Our paper on #SocialEavesdropping in #AsianElephants has just been published @FrontPsychol! http://frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.604372
Thanks to my co-authors Friederike Range, @MarshallPescini @DrRachelDale @CCCAnimals & @elehelp for making this work possible!
Here's a thread of what we did: (1/8)

Elephants are highly social, intelligent and cooperative - they can successfully solve the string-pulling task with a conspecific. (2/8)

As Asian elephants have a long history of living alongside humans, we tested whether they could form reputations about humans after observing them using the string-pulling task with a conspecific and/or directly working with them on it. (3/8)

To test for eavesdropping, the observer elephant (on the left) watched two humans interact with a demonstrator elephant on the string-pulling task - one partner was cooperative and they both received a food reward; the other was non-cooperative and they were unsuccessful. (4/8)

7 out of 8 elephants did not discriminate between the cooperative and non-cooperative partner, even after direct experience with them.

The experimental setup might have been too complex so we simplified the design to a begging situation, without the need for cooperation. (5/8)

We tested 10 elephants and they didn't discriminate between a generous person (who fed the demonstrator elephant food) or a selfish person (who didn't give food)… not even after they had direct experience with the partners! (6/8)

Therefore, we found no support for the hypothesis that elephants can form reputations of humans… but we argue that these results may be due to challenges with experimental design rather than a lack of capacity. (7/8)

Almost all of the previous eavesdropping research has been on #dogs and #primates, so our study highlights the importance of developing future experiments that account for the #elephants' use of multimodal sensory information in their decision making. (8/8)