This Horse Changed Psychology Forever| The Life and Times of Carl Stumpf and Clever Hans

So, while working on several larger projects, I realized that I was definitely not going to be able to make my January 14th release date that I promised at the end of the last video. And I'm fully aware that I didn't make it with this video either, but you know, trust me, this one came out sooner than the other ones would have. And if you're wondering why I'm doing release dates at the end of my videos now, honestly, you don't need to worry about that. That's more for me than for you. I'm what you would call a professional procrastinator. And as such, I work best under the pressure of deadlines, because I generally only work under the pressure of deadlines. Either way, I decided that in the meantime, I'd adapt a research presentation that I had given in my capstone class about an early application of scientific investigation at the dawn of psychology as a science, instead of working on the very long video essay that I was working on instead of this. So regarding this project that I adapted, this was a time where the academic world was caught between the psychologists and the psychoanalysts, who in our general view of history, get unjustly lumped together. This was also a time where psychology was trying to distinguish itself from the philosophy departments in the universities, and attempting to apply scientific methodologies and rigor to its claims and inquiries. This story provides wonderful insights into the importance of testing hypotheses with the intent to falsify, and how scientific findings are often made in spite of one's original hypothesis. Things that are still ever relevant to scientists today, and some of the easiest things to forget. Enter Karl Stumpf, born in 1848. In these days, there wasn't really much in the way of an academic track for psychology as we understand it today. While Karl would go on to found the Berlin Institute of Psychology, where Gestalt psychology would later be conceived, he began his academic life in the humanities, namely studying music and philosophy at the Gymnasiums of Bamberg and Aschaffenburg, respectively. He would go on to attend the University of Würzburg, where he initially studied law and the philosophy of aesthetics. In his autobiography, he notes that his interest in the Kantian school of philosophy was one of the driving forces for interest in law at the time. However, he would later shift his focus from law to philosophy under the tutelage of Franz Brentano. Brentano, at this time, was in the process of formulating his philosophy of phenomenology. And while this was not fully realized at the time he was Stumpf's instructor, no doubt there were some influences of phenomenology on Stumpf's way of thinking. Consequently, Stumpf shifted away from the Kantian school and became very concerned with empiricism in his work, and phenomenology emphasizes this. Around this time, Stumpf also attended various lectures on physics and scientific research methods which no doubt influenced his later work in psychology as well. It was during his dissertation work, which was supervised by Hermann Lutz, that he was introduced to psychology. Much like his education, his career after graduation was very eclectic, ranging from science to philosophy and of course psychology at various institutions. Fast forward to 1904. Stumpf was approached to consult on the curious case of a horse that had demonstrated mathematical abilities. Clever Hans, as the horse was named, was owned by a man by the name of Mr. von Otzen, who had supposedly educated the horse to solve various math problems. According to an article published in 1911 by a journalist reviewing the case, Harry Johnson, Otzen had supposedly taught his horse to count, perform simple addition, and eventually to even square root. The method of communication between the horse and the questioner was the horse tapping his right front hoof however many times till he had reached the correct count. Otzen began training Hans by showing Hans a written number, verbally saying the number, and then having Hans tap his foot to the correct count. In essence, he was trying to teach Hans to read, which is why Otzen described this as not training, but education. Before Stumpf was consulted on the case, multiple investigations had already been made into the claims about Clever Hans, but none of them had determined that deception was the motive or intent. Otzen had turned down multiple offers to buy Hans, and in addition, Hans was able to correctly produce the answer to mathematical questions regardless of whether Otzen was the questioner or if it was someone else. Considering Hans' training was more similar to human education than the typical training of a horse, various theories were proposed by investigators, one of which was that subtle non-verbal cues from either Otzen, another questioner, or an audience member was what caused Hans to elicit the proper responses, and not his own mathematical ability. Stumpf, along with a man named Oskar Fungst, who would later go on to write a book about the case, proposed an experiment to determine the efficacy of the supposed genius horse. By his own account, Stumpf was not very partial to the theory of non-verbal cues and believed that deception was involved in the part of the trainer. Stumpf believed