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Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

I'm not convinced. The fact that young male monkeys choose firetrucks over dolls rather strongly indicates that the study is bogus and there is some (unconscious) influence from the experimenter. How can monkeys instinctively know what a fire truck is? The explanation about females preferring faces is just a post-hoc rationalisation.

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To what degree does a monkey know what a fire truck is, compared to a child? Yes the child might even understand that it's a vehicle, but as far as being a toy is concerned, it's a block with wheels, as long as the monkey is not pretending firefighters come and go from the fire truck (which children also don't do, unless it explicitly included small figurines, functional doors etc) I really don't see the problem.

They don’t know what it is, they know what it is not:

a baby.

But surely if there is a clear difference in the data, we should be looking for an explanation, right? Of course it's possible for experimental methods to be flawed, but as the results from multiple studies pile up, that becomes less and less plausible as an explanation.

Read Berger(1966). This is reification in it's most basic form.

Could you clarify 'what' is the example of reification here?

If you are hung up on the firetruck, here is another one on newborn macaques preferring faces:

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep19669

Or this one, where adding testosterone to rhesus monkeys causes their female offspring to be "masculinized':

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3146061/

Because one is a verifiable unusual and complex object (things) and another is seen as another of the same or similar species, activating the temporal lobe more (people).

You don't have to comprehend or understand a firetruck to see it is a very different environmental object to another being.

That people need a study to know these differences exist is the real head scratcher.

What specifically are you not convinced of?

A firetruck is not a face. How wouldn't a monkey know what a face is?

Human babies don't know what a fire truck is either.

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