The Social Instinct by Nichola Raihani

Author:Nichola Raihani [Raihani, Nichola]
Language: eng
Format: epub

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We are not the only image-conscious species on the planet. Once again, the cleaner fish appears to be doing something remarkably similar to us, by trying to present itself in a positive light to others. Remember that there is a conflict of interest between a cleaner fish and its client: the client wants the cleaner to remove the parasites, while the cleaner fish would prefer to eat mucus and scales. Unlike humans, cleaners and clients can’t sit down and talk about it and clients cannot leave feedback for bad service. Nevertheless, the tension between the two parties in this system is resolved in strikingly similar ways.

One of the ways that clients can keep a cleaner fish honest is by voting with their fins. Some clients have access to several cleaning stations within their home range and, as such, they do not need to put up with substandard service. These “fussy” clients behave like prima donnas: they demand immediate attention and refuse to wait for a cleaning service. If they don’t like what they see at a cleaning station (for example, if they see an altercation between a cleaner fish and a current client) then they swim away and look for a better service elsewhere.

Divas demand better service—and they get it: whereas the hoi polloi have to wait to have their parasites removed, cleaners frequently promote the fussy clients to the head of the queue when they arrive at a cleaning station. Even more astonishingly, work led by Ana Pinto during her PhD found that cleaners take extra care with their current client when being watched by a fussy client nearby. This demonstrates a rudimentary concern for reputation; something that is extremely rare in nature. Even humans struggle with reputation management until we hit middle childhood, and there is scant evidence that any of the other great apes know or care about what others think of them.

The fact that cleaner fish do this, while other species do not, does not imply that cleaners are somehow cleverer than chimpanzees or human children. Cleaners are unlikely to use the same cognitive strategies to manage their reputations that humans use, and that children develop as they progress through childhood. For humans, reputation management involves taking the perspective of another person, and also inferring how their beliefs and impressions of us might be altered under various scenarios. These scenarios don’t even have to happen for us to reason in this way: we can imagine what people might think of us if we were to cheat on our taxes or win a Nobel Prize, as well as scenarios where our hypothetical behavior goes undetected. These daydreams feel effortless to us, but drawing such inferences is computationally taxing—and cannot be done by any non-human species. Cleaner fish don’t solve reputation-management tasks by thinking in this way; rather their skills are more likely to be based on a much simpler form of associative learning: over time they learn that some kinds of clients tend to swim away if they don’t get a good service, or if they see the cleaner fish bite another client.

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