that perhaps a form of nasal whisper, which had been a technique employed by various frauds of the time who claimed that they possessed telepathy, and he believed that this was the method of deception at play here. Stumpf's justification for this line of thinking was that a horse would lack the visual prowess to be able to detect these sorts of non-verbal cues, particularly if human investigators, who have better vision than horses, had thus far failed to pick up on any. This was a decent rationale and hypothesis, but it needed to be tested, and in these early days of psychology, there was a real drive to make it as scientific as possible, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do just that. Stumpf devised a series of experiments that would attempt to falsify the non-verbal theory. The first experiment, conducted by Stumpf and his colleagues, was to ask questions that neither the experimenter nor anyone else present knew the answer to. Under this condition, Hans was only successful 8% of the time, whereas under uncontrolled circumstances, Hans' success rate was 98%. This gave their investigation a baseline between controlled and uncontrolled conditions, but it alone was not enough to disprove the idea that Hans was able to do basic math. Of course, the argument could be made that if his own trainer didn't know the answer, he likely hadn't received the education to produce the correct response. However, in addition to providing a baseline for the investigation, it also strengthened the hypothesis that some sort of cue was being given to Hans by someone present at the time of the question. Working from that hypothesis, another experiment was designed to determine whether the cue was visual or auditory. In this experiment, they arranged it to where Hans was made to wear blinders that blocked his vision of the experimenter who now stood behind him. Under these conditions, Hans gave random taps in response to the questions given. This offered more evidence in favor of the idea that not only was Hans not actually doing math, but there was some sort of visual cue at play as opposed to an auditory one. After determining that they should be looking for visual cues, they returned to uncontrolled conditions and were now able to spot what was tipping Hans off. The surprising thing to Stumpf was that they were not just seeing these nonverbal cues from the questioner, but from the audience members as well. These cues were only very slight tilts of the head, so slight as to be unconscious movements by Stumpf's estimation. What of Stumpf's original rationale that a horse lacked the visual capacity to spot these cues? Well, it turns out that Mr. von Otzen typically wore a wide-brimmed hat. Since it was Otzen that trained Hans, when Hans was initially learning to spot these cues, the wide-brimmed hat would make these slight head movements much more obvious. From this, Hans learned to generalize this behavior to more subtle movements. While this was well before the school of behaviorism, it is very likely that operating conditioning was at play. Otzen was very invested in his horse and had a deep emotional connection to him, so while there was likely not an organized reward routine for Hans, the social reward of food he'd would produce the behavioristic basis for the acquisition of the behavior. While at this point, the evidence was heavily stacked in favor of unconscious nonverbal cues being the thing that tipped Hans off, Stumpf and his colleagues wanted to push this hypothesis to the limits to see if it could be falsified. A final experiment was designed where investigators would ask math questions to Hans and then consciously prohibit any movements of their heads. Once again, Hans' 98% accuracy became random hoof taps. Not only was this case settled to a great degree of satisfaction, but the finding of unconscious nonverbal movements that could give a trained observer necessary cues to give correct answers would influence psychological testing in the future and lead to the debunking of various frauds such as mediums and psychics, who employed these same sorts of observations to read people and craft elaborate and believable reads. Like any good story, however, it ends with a bit of controversy. After Stumpf's experiments, a controversy as to who should be credited with the discovery came about with Dr. Albert Moll, who published his own experiments that had shown similar findings almost a year prior to Stumpf's investigation, a dispute that was never openly settled. Despite the controversy of credit, this story and the way in which scientific experimentation was employed offers a lot of takeaways for us even today. Science is an inescapable feature of our lives in the contemporary world. Everywhere you look, there are technologies and practices based on the findings of all the different branches of science. Because of this pervasiveness, it is easy to conflate science itself with those technologies and practices developed based on scientific findings. Science is the process, nothing more than the explanatory framework built on observation and falsification. Not the collection of knowledge accrued based off of the process or the technologies developed based on that knowledge. I know this might sound a bit pedantic, and yes, I am a bit of a pedant, but it is important to make this distinction, because