We present an exploratory study of forest-living orangutan pantomiming, i.e. gesturing in which they act out their meaning, focusing on its occurrence, communicative functions, and complexities. Studies show that captive great apes may elaborate messages if communication fails, and isolated reports suggest that great apes occasionally pantomime. We predicted forest-living orangutans would pantomime spontaneously to communicate, especially to elaborate after communication failures. Mining existing databases on free-ranging rehabilitant orangutans' behaviour identified 18 salient pantomimes. These pantomimes most often functioned as elaborations of failed requests, but also as deceptions and declaratives. Complexities identified include multimodality, re-enactments of past events and several features of language (productivity, compositionality, systematicity). These findings confirm that freeranging rehabilitant orangutans pantomime and use pantomime to elaborate on their messages. Further, they use pantomime for multiple functions and create complex pantomimes that can express propositionally structured content. Thus, orangutan pantomime serves as a medium for communication, not a particular function. Mining cases of complex great ape communication originally reported in functional terms may then yield more evidence of pantomime.

An argument that as folk psychologists humans (and perhaps other animals) don't so much read minds as see one another as persons with traits, emotions, and social relations. By adulthood, most of us have become experts in human behavior, able to make sense of the myriad behaviors we find in environments ranging from the family home to the local mall and beyond. In philosophy of mind, our understanding of others has been largely explained in terms of knowing others' beliefs and desires; describing others' behavior in these terms is the core of what is known as folk psychology. In Do Apes Read Minds? Kristin Andrews challenges this view of folk psychology, arguing that we don't consider others' beliefs and desires when predicting most quotidian behavior, and that our explanations in these terms are often inaccurate or unhelpful. Rather than mindreading, or understanding others as receptacles for propositional attitudes, Andrews claims that folk psychologists see others first as whole persons with traits, emotions, and social relations. Drawing on research in developmental psychology, social psychology, and animal cognition, Andrews argues for a pluralistic folk psychology that employs different kinds of practices (including prediction, explanation, and justification) and different kinds of cognitive tools (including personality trait attribution, stereotype activation, inductive reasoning about past behavior, and generalization from self) that are involved in our folk psychological practices. According to this understanding of folk psychology—which does not require the sophisticated cognitive machinery of second-order metacognition associated with having a theory of mind—animals (including the other great apes) may be folk psychologists, too.

I respond to an argument presented by Daniel Povinelli and Jennifer Vonk that the current generation of experiments on chimpanzee theory of mind cannot decide whether chimpanzees have the ability to reason about mental states. I argue that Povinelli and Vonk's proposed experiment is subject to their own criticisms and that there should be a more radical shift away from experiments that ask subjects to predict behavior. Further, I argue that Povinelli and Vonk's theoretical commitments should lead them to accept this new approach, and that experiments which offer subjects the opportunity to look for explanations for anomalous behavior should be explored.

To answer tantalizing questions such as whether animals are moral or how morality evolved, I propose starting with a somewhat less fraught question: do animals have normative cognition? Recent psychological research suggests that normative thinking, or ought-thought, begins early in human development. Recent philosophical research suggests that folk psychology is grounded in normative thought. Recent primatology research finds evidence of sophisticated cultural and social learning capacities in great apes. Drawing on these three literatures, I argue that the human variety of social cognition and moral cognition encompass the same cognitive capacities and that the nonhuman great apes may also be normative beings. To make this argument, I develop an account of animal social norms that shares key properties with Cristina Bicchieri's account of social norms but which lowers the cognitive requirements for having a social norm. I propose a set of four early developing prerequisites implicated in social cognition that make up what I call naïve normativity: (1) the ability to identify agents, (2) sensitivity to in-group/out-group differences, (3) the capacity for social learning of group traditions, and (4) responsiveness to appropriateness. I review the ape cognition literature and present preliminary empirical evidence supporting the existence of social norms and naïve normativity in great apes. While there is more empirical work to be done, I hope to have offered a framework for studying normativity in other species, and I conclude that we should be open to the possibility that normative cognition is yet another ancient cognitive endowment that is not human-unique.

Comparative psychology, the multidisciplinary study of animal behavior and psychology, confronts the challenge of how to study animals we find cute and easy to anthropomorphize, and animals we find odd and easy to objectify, without letting these biases negatively impact the science. In this Element, Kristin Andrews identifies and critically examines the principles of comparative psychology and shows how they can introduce other biases by objectifying animal subjects and encouraging scientists to remain detached. Andrews outlines the scientific benefits of treating animals as sentient research participants who come from their own social contexts and with whom we will be in relationship. With discussions of science's quest for objectivity, worries about romantic and killjoy theories, and debates about chimpanzee cognition between primatologists who work in the field and those in the lab, Andrews shows how scientists can address the different biases through greater integration of the subdisciplines of comparative psychology.