Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

32 animals that act weirdly human sometimes – Livescience.com

Humans often think we are unique, with abilities and behaviors far more complex than our distant animal cousins. But in fact, many creatures, from tiny insects to our closest living relatives, exhibit a surprising repertoire of behaviors that can seem eerily human. From elephants mourning their dead to bees that get pessimistic when faced with setbacks, here are some of the most human-like behaviors demonstrated by other members of the animal kingdom.

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), along with bonobos, are our closest living relatives. A 2018 study found that chimpanzees not only share the same five major personality traits with humans conscientiousness, openness, agreeableness, extraversion and neuroticism but that these traits could be linked to life span. Scientists found that more agreeable male chimpanzees formed stronger social bonds and tended to live longer.

A separate 2020 study published in the journal Science found evidence of social selection in aging male chimpanzees, with individuals showing a preference for more meaningful social interactions with older friends in a smaller group. This is similar to aging human adults, who tend to choose lifelong friends and socialize in smaller groups than in our youth, the study noted. Another study showed that chimpanzees, much like young children, copy human behaviors such as waving, clapping and kissing. And like humans, chimps also "wage war" to expand their territory.

The gorilla is another large primate that exhibits human-like traits. Scientists have found evidence of gorillas displaying the five human-like personality traits in both the wild and captivity. They use facial expressions and gestures to communicate, and feel joy, empathy and sadness. A 2016 study of gorilla behavior even found personality variations among different gorilla populations. And cultural traits a largely human behavior varied among five groups of gorillas, including mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) and western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla), in different African habitats.

Dolphins are known for their intelligence and sociability, and a 2021 study found that, similar to humans and other primates, bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) have the personality traits of openness, sociability and disagreeableness. Interestingly, researchers also identified a fourth personality trait, dubbed directedness, which is unique to dolphins and combines elements of low neuroticism and conscientiousness.

"Throughout our lifetime, we interact and form relationships with a wide variety of people dolphins do the same with each other," Blake Morton, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Hull in the U.K., said in a statement. "Collectively, being smart and social,regardless of what ecosystem you live in, may play an important role in the evolution of certain personality traits."

With their huge brains, high intelligence, strong social bonds and empathetic behavior, Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) display many human-like traits, including facial recognition. In 2006, researchers found that, like humans, elephants recognize themselves in a mirror, and in 2015, a separate research team found that elephants have incredible long-term memories.

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A 2009 study found evolutionary evidence that genes that affect brain function, energy usage and metabolism, have evolved similarly in large-brained mammals such as elephants and humans. A separate 2023 study found that, like humans, elephants have followed an evolutionary process of domesticating themselves, in which their cultural and societal structures helped increase sociability and reduce aggression in creatures over time.

Like humans, magpies, a member of the crow or corvid family, can make and use tools to feed their young and mimic human voices. Another study also found evidence that European magpies (Pica pica) recognize themselves in a mirror.

Sometimes nicknamed "feathered apes" because their cognitive ability has been found to rival that of nonhuman) primates, Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius) are also members of the corvid family. They can learn how to use tools and demonstrate an extraordinary level of self-restraint. A 2022 study found that Eurasian jays possess self-control. In that research, scientists found that Eurasian jays could pass an avian version of the "marshmallow test" they could withhold the temptation to eat mealworms right away. The scientists found that the jays with the most self-control scored the highest on intelligence tests.

Orcas (Orcinus orca), also known as killer whales, form strong social bonds and live in close-knit family groups called pods. Orcas have been recorded hunting, sharing food, communicating and socializing within their pod, demonstrating advanced cultural and personality traits. While studying the behavior of 24 captive orcas, researchers found that, like humans and chimpanzees, orcas have the personality trait of extraversion, as demonstrated by their playfulness and affection. Further research has found that captivity can change orcas' behavior, increasing their aggression and neuroticism.

A 2011 study found that rats display prosocial behavior. In that research, scientists recorded evidence of rats helping one another by allowing one rat to roam freely while another was trapped in a container. It appeared that the free rat shared the emotional distress of the trapped rat, despite no reward being offered each time it willingly freed the captive rat. However, a 2014 study suggested that it was a desire for social contact, rather than empathy, that encouraged the rat to rescue the captive rat.

In a much earlier experiment in 1958, researchers allowed rats to feed only if they pulled a lever that shocked fellow rats. The rats refused to do so, which, according to the researchers, indicated empathy and compassion.

In a 2018 study published in the journal Learning and Behavior, researchers found that dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) notice when people are in distress and seek to comfort them a behavior the researchers interpreted as evidence of empathy.

In the experiment, dog owners cried or hummed behind a closed door. The dogs that suppressed their own stress reaction in order to comfort the humans opened the door the fastest.

Male mountain bluebirds (Sialia currucoides) seem to get jealous when spurned in mating, according to a 1975 study published in the journal The American Naturalist. Researchers found that when a male bluebird leaves the nest to forage, its female partner may move on with another male. In response, the male bluebird was found to savagely beat their partner by pulling out feathers and snapping beaks.

Like humans, horses (Equus caballus) can interpret facial expressions and distinguish human emotions. Similarly to dogs, horses are known for having close relationships with their owners.

In a 2018 study, the researchers found that horses cross-modally recognized the voices, facial expressions and emotional states of their primary carers and strangers. "Our study could contribute to the understanding of how humans and companion animals send and receive emotional signals to deepen our relationships, which could help establish a better relationship that emphasizes the well-being of animals," Ayaka Takimoto, an associate professor at Hokkaido University in Japan and co-author of the study, said in a statement.

Don't be fooled by their cute and fluffy appearance; female meerkats (Suricata suricatta) will kill any female rivals. Nonetheless, meerkats do exhibit a more caring side, with adults taking turns babysitting young meerkats and spending time educating them in essential life skills. This human-like child-rearing behavior has a strong evolutionary motivation, as it allows the dominant female meerkat to devote her time to breeding.

As part of a three-year study launched in 2023, researchers are investigating whether meerkats mirror human emotion and display empathy, with the aim of better understating human-animal interactions.

