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2025-10-30 18:00:37

Chimps Are Capable of Human-Like Rational Thought, Breakthrough Study Finds

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Chimpanzees revise their beliefs if they encounter new information, a hallmark of rationality that was once assumed to be unique to humans, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.

Researchers working with chimpanzees at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda probed how the primates judged evidence using treats inside boxes, such as a “weak” clue—for example, the sound of a treat inside a shaken box—and a "strong" clue, such as a direct line of sight to the treat.

The chimpanzees were able to rationally evaluate forms of evidence and to change their existing beliefs if presented with more compelling clues. The results reveal that non-human animals can exhibit key aspects of rationality, some of which had never been directly tested before, which shed new light on the evolution of rational thought and critical thinking in humans and other intelligent animals.

“Rationality has been linked to this ability to think about evidence and revise your beliefs in light of evidence,” said co-author Jan Engelmann, associate professor at the department of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in a call with 404 Media. “That’s the real big picture perspective of this study.”

While it’s impossible to directly experience the perspective of a chimpanzee, Engelmann and his colleagues designed five controlled experiments for groups of anywhere from 15 to 23 chimpanzee participants.

In the first and second experiments, the chimps received a weak clue and a strong clue for a food reward in a box. The chimpanzees consistently made their choices based on the stronger evidence, regardless of the sequence in which the clues were presented. In the third experiment, the chimps were shown an empty box in addition to the strong and weak clues. After this presentation, the box with the strong evidence was removed. In this experiment, the chimpanzees still largely chose the weak clue over the empty box.

In the fourth experiment, chimpanzees were given a second “redundant” weak clue—for instance, the experimenter would shake a box twice. Then, they were given a new type of clue, like a second piece of food being dropped into a box in front of them. They were significantly more likely to change their beliefs if the clue provided fresh information, demonstrating an ability to distinguish between redundant and genuinely new evidence.

Finally, in the fifth experiment, the chimpanzees were presented with a so-called “defeater” that undermined the strong clue, such as a direct line of sight to a picture of food inside the box, or a shaken box containing a stone, not a real treat. The chimps were significantly more likely to revise their choice about the location of the food in the defeater experiments than in experiments with no defeater. This experiment showcased an ability to judge that evidence that initially seems strong can be weakened with new information.

“The most surprising result was, for sure, experiment five,” Engelmann said. “No one really believed that they would do it, for many different reasons.”

For one thing, he said, the methodology of the fifth experiment demanded a lot of attention and cognitive work from the chimpanzees, which they successfully performed. The result also challenges the assumption that complex language is required to update beliefs with new information. Despite lacking this linguistic ability, chimpanzees are somehow able to flexibly assign strength to different pieces of evidence.

Speaking from the perspective of the chimps, Engelmann outlined the responses to experiment five as: “I used to believe food was in there because I heard it in there, but now you showed me that there was a stone in there, so this defeats my evidence. Now I have to give up that belief.”

“Even using language, it takes me ten seconds to explain it,” he continued. “The question is, how do they do it? It’s one of the trickiest questions, but also one of the most interesting ones. To put it succinctly, how to think without words?”

To hone in on that mystery, Engelmann and his colleagues are currently repeating the experiment with different primates, including capuchins, baboons, rhesus macaques, and human toddlers and children. Eventually, similar experiments could be applied to other intelligent species, such as corvids or octopuses, which may yield new insights about the abundance and variability of rationality in non-human species.

“I think the really interesting ramification for human rationality is that so many people often think that only humans can reflect on evidence,” Engelmann said. “But our results obviously show that this is not necessarily the case. So the question is, what's special about human rationality then?”

Engelmann and his colleagues hypothesize that humans differ in the social dimensions of our rational thought; we are able to collectively evaluate evidence not only with our contemporaries, but by consulting the work of thinkers who may have lived thousands of years ago. Of course, humans also often refuse to update beliefs in light of new evidence, which is known as “belief entrenchment” or “belief perseveration” (many such cases). These complicated nuances add to the challenge of unraveling the evolutionary underpinnings of rationality.

That said, one thing is clear: many non-human animals exist somewhere on the gradient of rational thought. In light of the recent passing of Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist who popularized the incredible capacities of chimpanzees, the new study carries on a tradition of showing that these primates, our closest living relatives, share some degree of our ability to think and act in rational ways.

Goodall “was the first Western scientist to observe tool use in chimpanzees and really change our beliefs about what makes humans unique,” Engelmann said. “We're definitely adding to this puzzle by showing that rationality, which has so long been considered unique to humans, is at least in some forms present in non-human animals.”

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2025-10-30 14:02:39

Libraries Scramble for Books After Giant Distributor Shuts Down

This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation.

One of the largest distributors of print books for libraries is winding down operations by the end of the year, a huge disruption to public libraries across the country, some of which are warning their communities the shut down will limit their ability to lend books.

“You might notice some delays as we (and more than 6,000 other libraries) transition to new wholesalers,” the Jacksonville Public Library told its community in a Facebook post. “We're keeping a close eye on things and doing everything we can to minimize any wait times.”

The libraries that do business with the distributor learned about the shut down earlier this month via Reddit.

Upon learning of her company’s closure, Jennifer Kennedy, a customer services account manager with Baker & Taylor, broke the news on October 6 on r/Libraries Reddit community.

“I just wanted the libraries to know,” Kennedy told 404 Media. “I didn’t want them to be held hostage waiting for books that would never come. I respect them too much for all this nonsense.”

Kennedy’s post prompted other current and former B&T employees to confirm the announcement and express concern for the competitors about to be inundated with requests from the libraries who would be scrambling for new suppliers.

