Psychologist Daniel Gilbert on the unwritten vow taken by psychologists. From p3 of Stumbling on Happiness (ISBN 9780007183135).
Few people realise that psychologists also take a vow, promising that at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter or at least an article that contains the sentence: 'The human being is the only animal that...' We are allowed to finish the sentence any way we like, but it has to start with those eight words.
Most of us wait to relatively late in our careers to fulfil this solemn obligation because we know that successive generations of psychologists will ignore all the other words that we managed to pack into a lifetime of well-intentioned scholarship and remember us mainly for how we finished The Sentence.
We also know that the worse we do, the better we will be remembered. For instance, those psychologists who finished The Sentence with 'can use language' were particularly well remembered when chimpanzees were taught to communicate with hand signs.
And when researchers discovered that chimps in the wild used sticks to extract tasty termites from their mounds (and to bash each other over the head now and again), the world suddenly remembered the full name and mailing address of every psychologist who ever finished The Sentence with the words 'uses tools'.
So it is with good reason that most psychologists put off completing The Sentence for as long as they can, hoping that if they wait long enough, they might just die in time to avoid being publicly humiliated by a monkey.
From Mind Hacks, via Cognitive Daily.
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Comments
What about Mark Twain's famous quip that "Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to."? Has that stood the test of time and ethology?
Posted by: Jeremy Henty | February 20, 2007 7:21 PM
Sources say yes, in one sense. The Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute has an article up that says:
"Studies also suggest that when people blush and they believe it is not observed, they engage in more overt, voluntary behaviors designed to elicit a positive response (in embarrassing situations, for example, they may act more apologetic). This hypothesis has some support in the animal kingdom. Although blushing is a uniquely human characteristic, behaviors that often go hand in hand with blushing (for example, avoiding eye contact or smiling) are used by other primates in appeasement displays. Overt attention such as staring triggers these responses in humans and nonhuman primates alike."
Biology Letters last year reported that primate vision is pretty good at picking up subcutaneous vasodilation.
And of course Darwin himself argued something like this.
Posted by: John Wilkins | February 20, 2007 7:29 PM
Monkeys? Hell, how about crows?
Posted by: CCP | February 20, 2007 10:52 PM
Come on this has to be the start of a competition! To make sure that it starts at the right level my offering is; "Man is the only animal who shits his pants".
Posted by: Thony C. | February 21, 2007 6:37 AM
Posted by: llewelly | February 21, 2007 2:24 PM