Although cats don't adore us in the intense way dogs do, a 2021 study found that they are capable of forming bonds with humans depending on the emotional behavior of the owner. A 2020 study also found evidence that cats (Felis catus) released the "bonding" hormone oxytocin when stroked, although to a much lesser degree than dogs.

However, when it came to displaying complex human-like emotions, jealousy was more commonly seen in cats than empathy or compassion, according to a 2016 study.

Pigeons have been shown to understand dozens of human words. And a 2016 study found that a pigeon could distinguish up to 60 words, marking the first time a nonprimate could recognize letters and have an orthographical brain, meaning they can process and understand letters.

According to study lead author Damian Scarf, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, the findings provided more insight into human brain development and our cognitive skills. "If you find something like this with pigeons, you can argue that it must've been common to our last common ancestor with pigeons, which is about 300 million years ago," Scarf said in a statement. "So the same flexibility and plasticity of the human brain that lets us pick up on words and the statistics behind them must've been present when we were still joined with pigeons."

Like humans, dragonflies can shut out unnecessary information, enabling them to focus on a specific task. This behavioral trait is seen in primates, which have a limited amount of attention and thus must choose between focusing in depth on a single task or multitasking with less focus.

In 2012, scientists found evidence that dragonflies have "human-like" selective attention when hunting their prey. Using a microscopic sensor in a dragonfly's brain, they found that this brain activity, known as neural filtering, enabled the insect to successfully capture their prey 97% of the time.

Scientists have found that, like humans, honeybees feel more pessimistic after a stressful experience.

In a 2011 study, bees were offered sugar or quinine, with a mix of odors, before being shaken in a way that stimulated a predator attack. The shaken bees had lower levels of the feel-good hormones dopamine and serotonin, suggesting they might experience some negative human-like emotions, according to the researchers.

Although they're not commonly associated with cleanliness, cockroaches have a preference for self-hygiene and groom themselves incessantly.

According to a 2013 study, cockroaches (Periplaneta americana) do this to keep their antennae working efficiently, as a buildup of environmental pollutants and their own waxy secretions harm their ability to smell pheromones to find a mate, source food and sense danger.

"The evidence is strong: Grooming is necessary to keep these foreign and native substances at a particular level," Coby Schal, an entomologist at North Carolina State University and co-author of the study, said in a statement. "Leaving antennae dirty essentially blinds insects to their environment."

Other than when they mate, Snakes are generally known for being solitary. But a 2023 study published in the journal Frontiers in Ethology found that, like humans, snakes may comfort one another in periods of stress. When adult southern Pacific rattlesnakes (Crotalus helleri) in the study experienced a stressful situation with another snake of the same species, they had a lower heart rate than a snake that had not experienced such an encounter.

Facial recognition is essential to forming complex social connections. Humans as young as 2 months have mastered this skill.

Unlike primates, fish lack a large brain and visual cortex that aids in processing images. Yet archerfish can recognize human faces. In a 2016 study, scientists found that archerfish could learn and recognize human faces with accuracy.

"The fact that archerfish can learn this task suggests that complicated brains are not necessarily needed to recognise human faces," Cait Newport, a researcher in the University of Oxford Department of Zoology and first author of the study, said in a statement.

While studying Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) in 2024, scientists found that nerve cells in the brain's premotor cortex, which prepares and executes movement in the limbs, strongly responded when tasked with adding and subtracting.

And back in 2008, a group of captive Japanese macaques were trained to use tools, with scientists finding cognitive similarities with humans. A 2021 study found that Japanese macaques can respond to the human gaze flexibly depending on the context, indicating a high level of perspective of others and their intent.

Along with chimpanzees, bonobos (Pan paniscus) are humans' closest living relatives. Known for living peacefully in close-knit social groups, bonobos engage in sex with both sexes, by touching genitals to greet each other and to deescalate violence.

According to a 2022 study, bonobos, like humans, can form harmonious relationships outside their immediate group by helping those in need. However, it appears their social interactions may not be completely harmonious, with a 2024 study finding evidence of aggression between male bonobos.

Whales use song to form social groups, find a mate and communicate. Much like humans, their taste in music evolves over time, with each whale species creating their own song. A 2017 study into cetacean culture and behavior found that, like humans, whales and dolphins of various species live in tight-knit social groups, form mutually beneficial alliances and enjoy playing. Scientists attribute much of whales' social behavior to their large brains.

Female Northern mockingbirds (Mimus polyglottos) can not only distinguish familiar humans but also judge which individual poses the greatest threat, allowing them to flee from their nest to safety, a 2023 study found. This finding suggests these birds have higher cognitive ability than scientists previously thought.

This research adds to findings from a 2009 study showing that wild mockingbirds don't forget people and have been found to chase away familiar humans they perceive as threatening.

Scientists have found that big cats including cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus), lions and tigers can recognize human voices and distinguish them from those of strangers. The 2024 study found that these cats reacted more quickly and more intensely to human voices they recognized. The study authors said the findings indicate that less-social feline species can still have socio-cognitive abilities.

A separate 2018 study of captive and wild cheetahs found that they not only recognized human voices but also discriminated between caregivers and strangers and changed their activity in response. Wild cheetahs also appeared to recognize human voices, potentially because they lived in close proximity to humans.

With their blue blood and multiple brains and hearts, octopuses may seem otherworldly. However, they are also known for being highly intelligent, with strong facial recognition and learning abilities. A 2010 study found that giant Pacific octopuses (Enteroctopus dofleini) could recognize individuals using their large orbital lobes, an area of the brain used for vision. Researchers found that these octopuses were picky about who they liked and disliked, with each octopus showing a strong preference for the keeper who fed it.

Octopuses are also the only known marine invertebrate that can use tools, thanks to their long arms, each of which contains a brain.

Parrots not only have the extraordinary ability to mimic human speech but also exhibit social complexity and, like humans, use memories of past actions to influence future behavior. A 2022 study found that blue-throated macaws (Ara glaucogularis) demonstrated mental self-representation and episodic memory.

