Clever Hans

We're delivering messages.

You know what this brings me back to? Clever Hans.

Never thought I'd reincorporate Clever Hans, but Clever Hans was the horse who could do math.

The horse.

[laughs]

Right? [laughs]

Clever Hans, the counting horse.

He could count a...

All well and good, until someone checked the math, as I would say, or the maths.

Scientists and philosophers meet Clever Hans, the psychic horse.

Around 100 years ago, some of the greatest minds thought there were people who had psychic abilities.

In fact, they even suggested that perhaps horses and dogs could have them too.

Stay tuned for an upcoming Loons from Canada where we're going to actually talk about this subject.

Going back to clever Hans and dogs being psychic.

AI skepticism versus AI excitement.

Despite the tech industry's conviction that the rise of AI is an inflection point that will change the course of humanity, and with already enough money behind it to see it through, Many humans remain skeptical whether the new direction we're headed in is the right one.

The walking effect appeared when the person holding the timer believed that it would.

Now, if you've been listening to "The Psych Files" for a while, you might recall me talking about good old Clever Hans.

Now, this is the horse that in the early 1900s could supposedly do arithmetic, tapping out answers with his hoof.

And, uh, you know, it's interesting.

[chuckles] This horse was answering math questions, but he wasn't doing the math.

He was reading the tiny unconscious changes in his questioner's posture and breathing, the little tell signs that said, "Okay, that's the right number.

Stop tapping." So when you removed hi-his, his questioner, this person, his owner, fr-from the room, then Clever Hans didn't get any questions right.

So nobody was cheating, though, on purpose.

Cognitive scientists define learning as a relatively permanent change in long-term memory.

And to illustrate how deceptive performance can be, Instructional Illusions brings up another amazing historical story, Clever Hans.

Have you ever heard of Clever Hans before this?

The famous horse in early 1900s Berlin.

Yes, it's a legendary case study in psychology.

Hans saw that microscopic cue, stopped tapping, and got a carrot.

It is a stunning metaphor for the classroom.

Clever Hans was performing, not learning.

So one example that you give in your article, this is not about AI, but this is about the kind of lesson from biology or from psychology that subtle things can be happening that you need to have an alert and skeptical mind to notice what might really be going on.

So could you just regale us with the old story of Clever Hans?

So Clever Hans was a horse who lived in the early 1900s in Germany, and Clever Hans was able to answer arithmetic questions.

So you'd say like, "What's 14 plus 12?" And he would tap his hoof that many times.

Looked like a genius horse.

Uh-huh.

The observer themselves is interfering with the experiment or the outcome of the experiment, and that is such an interesting role.

Of course, this Clever Hans is very famous, and I agree that that is a very clever horse-

It's very easy to be fooled.

Uh, I like to give the example of, uh, of Clever Hans about how we can be fooled about such things, about what's going on.

So if you're not familiar with Clever Hans, he's a horse.

Um, lived, uh, around the turn of the, uh, nineteen hundreds, nineteen-- uh, just before nineteen hundred, around nineteen hundred.

Uh, and, uh, he was very good at, well, mathematics.

Eventually, they, you know, gave him a, a code for, uh, you know, uh, a sort of Morse code for letters.

And, uh, and he would start stomping out answers to questions, right? Uh, and, uh, he was very good at that as well.

Uh, well, uh, although most scientists were saying, "Yeah, Clever Hans can do these things," there was a skeptic, and eventually, he figured out exactly what Clever Hans was doing.