Michael Tomassello conducted with his group another experiment concerning how apes react to others' behaviour. And again, based on sloppy definitions he and his team overestimated and misinterpreted what their results meant. It is more and more common that not only poorly trained and/or click-hunting 'science journalists' misinterpret the findings of studies, but also the researchers workig on them.
See the original paper here.
And the successful bullshit-busting here, by Hanoch Ben-Yami (CEU).
Frans DeWaal is someone who repeatedly did the same thing, when he claimed that apes possess the same as our what we mean by empathy in our current societies. While DeWaal's experiments and many of his observations - just like Tomasello's - are truly fascinating, he over-interprets his findings too.
The reason of such over-interpretations and misunderstandings is usually careless thinking: the researchers involved in the experiments don't think hard and carefully about the concepts and questions they pose and try to answer. It is usually very obvious that they lack any training in conceptual work, and don't have a solid humanities background. Of course there would be funding to solve this issue, but then the results would be much more cautious and less sensational. They wouldn't make for such entertaining TED-talk material. Sadly, the truth loses in these circumstances often.
No comments:
Post a Comment