In 2020, an African gray parrot named "Griffin" (Psittacus erithacus) outperformed Harvard students in a memory-test game. According to the researchers, both the parrot and humans used a part of their working memories known as manipulation to remember and manipulate information, suggesting a similar ancient evolutionary capability.

Research shows that some penguins communicate by "singing" and can adapt their behavior to their environment. For example, Emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) huddle together for warmth.

Penguins are complex social creatures that, like humans, rely on collaborative social skills to problem-solve for tasks such as hunting.

A 2021 study found that African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) could recognize an individual by matching their appearance to their voice, and a 1999 study found that a penguin could identify its mate's voice in a crowd.

Tamarin monkeys small, orange primates that live in South and Central America display several behaviors that could be considered human-like. In a 2013 study, scientists found evidence of cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus) "whispering" to one another when in the presence of a human they disliked.

Ants are highly intelligent insects that live in huge colonies and form complex social structures. Like humans, ants teach one another new skills, a 2006 study found. Scientists observed ants performing a "tandem-running" style of teaching, with one ant showing another the route to a food source.

According to researchers, this indicates that teaching can evolve in animals with small brains. Even though the tandem leader doesn't immediately benefit, the tandem follower was found to quickly learn and show others, ultimately benefiting the entire colony.

Crickets are another insect with impressive memory skills. A 2006 study found that crickets of the species Gryllus bimaculatus could remember seven odors at a time and, like humans, have long-term memory. In a 2022 study, researchers found that crickets could learn and remember food sources using odors.

In 2011, scientists found that, like caring humans, crickets often put the needs of their mate before their own.

"Relationships between crickets are rather different from what we'd all assumed," Rolando Rodrguez-Muozof, a researcher at the University of Exeter in the U.K. and co-author of the study, said in a statement. "Rather than being bullied by their mates, it seems that females are in fact being protected. We could even describe males as 'chivalrous.'"

Like humans, orangutans are social primates with opposable thumbs, which they use to grasp things and swing through the trees.

Also like humans, orangutans (Pongo) can learn their own "languages" and often communicate using body language. A 2018 study found evidence that orangutans can "talk" about the past. Researchers observed female orangutans warning their young of past dangers in a form of language known as "displaced reference," providing insight into how vocal systems have evolved in humans.

Crows are highly intelligent birds with complex brains that allow them to solve problems and use tools to their advantage. A 2019 study found evidence of New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) using a hooked tool to forage plants.

Like humans, crows also possess self-awareness and can make decisions. A 2020 study published in the journal Science showed that crows use sense and reason to problem-solve, and a 2017 study found that crows rival some primates in intelligence.

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32 animals that act weirdly human sometimes - Livescience.com

Human Behavior

NBC Is Using Animals To Push The LGBT Agenda. Here Are 5 Abhorrent Animal Behaviors Humans Shouldn’t Emulate – The Daily Wire

Caution: The following article contains graphic descriptions of disturbing animal-on-animal violence and sexual deviancy.

In an apparent response to the common argument that the LGBT spectrum of sexualities isnt natural, NBC is showcasing the unorthodox sexual proclivities of the lower life forms in a stunning and brave new documentary titled Queer Planet.

The documentarys trailer, which was posted publicly on X, opens with a shot of a male lion sexually mounting another male, and clips of various presumably same-sex animals nuzzling each other are interspersed with soundbites from expert scientists assuring you that everything you were told as a kid is wrong, this is a queer planet, and its only in humans that we have such a stigma about it.

If you have the stomach for it, take a look at the full trailer below:

Weve all heard of gay penguins, but this film really opened my eyes to the full spectrum of LGBTQ+ behaviors across the natural world, narrator Andrew Rannells said in a press statement. And what could be more natural than being who you are? Im excited to be part of Queer Planet, especially during Pride Month, and on Peacock, surely the most colorful and glamorous of all the streaming services.

The specials official synopsis claims its an exploration of the rich diversity of animal sexuality from flamboyant flamingos to pansexual primates, sex-changing clownfish to multi-gendered mushrooms and everything in between. This documentary looks at extraordinary creatures, witnesses amazing behaviors, and introduces the scientists questioning the traditional concept of whats natural when it comes to sex and gender.

Of course, there are numerous questions surrounding the findings of the documentary and whether homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom really is natural, but the implication of using animal behavior as a justification for similar human behavior may be even more insidious.

Since NBC apparently wants you to believe that something is morally justifiable just because animals do it, here is a non-exhaustive list of some reprehensible things that, according to Queer Planets logic, should be permissible because they are widely practiced in the animal kingdom.

Infanticide within the animal kingdom is extremely common. It is most often practiced by males as part of their reproductive strategy.

For example, when a male liontakes overan established pride, he will often kill any existing young in the group to extinguish the bloodline of the previous dominant male. The loss of the cubs also makes lionesses reenter heat more quickly, allowing the new male to reproduce and pass on his genes in his new pride. Male bears and other mammals such as dolphins and baboons have exhibited the same behavior.

Males committed infanticide more frequently in species where males and females lived together and a few males dominated as mates but only remained at the top of the pack for brief periods of time. The practice was also associated with non-annual or seasonal reproduction cycles, meaning females could mate whenever. Through infanticide, males can eliminate the offspring of their competition and get the female back to full baby-making capacity faster, Smithsonian Magazine noted.

The Smithsonian also noted that mothers will also abandon offspring that are ill and may alsokillthe offspring of other females to cut down on competition if food is scarce.

Cannibalism is also a common occurrence among animals when food is scarce. In cases of drought and famine, many carnivores will feed on the dead bodies of their own species, including their own young.

Certain species of sharks give birth to live young instead of laying eggs like the vast majority of fish do. Those young developing in their mothers womb are often conscious and are able to move about freely. These shark pupswill eateach other while still inside their mother if her nutritious yolk is depleted. This form of cannibalism is so common in the sand tiger shark that a female usually only gives birth to two pups at a time because they have eaten all of their other siblings in the womb.

