Clever Hans

Day 174 / 365

What separates us Humans from other animals?

Is it our ability to talk? Well, that can’t be, as you can go on youtube and see videos of some parrots speaking coherent sentences.

It might be our intelligence. What would you consider evidence of an animal being intelligent? Will an ability to do maths be good enough for you? Cause, today I’m going to tell you about a horse that could do just that!

The Horse in question is Clever Hans, a horse that lived in Germany in the early 1900s. And the reason why Hans got the word ‘Clever’ in front of his name was that he was able to do mathematical calculations and solve some complicated problems, wells complicated for a horse at least.

Here’s how a typical Clever Hans show would go. Someone would ask Hans a question, say “What’s 9 + 9?” and Hans would start stomping its feet. It would stomp it’s feet exactly 18 times, and stop.

As if that didn’t seem crazy enough, the horse could supposedly read German as well. The owner would write in German on a board “What is 5 + 7”, and show it to Hans, and of course, it would stomp its feet 12 times.

I know you might be skeptical at this point, and so were most scientists at that time. The obvious explanation was that the owner was cheating by somehow signaling the right answers to Hans. So people tested this, by removing the owner from the scene and asking questions to Hans themselves. And miraculously, It still answered correctly every time.

So how was Hans doing it?

When the other scientist failed, the psychologist Carl Stumpf decided to study the horse. What he observed that when the Horse was able to see the person that asked the question, it gave the correct answer 89% of the time. When he couldn’t see the person, it was right merely 6% of the time. This led to Carl figuring our Hans’s secret.

Clever Hans wasn’t a mathematical genius, but he was indeed clever. When asked a question, Hans would just start stomping his feet and then observe the reactions of the person. As he reached closer to the answer, he could sense the astonishment on the face of the person, and that is how he knew when to stop.

So while Hans didn’t understand Mathematics, I would still say he was clever enough to fool so many of us Humans and even some scientists!

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — The 10x Rule