her predecessor's choice. Lee Dugatkin, an American ethologist who conducted these experiments, speculates that female guppies rely on each other's assessments of potential mates. The I-want-what-she-wants principle that Dugatkin found had the power of reversing a female's independent preferences known from earlier tests.

Similarly, two Italian scientists, Graziano Fiorito and Pietro Scotto, trained an octopus to attack either a red or a white ball. After the training another octopus was allowed to watch four demonstrations from an adjoining tank. The spectator closely monitored the actions of the demonstrator with head and eye movements. When the same balls were dropped in the spectator's tank, he attacked the ball of the same color as the first octopus.

What both experiments teach us is that even animals with minuscule brains compared to primates notice how members of their own species relate to the environment. The octopus identified with the other octopus and the female guppy with the other female guppy, both letting their counterpart influence their attitude toward a stimulus.

If identification is the ability to feel closer to one object in the environment than another, and to make the situation of the first to some extent one's own, this is a very basic ability indeed. It makes it possible to reach out mentally to others, making them an extension of the self, paying close attention to their situation so as to influence it or gain information from it. Identification underlies both empathy and imitation. The precision with which one individual can copy the behavior of another depends on the degree to which that individual is able to assume the other's point of view (another way of saying that the level of imitation depends on the level of empathy).