Many female insects will cannibalize their mates soon after the act of reproduction in order to gain additional nutrients for their eggs. The female praying mantis will infamouslydevourher mate once theyve coupled, usually starting with the head, in order to provide a boost of nutrients to her fertilized eggs. Similarly, black widow spiders often live up to their name bykilling and eatingmuch smaller males after theyve been impregnated.

Mammals like lions, macaques, and leopards have also been knownto engagein cannibalism. Mothers will often cannibalize their dead young in order to recoup nutrients.

Violence akin to what we would consider torture has been observed in a select few animal species, mostly concentrated among those with a high degree of intelligence.

Felines, dolphins, killer whales, and primates have all been observed toying with their prey before killing them.

Many people who have owned cats have seen them play with small birds, rodents, or reptiles before finally killing them. Dolphins and killer whales often exhibit similar behavior with seals and fish.

Chimps will often attack strategic points on an enemys body, most commonly the hands and genitals, to maim them before killing them. Theyve also been observed desecrating the dead bodies of adversaries. One notable instance saw a troop of chimps kill a former leader who had been ejected from the group. They then spent hours eating and mutilating his dead body.

Coerced sexual activity occurs on a fairly regular basis in the animal kingdom. Harassment and intimidation by males are common occurrences among dozens of species.

Rape is a normal reproductive strategy in mallards, Dutch scientist Kees Moeliker told The Guardian in 2005. He observed that male ducks would often chase female ducks and force them to land in order to initiate sexual activity with them.

Instances of sexual coercion by male grey seals in the North Sea were so violent that they resulted in the deaths of several female harbor seals, according to a paper published in 2020. Male dolphins off the coast of Australia work together to isolate a single female and then force copulation.

Sexually coercive behavior has also been documented in chimpanzees and orangutans. Its been theorized that female bonobos create alliances with each other to discourage sexual aggression from males.

Several instances have been observed of animals attempting to mate with the corpses of members of their own species.

Cases of both heterosexual and homosexual acts of necrophilia have beenreported among ducks. Moeliker first observed necrophilic behavior in mallards in 1995. He saw a male mallard die after it flew directly into a window and reportedthat another male attempted to mate with the corpse continuously for almost 75 minutes.

In 2014, scientists in Japan reported that three male sand martin birds attempted to mate with the corpse of another male. A herpetologist witnessedtwo male white and black tegu lizards from Brazil try to mate with a dead female in 2013.

Scientists set upa camera trap near the corpse of a female stump-tailed macaque (a type of monkey) in Thailand, and over three days of observation three different male macaques attempted to have intercourse with the dead female.

Penguins have become one of the mascots of the LGBT animal movement, largely due to several high-profile instances of male penguins forming bonded pairs. A childrens book depicting the same-sex romance between two chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo won multiple awards when it was released in 2005.

However, these birds run the gamut on deviant sexual behavior.

In 1912, a British naturalist who joined Robert Scotts famous Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica described the astonishing depravity of the local Adlie penguins. Calling them little knots of hooligans, the naturalist observed instances of rape, necrophilia, infanticide, and abuse of chicks. He also noted instances of homosexuality.

The preceding account may seem a little morbid, even brutal, but it illustrates the danger in justifying certain human behaviors by pointing to similar behavior in animals. Though it can often look idyllic in documentaries or during a casual stroll in a park, morality is often absent in the natural world, and humans ability to discern it is one of our primary advantages over animals.

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NBC Is Using Animals To Push The LGBT Agenda. Here Are 5 Abhorrent Animal Behaviors Humans Shouldn't Emulate - The Daily Wire

Human Behavior

30000 years of history reveals that hard times boost human societies’ resilience – Livescience.com

The old saying may be true: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. At least that's the case for human civilizations across 30,000 years of history, according to a new analysis published May 1 in the journal Nature. The study found that, across the globe, ancient human societies that experienced more setbacks were also quicker to bounce back from future downturns.

"The more often a population experiences disturbances or downturns, the more likely it is to be able to recover faster the next time around," study leader Philip Riris, an archaeologist at Bournemouth University in the U.K., told Live Science.

This seesaw between vulnerability and resilience was particularly strong among early farmers and herders, Riris and his colleagues found. Agricultural communities throughout history experienced more downturns overall than other societies, such as hunter-gatherer groups, but they also recovered from these downturns more quickly than other groups.

"It's an important paper," said Dagomar Degroot, an associate professor at Georgetown University who studies how climate change influenced human history and who was not involved in the research. "There is a lot of really influential work on the collapse of societies faced with climate change," Degroot told Live Science, "but a focus on resilience and only resilience is significantly rarer."

Historians and archaeologists have published many case studies on individual societal crises, Riris agreed. But it's hard to compare these experiences across space and time. He and his team pulled together data from 16 separate archaeological sites around the globe, spanning from South Africa to Canada, with data stretching back as far as 30,000 years ago.

Related: What's the deadliest month of the year?

To determine downturns and recoveries, the researchers used a method called "dates as data." Each site had records of radiocarbon dating, which gives an age for organic materials based on the decay of carbon-14, a radioactive form of carbon. Previous studies have established that the number of carbon-14 dates available for a certain time and place is correlated with population. When there are more people, it means more activity, buildings, trash heaps and firepits to excavate and date.

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Most of the downturns in the study took place on decades-plus timescales and had a variety of causes, ranging from environmental change to societal upheaval. In some cases, the researchers had specific historical or climatological information about what those crises were, such as a cold snap in Norway that led to crop loss. Farmers and herders may be inherently more vulnerable to disaster, Riris said, since one bad growing season or a drought can mean immediate famine. But agricultural and herding societies also may be well positioned to recover from disaster.

"The winners [after a disturbance], either they're just lucky or they have some sort of technology or practice or behavior or social institution that means that they did better during the crisis," Riris said. "As a result, they're more likely to pass down that learning, that aspect of culture that will enable their descendants to do better down the line."