it influences the way that we think about science. When we think about science as a constant, unchanging collection of facts, it's easy to think of it as a dogma. Ultimately, science is built upon falsification. Any rationale or hypothesis can sound reasonable enough and can be a decent enough explanation, but perhaps it's missing a key detail. Scientific observation and experimentation exists because of the limits of rationality. Experiments exist to falsify hypotheses, not to prove them. Another important distinction that runs the risk of sounding pedantic. Science, unlike other explanatory frameworks, does not claim certainty, quite the opposite. Scientific knowledge is comprised of an ever-growing number of explanations that have been ruled out rather than explanations that have been confirmed. When we reach the limits of our technological capabilities to falsify a claim, or run out of claims to falsify, we can be fairly certain that our assessments are accurate. But the question can always be raised again. Some people will point out the ever-changing nature of scientific theories as a reason to distrust science, but this is exactly why it's trustworthy. It is trustworthy in that if the scientific community finds a way to falsify a claim, we stop making that claim. The advantage of science over all other explanatory frameworks is that whatever claims are made in the bounds of science are the claims that survived rigorous attempts at falsification. That being said, there are equally dubious claims that everything in science is equally questionable by anyone regardless of methodology or credentials. The claims are up for scrutiny, yes, but so are the methods for challenging them. This is what peer review exists for. Every question in science is up for debate, but if one does not have the knowledge or ability to design a study that can actually attempt to falsify the claim, then any additional claims made by that party are not valid critiques of a well-researched scientific claim. These days, there is a growing mistrust for scientific credentials, from medical conspiracy theories to ancient alien theories to opportunistic health fads, and there are no shortage of people calling the validity of science education into question. Whether they be making the claim directly or by merit of the overall argument and message. The more I look at this sort of discourse, the more a common factor rears its ugly head. The idea that credentials don't matter and the implication that scientists are merely taught a dogma they are incentivized and sworn to uphold. This leads to the assumption that when the scientific community does disavow or debunk a claim, it's merely an attack against the people that are making that claim in order to uphold the existing dogma. This is an idea born out of looking at science like a collection of claims. The assumption that a higher education in science is just the same as science education in grade school. Far from it. That sort of education is to introduce children to science, not to actually explain scientific framework because that is something that developing minds are not going to grasp onto as well. Even in the undergraduate level, higher education in science promotes searching through the literature to see the debates in the scientific community on a topic, to think with the intent to falsify, to think critically. What you learn from a science education is that there are many competing explanations for any given question, and then you are taught that the process of experimentation is our tool to parse out the best explanations among them, which is an ongoing process. Does it sound like I'm on a soapbox? Do I sound preachy right now? Thank you. I'll take it. The reason I'm getting preachy about this is because it's just, it's one of those things that I just can't get away from, it seems like. You know what I mean? Like, you can't get away from... Can you say that in a different way? Yeah. Okay. Enough going off script. I mean, I was preaching because these are all facts, and you're just relating them. Yeah, but how... I don't know. Maybe I'm, like, diverting from the topic of the horse. You know what? That was the plan all along. I tricked you. I got you in with a fun little story about a horse, and now you're here learning about science and how it's important and it's probably not what you think it is. The point is, science is always changing, but when people make claims counter to the general scientific consensus, they will often hide behind this fact to shield them from critique. I'm just raising questions is a very popular lampshade among these types. It's important to keep in mind that while scientific consensus is always changing, the event of a paradigm shift is fairly rare. Not often do we find that all of our previous rigorous attempts at falsification and subsequent theorizing based off of that data is entirely wrong. And even rarer still, do we find that the scientific paradigm shifts back to a previous already falsified paradigm. Oftentimes these types will also critique the motivations of scientists and point to sources of funding as conflicts of interest. And yes, these are very valid critiques of the scientific community to an extent. These are also just general critiques of capitalism as a whole, and generally the same types, quick to point out the