Going Meta: Retelling the Scientific Retelling of Aesop's the Crow and the Pitcher

Abstract:The Crow and the Pitcher, a classic Aesop's fable, has surprisingly (re)captured the interest of comparative cognition scientists in the past decade. These researchers examine whether corvids (e.g., rooks, crows, and jays) can complete a laboratory analog of the fable by training the corvids to drop stones and other similar objects into tubes of water to retrieve floating worms. This Aesop's Fable Paradigm is argued to be an experimental method that can prove corvids have the ability to engage in complex causal reasoning—implying that they understand something fairly rich about the ideas of volume and water displacement. However, critiques—including our own meta-analysis—suggest that corvids' behaviors in this paradigm could be explained by trial-and-error learning combined with an instinctive, initial preference for functional objects rather than complex causal reasoning. With this line of research as the case example, we explore historical and sociocultural factors in the field of psychology that incentivizes scientific research that tells a "good story."