The archaeological findings mesh well with historical case studies, said Degroot, who has researched resilience in the Dutch Republic in the face of the Little Ice Age in the 17th century. "I had found those things for a very narrow case study," he said, "and here the authors find them for a much broader set of case studies."

Whether modern humans can pull directly from these lessons is less certain, Degroot said. All of the societies in the study were preindustrial and might have little in common with today's global order. However, Riris said, the ability to compare societies and look for patterns is important.

"It provides that overarching framework that will allow resilience to be tackled systematically," he said.

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30000 years of history reveals that hard times boost human societies' resilience - Livescience.com

Human Behavior

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Actors Had Trouble Reverting Back to Human – CBR

The graduates of "Ape School" went through a transformation to teach themselves how to best portray primates in the new movie Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. While switching into character was unique for the actors, it was actually reverting back to human behavior that felt more strange.

In a new interview with CBR's Kevin Polowy, actors Kevin Durand and Peter Macon addressed their roles in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Durand plays the villain, the bonobo Proximus Caesar, while Macon plays Raka, a wise orangutan who serves as an ally to Owen Teague's Noa. When asked about the weirdest part of going through Ape School to transition into character, Macon explained how it was more difficult to go back to human behavior at the end of the day.

"I think the weirdest thing was to come back to being a human," as Macon said. "You know, you spend your day... we'd be in there six, seven hours, and just living in this [other mindset]. [...] Sometimes longer! Because Alain Gauthier, our movement coach, would [teach us] it's part of the process too to go back to being a human, so that you can sort of feel the difference in your body, and then go back to being an ape, and go back to being a human. So, transitioning back to being a human at the end of the day, and walking up the stairs, it just didn't feel right."

"So, transitioning back to being a human at the end of the day, and walking up the stairs, it just didn't feel right."

Meanwhile, Durand frequently broke out into character throughout the entire interview with Polowy. The actor joked that he's "still in it" when talking about the "Ape School" training that was done for the primate actors. Durand also shared how he has taken his ape persona home as well, much to the enjoyment of his youngest child.

"My wife begs me to stop," Durand said. "My children, at first, my eldest was like, 'No.' But, my little one was kind of scared, and fascinated."

Demonstrating how he'd spoken to her with his Proximus Caesar voice, Durand added, "Within ten minutes, we're ape-ing around. We would play together, and it was so much fun. She would talk to me like I was Proximus."

The official synopsis for the movie reads, "Director Wes Ball breathes new life into the global, epic franchise set several generations in the future following Caesars reign, in which apes are the dominant species living harmoniously and humans have been reduced to living in the shadows. As a new tyrannical ape leader builds his empire, one young ape undertakes a harrowing journey that will cause him to question all that he has known about the past and to make choices that will define a future for apes and humans alike."

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is now playing in movie theaters.

Source: CBR

Many years after the reign of Caesar, a young ape goes on a journey that will lead him to question everything he's been taught about the past and make choices that will define a future for apes and humans alike.

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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Actors Had Trouble Reverting Back to Human - CBR

Human Behavior

AI learned how to sway humans by watching a cooperative cooking game – Science News Magazine

If youve ever cooked a complex meal with someone, you know the level of coordination required. Someone dices this, someone sauts that, as you dance around holding knives and hot pans. Meanwhile, you might wordlessly nudge each other, placing ingredients or implements within the others reach when youd like something done.

How might a robot handle this type of interaction?

Research presented in late 2023 at the Neural Information Processing Systems, or NeurIPS, conference, in New Orleans, offers some clues. It found that in a simple virtual kitchen, AI can learn how to influence a human collaborator just by watching humans work together.

In the future, humans will increasingly collaborate with artificial intelligence, both online and in the physical world. And sometimes well want an AI to silently guide our choices and strategies, like a good teammate who knows our weaknesses. The paper addresses a crucial and pertinent problem, how AI can learn to influence people, says Stefanos Nikolaidis, who directs the Interactive and Collaborative Autonomous Robotic Systems (ICAROS)lab at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and was not involved in the work.

The new work introduces a way for AI to learn to collaborate with humans, without even practicing with us. It could help us improve human-AI interactions, Nikolaidis says, and detect when AI might take advantage of us whether humans have programmed it to do so, or, someday, it decides to do so on its own.

There are a few ways researchers have already trained AI to influence people. Many approaches involve whats called reinforcement learning (RL), in which an AI interacts with an environment which can include other AIs or humans and is rewarded for making sequences of decisions that lead to desired outcomes. DeepMinds program AlphaGo, for example, learned the board game Go using RL.

But training a clueless AI from scratch to interact with people through sheer trial-and-error can waste a lot of human hours, and can even presents risks if there are, say, knives involved (as there might be in a real kitchen). Another option is to train one AI to model human behavior, then use that as a tireless human substitute for another AI to learn to interact with. Researchers have used this method in, for example, a simple game that involved entrusting a partner with monetary units. But realistically replicating human behavior in more complex scenarios, such as a kitchen, can be difficult.

The new research, from a group at the University of California, Berkeley, used whats called offline reinforcement learning. Offline RL is a method for developing strategies by analyzing previously documented behavior rather than through real-time interaction. Previously, offline RL had been used mostly to help virtual robots move or to help AIs solve mazes, but here it was applied to the tricky problem of influencing human collaborators. Instead of learning by interacting with people, this AI learned by watching human interactions.

Humans already have a modicum of competence at collaboration. So the amount of data needed to demonstrate competent collaboration when two people are working together is not as much as would be needed if one person were interacting with an AI that had never interacted with anyone before.

In the study, the UC Berkeley researchers used a video game called Overcooked, where two chefs divvy up tasks to prepare and serve meals, in this case soup, which earns them points. Its a 2-D world, seen from above, filled with onions, tomatoes, dishes and a stove with pots. At each time step, each virtual chef can stand still, interact with whatever is in front of it, or move up, down, left or right.