issues with scientific funding, are also very pro-capitalism. So there's that. But beyond that, while conflicts of interest arising from scientific funding exist, the important thing to keep in mind is that science is somewhat self-correcting in this way. For any field or even any research question, there are multiple research groups and labs investigating it. Beyond that, the process of peer review to be published in a scientific journal often involves other professionals that are removed from those conflicts of interest. And even when peer review isn't enough to prevent bad studies from getting published, scientists across labs are always debating and checking each other's work by repeating it. So even when you do have a financially motivated scientist who is also unhealthily clinging onto their hypothesis, there are many steps in the process outside of them that help to ensure that scientific literature should provide a thorough investigation of a question. And here lies one of the most beautiful aspects of the scientific community. If you're skeptical of a scientific claim, in order for a paper to even be published, there's a degree of transparency that has to be met. Go read the paper that makes a claim you're curious about. The methods and procedures will be in there, because replication is an important part of science. A scientific paper should include all of the information that one would need to replicate it, which means that if there are any problems in the design, you should be able to find them in the paper. Also, most scientific papers include a section at the end where the limitations of the study and design are discussed, and suggestions for future studies to overcome these limitations. If you're reading a paper in a field that you're not educated in, it's going to be difficult to read. Hell, even if you are educated in that field, some papers are just harder than others. But with careful reading and looking up terms, and brushing over your math skills, which I often have to do because I'm not great at statistics, and most psych papers, there's a lot of statistics in there. But if you're dedicated to educating yourself on a topic, you can do it. But if one finds a paper that is just too difficult for them to understand, and instead of putting the work into understanding it, they read an article published about the paper's findings, or watch a video about the paper's findings, and then wish to critique those findings, those critiques are not coming from a good faith position in my opinion. So what does any of this have to do with the horse that tricked everyone into thinking he could do math? I find this case not to just be a fun story, but also a beautiful example of why the scientific method is important, what it can achieve, and why it works. There were many competing explanations for why Hans was producing the correct responses, and each of them seemed equally valid. The only way to even attempt to parse out which one was correct was to try and eliminate all of them, and see which one was left. When Stumpf approached this case with the initial hypothesis of nasal whispering, he designed an experiment that could falsify it if he was wrong, rather than clinging to his hypothesis and getting no closer to the actual answer. We talk a lot about cognitive biases these days, and they are a bitch and a half to deal with for sure, but the scientific method is one that is specifically crafted to counter the effects of these biases. Now if you just came here to find out what the deal with the horse was, I'm sorry for getting on my soapbox here at the end, but I appreciate you sticking around, and maybe that was the point, was to hook line and sinker you with a story about a fun little horse. But these are important characteristics about science that aren't discussed in public discourse nearly as much as they need to be in my opinion, and I found this case to be a perfect microcosm for discussing them. Anyway, if you stuck around to the end, thanks! This was fun! Be sure to visit our complimentary petting zoo where you too can ask a flock of ducks to find the square root of four, at the auditorium to your left. If you had a good time, come along and subscribe if you feel like it, plenty more stuff like this coming soon, and if you feel like helping to keep the lights on, because they are kind of important to what we do here, consider supporting on Patreon. The one condition being that you have to be financially stable. No need to just add one more subscription to the pile of bleeding money from your bank account. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, please, just save that money for things you actually need. And do bear in mind I don't really have much to offer in terms of rewards right now, kind of just if I have something cool to share that doesn't fit into the main video or something like that. Either way, I would like to thank Michael Fuentes and Leia for their donations to the channel, and with that, I'm going to get back to researching for that next video and doing my taxes, both things that I should be doing today. I shouldn't really tell you anything about this video, by the way, but, you know, since we're friends, you're going to love it. It's going to be about, you know... So yeah, hope you were taking notes, glad you caught all that. Anyway, I gotta go, ciao!