Jun 15, 2026 · 50 min · 10 segments
In this episode, host Chris speaks with Dr. Christine Webb about primate behavior, cognition and consciousness, and dismantling the myth of human exceptionalism. Dr. Christine Webb is an assistant…
Chris LynnHost
So one of the things you point out in the book is that Historically, psychological approaches to primatology, especially primatological cognition, have been lab-based studies.
And as a consequence, you've chosen, I guess, the harder route of studying them in their natural habitat.
I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about some of those problems and what we should be doing.
I always had some ethical reservations about studying other primates in captive environments like labs and zoos.
I didn't mention I also studied the chimpanzees at the zoo in Arnhem in my past list, but it came up earlier.
It didn't sit right with me, mostly because of, again, how I felt while doing it.
The first time I really started questioning the whole enterprise, though, was when I was working at the Primate Cognition Lab at Colorado.
Colombia, where there are these singly housed rhesus macaques in a very, very sterile environment.
And, you know, for an hour or two a day, they would get to play with these computer touchscreens for food rewards.
And the lab was studying their numerical cognition and whether they had categories that could count.
And that following summer, after I started working in that lab, I did my first bout of fieldwork in South Africa with the chacma baboons.
And not only did that feel like a much truer, more authentic, richer experience, what I was envisioning as a prime dermatologist my life looking like.
I also really began to realize that as a scientist interested in questions primarily about social cognition, right? So how other animals relate to one another and deal with the complex rewards and challenges of living in a social group.
For those kinds of questions, studying singly housed rhesus attacks made no sense, right? They didn't have complex social lives.
It would be a little bit like, okay, I want to study cooperation or altruism or pro-sociality in human beings.
And I'm going to study incarcerated individuals who live in cells or cages by themselves.
And that experience of seeing how the baboons' lives, their physical and social environments changed so much on a day-to-day basis, right? They had to keep track of each other, who their friends were, who their foes were, their families, their children.
They had to navigate a very transient ecological situation, changing tides, seasons, sunlight hours, food availability, terrain.
I began to see, okay, this must influence their physical and their social cognition.
And then going back to the lab at Columbia after that experience, the first day I went back, I almost fainted.
So one of the things you point out in the book is that Historically, psychological approaches to primatology, especially primatological cognition, have been lab-based studies.
And as a consequence, you've chosen, I guess, the harder route of studying them in their natural habitat.
I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about some of those problems and what we should be doing.
I always had some ethical reservations about studying other primates in captive environments like labs and zoos.
I didn't mention I also studied the chimpanzees at the zoo in Arnhem in my past list, but it came up earlier.
It didn't sit right with me, mostly because of, again, how I felt while doing it.
The first time I really started questioning the whole enterprise, though, was when I was working at the Primate Cognition Lab at Colorado.
Colombia, where there are these singly housed rhesus macaques in a very, very sterile environment.
And, you know, for an hour or two a day, they would get to play with these computer touchscreens for food rewards.
And the lab was studying their numerical cognition and whether they had categories that could count.
And that following summer, after I started working in that lab, I did my first bout of fieldwork in South Africa with the chacma baboons.
And not only did that feel like a much truer, more authentic, richer experience, what I was envisioning as a prime dermatologist my life looking like.
I also really began to realize that as a scientist interested in questions primarily about social cognition, right? So how other animals relate to one another and deal with the complex rewards and challenges of living in a social group.
For those kinds of questions, studying singly housed rhesus attacks made no sense, right? They didn't have complex social lives.
It would be a little bit like, okay, I want to study cooperation or altruism or pro-sociality in human beings.
And I'm going to study incarcerated individuals who live in cells or cages by themselves.
And that experience of seeing how the baboons' lives, their physical and social environments changed so much on a day-to-day basis, right? They had to keep track of each other, who their friends were, who their foes were, their families, their children.
They had to navigate a very transient ecological situation, changing tides, seasons, sunlight hours, food availability, terrain.
I began to see, okay, this must influence their physical and their social cognition.
And then going back to the lab at Columbia after that experience, the first day I went back, I almost fainted.
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