The researchers first collected data from pairs of people playing the game. Then they trained AIs using offline RL or one of three other methods for comparison. (In all methods, the AIs were built on a neural network, a software architecture intended to roughly mimic how the brain works.) In one method, the AI just imitated the humans. In another, it imitated the best human performances. The third method ignored the human data and had AIs practice with each other. And the fourth was the offline RL, in which AI does more than just imitate; it pieces together the best bits of what it sees, allowing it to perform better than the behavior it observes. It uses a kind of counterfactual reasoning, where it predicts what score it would have gotten if it had followed different paths in certain situations, then adapts.

The AIs played two versions of the game. In the human-deliver version, the team earned double points if the soup was delivered by the human partner. In the tomato-bonus version, soup with tomato and no onion earned double points. After the training, the chefbots played with real people. The scoring system was different during training and evaluation than when the initial human data were collected, so the AIs had to extract general principles to score higher. Crucially, during evaluation, humans didnt know these rules, like no onion, so the AIs had to nudge them.

On the human-deliver game, training using offline RL led to an average score of 220, about 50 percent more points than the best comparison methods. On the tomato-bonus game, it led to an average score of 165, or about double the points. To support the hypothesis that the AI had learned to influence people, the paper described how when the bot wanted the human to deliver the soup, it would place a dish on the counter near the human. In the human-human data, the researchers found no instances of one person passing a plate to another in this fashion. But there were events where someone put down a dish and ones where someone picked up a dish, and the AI could have seen value in stitching these acts together.

The researchers also developed a method for the AI to infer and then influence humans underlying strategies in cooking steps, not just their immediate actions. In real life, if you know that your cooking partner is slow to peel carrots, you might jump on that role each time until your partner stops going for the carrots. A modification to the neural network to consider not only the current game state but also a history of their partners actions would give a clue as to what their partners current strategy is.

Again, the team collected human-human data. Then they trained AIs using this offline RL network architecture or the previous offline RL one. When tested with human partners, inferring the partners strategy improved scores by roughly 50 percent on average. In the tomato-bonus game, for example, the bot learned to repeatedly block the onions until people eventually left them alone. That the AI worked so well with humans was surprising, says study coauthor Joey Hong, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley.

Avoiding the use of a human model is great, says Rohan Paleja, a computer scientist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Mass., who was not involved in the work. It makes this approach applicable to a lot of real-world problems that do not currently have accurate simulated humans. He also said the system is data-efficient; it achieved its abilities after watching only 20 human-human games (each 1,200 steps long).

Nikolaidis sees potential for the method to enhance AI-human collaboration. But he wishes that the authors had better documented the observed behaviors in the training data and exactly how the new method changed peoples behaviors to improve scores.

In the future, we may be working with AI partners in kitchens, warehouses, operating rooms, battlefields and purely digital domains like writing, research and travel planning. (We already use AI tools for some of these tasks.) This type of approach could be helpful in supporting people to reach their goals when they dont know the best way to do this, says Emma Brunskill, a computer scientist at Stanford University who was not involved in the work. She proposes that an AI could observe data from fitness apps and learn to better nudge people to meet New Years exercise resolutions through notifications (SN: 3/8/17). The method might also learn to get people to increase charitable donations, Hong says.

On the other hand, AI influence has a darker side. Online recommender systems can, for example,try to have us buy more, or watch more TV, Brunskill says, not just for this moment, but also to shape us into being people who buy more or watch more.

Previous work, which was not about human-AI collaboration, has shown how RL can help recommender systems manipulate users preferences so that those preferences would be more predictable and satisfiable, even if people didnt want their preferences shifted. And even if AI means to help, it may do so in ways we dont like, according to Micah Carroll, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley who works with one of the paper authors. For instance, the strategy of blocking a co-chefs path could be seen as a form of coercion. We, as a field, have yet to integrate ways for a person to communicate to a system whattypes of influence they are OK with, he says. For example, Im OK with an AI trying to argue for a specific strategy, but not forcing me to do it if I dont want to.

Hong is currently looking to use his approach to improve chatbots (SN: 2/1/24). The large language models behind interfaces such as ChatGPT typically arent trained to carry out multi-turn conversations. A lot of times when you ask a GPT to do something, it gives you a best guess of what it thinks you want, he says. It wont ask for clarification to understand your true intent and make its answers more personalized.

Learning to influence and help people in a conversation seems like a realistic near-term application. Overcooked, he says, with its two dimensions and limited menu, is not really going to help us make better chefs.

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AI learned how to sway humans by watching a cooperative cooking game - Science News Magazine

Human Behavior

We can’t combat climate change without changing minds. This psychology class explores how. – Northeastern University

Published on

March 7, 2024

PSYC-4660: Humans & Nature is part of a broader academic push at Northeastern to explore the intersection of environmental science and cognitive processing and how it can lead to tangible changes.

When Northeastern professors John Coley and Brian Helmuth tell their students to introduce themselves, they really mean it.

Its a clammy Monday afternoon in mid-January, and the 15 members of PSYC-4660 Humans & Nature: The Psychology of Social-Ecological Systems on Northeastern Universitys Boston campus are taking turns in front of a projector. Theyre going through detailed PowerPoint slides outlining their majors, family backgrounds, college resumes thus far, hobbies, dogs and cats. Some grew up going to grandparents farms and camping every weekend in rural New England; one works part time for a company that sells carbon credits. Eshna Kulshreshtha, born and raised in California, talks about the small arguments she and her Indian immigrant parents have about recycling.

Ive never had a class where we spent an hour just doing introductions, says Kulshreshtha, a second-year marine science major, in an interview a few days later.

In another context it might be oversharing; here it has a point. The central argument of the class is that our personal backgrounds, behaviors and resulting worldviews may hold the key to saving the planet.

A new offering for the spring 2024 semester, PSYC-4660 is a seminar in cognition, a subset of psychology that covers how people encode, represent and process information from the environment in the brain, according to Coley, a psychology professor with a dual appointment in environmental science. Humans & Nature zeros in on how those things inform our interactions with the natural world, and the in-depth intros underscore just how different those can be from person to person based on their backgrounds.