B&T in Memoriam

Baker & Taylor has been in the book business just short of 200 years. Its primary focus was distributing physical copies of books to public libraries. The company also provided librarians with tools that helped them do their jobs more effectively related to collection development and processing.

But the company has spent decades being acquired by and divested from private equity firms, served as a revolving door for senior leadership, and was sued by a competitor earlier this year for alleged data misuse and was almost acquired again in September, this time by a distributor that works with mass-market retailers like Walmart and Target. That deal fell through.

On October 7, Publishers Weekly reported B&T let go of more than 500 employees the day the internal announcement was made. At least one law firm is currently investigating B&T for allegedly violating the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, and it took the company weeks to let account holders know.

Since the internal announcement, Kennedy says customer service staff at B&T have not received guidance on how to respond to inquiries from libraries, leaving them on the frontline and in the dark on issues ranging from whether existing orders would be fulfilled to securing refunds for materials they may have already paid for.

“Some libraries didn’t realize we are much closed as of right now,” Kennedy added.

B&T did not respond when asked for comment.

Kennedy has been with B&T for 16 years. At a time when it's uncommon to remain with one company more than a few years, that’s exactly what many of B&T’s employees have been able to do, until now. The same was true of the libraries who did business with them. Andrew Harant, director of Cuyahoga Falls Library had to consider the library's longstanding business relationship with the company against the roughly 20 percent of books the library had ordered from the beginning of the year they had never received.

“For us, that was about 1,500 items,” which Harant told 404 Media that for a small library is a lot of books they were ordering and not receiving.

Release dates for new books come and go on B&T’s main software platform for viewing and managing orders, Title Source 360. Better known as TS360, Harant realized the platform was updating preordered books never received to on backorder, which was “not sustainable”.

In September, Cuyahoga Falls Library canceled all outstanding orders with B&T.

“We needed to step up and make sure that we’re getting the books for our patrons that they needed,” he said.

Cuyahoga Falls Library was fortunate to have an existing account with the other main distributor on the scene, Ingram Content Group. This has been true for many of the libraries 404 Media reached out to for this story.

“The easier part is re-ordering the book,” Shellie Cocking, Chief of Collections and Technical Services for the San Francisco Public Library, told 404 Media. “The harder part is replacing the tools you use to order books.”

Integrated Fallout

Of the ancillary services B&T offered customers, TS360 was Cocking’s favorite. It helped her streamline collection development tasks, for instance, anticipating how popular a title might be or determining how many quantities of a book to purchase, which for larger libraries with dozens of branches, could be complicated to figure out manually. Once titles were ordered in TS360, B&T shared a Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) record that was automatically shared with the library’s API integration using data derived from B&T’s record set. This product, BTCat, was the subject of a lawsuit brought by OCLC earlier this year.

OCLC owns WorldCat, the global union catalog of library collections that lets anyone see what libraries own what items. OCLC alleged in a U.S. district court filing that B&T misused their proprietary bibliographic records to populate its own competing cataloguing database. OCLC also accused B&T of inserted clauses into its contracts where there was overlap with the businesses and customers, requiring libraries to grant B&T access to their cataloging records so the libraries could then license the records back to B&T for BTCat. B&T has denied these claims, accusing OCLC of stifling fair competition in an already consolidated marketplace.

Marshall Breeding, an independent consultant who monitors library vendor mergers has been following all of this rather closely. He says B&T's closure creates a number of bottlenecks for libraries, the primary one being whether suppliers like Ingram or Brodart can absorb thousands of libraries as customers all at once.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Breeding told 404 Media. “It’s going to take them a while to set up the business relationships and technical things that have to be set up for libraries to automatically order books from the providers.”

But one thing is evident.

“Libraries are kind of in a weaker position just scrambling to find a vendor at all,” he added.

Less competition in the market makes for more challenging working conditions all around. Just ask Erin Hughes, director of the Wood Ridge Memorial Library in New Jersey, made the move over to Ingram after a series of negative experiences with B&T in 2021 from late and damaged deliveries to customer service calls that went poorly, to say the least. Hughes worries her experience with B&T will happen again, only this time with Ingram.

Since the Reddit announcement, she's noticed it's a little more difficult to get a rep on the phone and the number of shipments to the library is smaller. But the other way Hughes is seeing the problem play out involves the consortium her library belongs to. While she may have foregone B&T years ago, her network hasn't, which affects the operability of InterLibrary Loan lending.

“The resource sharing is going to be off for a bit,” Hughes told 404 Media.

Amazon Incoming

If Ingram’s service stagnates due to the B&T cluster, Hughes says she'll use Amazon, which recently launched its own online library hub, offering competitive pricing. One downside, says Hughes, is that it's Amazon.

“No, we do have a little bit of pause around Amazon,” she added. “But we’re at a point now where Ingram actually does supply most of the books for Amazon. So we’re already in the devil’s pocket. It’s all connected. It’s all integrated. And as much as I personally don’t care for the whole thing, I don’t really see a lot of other options.”

It's hard not to think this outcome was predictable and also preventable. We know what happens when private equity gets involved with businesses not expected to generate high growth or returns, as well as what happens when there's too little market competition in any given sector. It can't be a cautionary tale because market consolidation is in itself a cautionary tale.

But it’s also worth acknowledging how the timing could not be worse. Library use is way up right now, which is indicative of the times. People are buying less for various reasons. People also seem to like the idea of putting a little friction between their media consumption habits and Big Brother, even at the expense of a little convenience.

“We kind of made our own bed a little bit because we didn’t branch out,” said Hughes. “We didn’t find other solutions to this, and we were relying essentially on two giant companies, one of which folded so quick it was not even funny.”

Key findings about Americans and data privacy

71% of adults say they are very or somewhat concerned about how the government uses the data it collects about them, up from 64% in 2019.

^{Beshay (Pew Research Center)}