Cataloged as an upper-level psychology class but available to any interested undergrad, the seminar is also part of a larger push at Northeastern to explore the relationship between brain and environmental sciences, including collaborative research papers and a new Ph.D. program currently accepting applicants for the coming fall.

I have become more and more convinced that this is a critical component to getting people and, honestly, agencies and governments to act in a more sustainable way, Coley says.

A marine science professor based at Northeasterns Nahant campus, Helmuth researches how climate change impacts coastal ecosystems. He has spent a large chunk of his career underwater, and more of it than he would like watching many of those ecosystems disappear. In his view, many solutions to issues affecting the planet are clear-cut; how to effectively implement them at scale is another story.

In most environmental problems the issue is not the science, he says a few days after the class meeting. Weve got a lot of solutions. Its the human behavior side thats hard to change. In policy, theres a lot of experimentation, but its kind of trial and error.

Coley is a developmental psychologist by training; early in his career, he researched how very young children categorize the natural world. The first big study I did at Northeastern looked at kids from across Massachusetts from inner-city Boston and Somerville to some very rural places in Western Massachusetts and how [their] experiences led to differences in how kids think about relations among plants and animals, he says. Further research examined how those backgrounds affected college kids learning in biology and other life science classes.

In most environmental problems the issue is not the science. Weve got a lot of solutions. Its the human behavior side thats hard to change.

The two initially met through Nicole Betz, a graduate student in Coleys lab. Last year, the three co-authored a paper on how human exceptionalism the idea that humans are different and set apart from other organisms can hinder sustainable behavior.

Humans & Nature is a further exploration of that type of academic research in a classroom setting with readings, lectures and a heavy emphasis on class discussions, all dealing with questions about how we think comes to bear on biodiversity preservation, food systems and climate change, according to the syllabus.

For the first few weeks, for example, the course content focuses on biodiversity conservation, or preserving the richness of species on Earth. An academic paper by sustainability scientist Thomas McShane explores the trade-offs between preserving biodiversity and human well-being; another, from 2019, explores possible links between a richer array of species and increased mental health in humans. Research from 2016 by a trio of ecologists in the academic journal Global Environmental Change focuses on urban biodiversity, outlining possible ways to marry development and conservation of natural environments in an economically equitable way.

The class is not proscriptive: I dont think there are specific misconceptions that were trying to puncture, Helmuth says. A lot of this is helping the students identify complexities in their different worldviews as they relate to those topics. Id be very surprised, even with a class this size, if they were all at the same starting point.

After introductions, the class breaks into small groups to discuss the assigned reading: a thin textbook called Human Dependence on Nature: How to Help Solve the Environmental Crisis by Haydn Washington. They talk together at length about collectivism and the sense of community in small, rural villages around the world and how it contrasts to the individualist, comparatively isolated routines of Western European and American societies.

We can follow a behavior but not value it in the United States, a student muses. I think its harder. In other societies where [people are more immediately affected by] the general health of their community, it might be easier to implement a belief in sustainability and helping the world around you.

The conversation isnt just geopolitical. Its a group in their early 20s, and millennials catch strays for being off-trend and having a collectively dire outlook on global warming. I recently saw a video that was like Stanley cups are over because the moms have gotten to it now its not cool, one student says. Were getting sick of things a lot faster, and overconsumption speeds up.

Theres a shift in our younger generation thats more inclined towards an understanding and appreciation for nature, which was lost on the millennial population because there was so much talk about climate change and overconsumption that everyone got overwhelmed, says another.

Kulshreshtha has experienced these types of vast differences in attitude even within her family. She grew up frequently visiting relatives in New Delhi and Noida in India. There, she explains, sustainability and eco-friendliness arent talked about nearly as much as they are in the United States, but not because people dont care about it. Rather, sustainable habits and practices are more baked into daily life.

Especially now, in the United States, people constantly pushing you to think about, like, Hey, make sure youre recycling the right thing, she says. Thats always on the forefront of your mind is this thing Im doing environmentally friendly?

With my extended family, its not something that they talk about, but theyre not being as harmful to the environment in their daily lives, she continues. My family in India still gets milk delivered every morning from the milkman, they put the bottles outside again every day. If you get groceries, youre not getting individual plastic bags for your broccoli and carrots. The street food vendors use bowls made out of leaves and wooden utensils. All these things are already integrated into Indian culture, so its not like you have to be actively thinking about how much plastic youre using every day.

Helmuth and Coley both think those types of insights can have direct impacts, particularly at a place like Northeastern. Environmental psychology with a focus on the natural world isnt a totally new concept, but tying it directly to human behavior and policy in an academically rigorous way is a next step. The course dovetails with research the two men have collaborated on, with implications for real-world scenarios like science education curricula and aiding the federal government on more effective environmental messaging and policy (Helmuth was a co-author of the White Houses most recent National Climate Assessment, released in November).

In the fall, Northeastern will begin admission to a new Ph.D. program in Human Behavior and Sustainability Sciences that integrates traditional core requirements of psychology and environmental science graduate programs. The hope is that this sort of interdisciplinary training could lead to more collaborations like theirs. Someone in psychology who [specializes in] decision-making and someone who studies salt marsh restoration could work together, Coley says. We want to provide Ph.D. students with structured opportunities to make those connections across fields.

And theyre optimistic about the future possibilities those collaborations could lead to. One advantage of teaching someplace like this is that these students are going to take over the world, Helmuth says. We already have a lot of students through co-ops working in the city of Boston, in state offices, at NASA. Anything we do in a classroom here is going to multiply itself.

Schuyler Velasco is a Northeastern Global News Magazine senior writer. Email her at s.velasco@northeastern.edu. Follow her on X/Twitter @Schuyler_V.

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We can't combat climate change without changing minds. This psychology class explores how. - Northeastern University

Human Behavior

Bees Reveal a Human-Like Collective Intelligence We Never Knew Existed – ScienceAlert

The humble bumblebee is proof that brain size isn't everything.

This little insect with its wee, seed-sized brain has shown a level of collective intelligence in experiments that scientists thought was wholly unique to humans.

When trained in the lab to open a two-step puzzle box, bumblebees of the species Bombus terrestris could teach the solution to another bee that had never seen the box before.

This naive bee would not have solved the puzzle on its own. To teach the 'demonstrator' bees the non-intuitive solution in the first place, researchers had to show them what to do and offer them a reward after the first step to keep them motivated.

"This finding challenges a common opinion in the field: that the capacity to socially learn behaviors that cannot be innovated through individual trial and error is unique to humans," write the team of researchers based in the United Kingdom and United States.

Humans have a long history of 'moving the goalposts' on what sets our species apart from all others.

Once, it was thought that humans were the only animals with culture. But 'viral' songs among sparrows, the evolving dialects and traditions of whales, the regional hunting strategies of orcas, and the learned tool tricks of apes, crows, and dolphins, all suggest that socially transmitted behaviors are also present in animal societies, too.

Some of these cultural behaviors even show signs of refinement and improvement over time. Homing pigeons, for instance, learn from each other and adjust their culture's flight paths year on year.

An influential way to move the goalposts on human intelligence is to say that humans are unique from other animals because we can learn things from each other that we could not invent independently.

Think of the device you are reading this article on right now. No one human can invent all its parts and mechanics from scratch on their own and in one lifetime. It's taken decades of work and refinement to get to this advanced stage. Even the very act of reading is a skill that generations of humans have built upon little by little.

Obviously, no animal can put together an iPhone or read an article on animal intelligence. But at a basic level, bumblebees join chimpanzees in "cast[ing] serious doubt on this supposed human exceptionalism," writes Alex Thornton, an ecologist at the University of Exeter, in a review of the bumblebee research for Nature.

Chimpanzees have large brains and rich cultural lives, but the discovery among bumblebees, Thornton argues, is "all the more remarkable because it focuses not on humanity's primate cousins, but on an animal with a brain that is barely 0.0005 percent of the size of a chimpanzee's."

Underestimated for decades, largely because of their size, bumblebees are finally getting their due.

Recent experiments in the lab show these bees can learn from each other, use tools, count to zero, and perform basic mathematical equations.

The collective intelligence of their hive mind is also not to be dismissed.

To test it, behavioral scientist Alice Bridges from Queen Mary University of London and colleagues housed colonies of bumblebees with a two-step puzzle for a total of 36 or 72 hours over 12 or 24 consecutive days, with no human help.

After all that time, the bees could not figure out how to get to the sugary reward. Bumblebees spend on average about 8 days foraging in their lifetimes, so it's as if they had up to a third of their lifetime foraging time to work on the puzzle.

In the image below, you can see the puzzle. The yellow circle contains a drop of sugar under a plastic lid. Bees can get to it by pushing the red tab, but only once the blue tab has been pushed out of the way.

It took a human to painstakingly show them the way, and this was only possible using an extra reward. But once one bee figured it out, they could teach others how to move the two tabs to retrieve a sugary treat.

A similar experiment on chimps was also published recently in Nature Human Behavior. Both the vertebrate and invertebrate case studies showed a sharing of ideas that were exceptionally hard to learn alone.

Of course, this behavior wasn't observed in the wild. It had to be taught to the bees and chimps first. But the findings leave open the possibility that if there were a rare, once-in-a-lifetime innovator in chimp or bee society an Einstein among bees their ideas might stick around in animal culture and be used for generations to come.

Bees' famous honey waggle dance, pointing out the distance, direction, and quality of sources of food, for instance, is a behavior that was once thought to be purely instinctive, but it now appears to be somewhat shaped by social influences.

In 2017, researchers also trained bumblebees to roll a ball into a goal for a reward. To score, the insects had to learn from each other and remedy their previous mistakes. And so they did.

The newest experiment, Thornton writes, "suggests that the ability to learn from others what cannot be learnt alone should now join tool use, episodic memory (the ability to recall specific past events) and intentional communication in the scrapheap" of explanations for human cognition and culture.

The study was published in Nature.

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Bees Reveal a Human-Like Collective Intelligence We Never Knew Existed - ScienceAlert

Human Behavior

Franciscan AI expert warns of technology becoming a ‘pseudo-religion’ – Detroit Catholic

ROME (CNS) -- Artificial intelligence risks giving technology a "pseudo-religion" status by shaping the way people engage with information and reality, a leading expert on artificial intelligence said.

Interacting with artificially intelligent large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT could "fracture us from reality," Franciscan Father Paolo Benanti, an expert on artificial intelligence and professor of moral theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, said March 7 at a conference organized by the Pontifical Academy of Theology.

Relying on such models could "reduce our capacity to have a strengthened, more sophisticated (way of) reasoning," he said, since people would have less need to engage in the focused thought required for tasks that can be completed by artificially intelligent technology.

Artificial intelligence, he said, can alter humanity's relationship with reality "to the point that (humanity's) desire for control, which satisfies the anxiety typical of the human condition, could take on a tendency toward a pseudo-religion regarding machines."

The theologian said that as machines become increasingly "humanized," humans also become increasingly "mechanized." As an example, he suggested considering a boy performing a task on a phone. "Is it his fingers that control the screen or are the phone's notifications controlling the behavior of the boy?" he asked.

"External causes such as interactions with machines can change our behavior," he said.

By using algorithms that consume and process the vast amounts of data humans produce, "the machine is not only able to predict our behavior, but is also able to produce our behavior," he said.

But unlike laws created by governments, which are also intended to influence human behavior, algorithms are developed by private companies that have financial earnings and not the public good as their primary objective, he said, citing as an example the world of e-commerce, which suggests products to users based on collected data about their shopping history and interests.

Father Benanti said that the "knowledge" produced by artificial intelligence can make data the principal way people making sense of and exercise control over their reality -- which is what he said religious thinking seeks to do -- and he said theology must confront such a rapid transformation in the way people view the world around them.

Originally posted here:
Franciscan AI expert warns of technology becoming a 'pseudo-religion' - Detroit Catholic