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Creativity
Animal Creativity Is Linked to Popularity and Personality
Being unpopular, brave, and persistent are linked to innovation in animals.
Updated May 12, 2024 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Key points
- Innovation is common across the animal kingdom, but not all individuals within a species are equally creative.
- In some species, such as giraffes, goats and gazelles, being a social outsider is linked to creativity.
- Being brave and persistent are related to creativity in many species, from elephants to zebra finches.
- Animals pay attention to and copy the creativity of others, leading to the formation of cultural traditions.
A great thing about researching animal behaviour is that most people have an intuitive idea of what I'm talking about. My last blog post was on animal play—how it is studied scientifically, and the many diverse species in which it is found. It was great to hear anecdotes of animal playfulness that readers had seen in their own lives.
This article focuses on animal innovativeness—that is, when animals solve problems in novel ways. Again, this is a pretty intuitive topic. Most people have seen animals solve problems in one context or another; whether it’s a dog getting food out of a puzzle toy, a squirrel breaking into a ‘squirrel-proof’ bird feeder, or—in what is hopefully a rarer experience—a bear opening a garage door to get to the food inside (see the video below)!
What might be less intuitive than understanding that animals do innovate, is understanding which animals innovate. Do all individuals within a species come up with creative solutions to problems? Or are some individuals more innovative than others?
In what is likely to become a bit of a theme in this blog, the answer parallels what we see in humans. Some individuals are more innovative than others. Interestingly, though, what drives an animal to innovate differs between species.
In ungulates (for example, goats, giraffes and gazelles), social outsiders are more likely to innovate than their popular groupmates. If an individual spends time on the outskirts of their group, they are more likely to succeed at a problem-solving task (such as opening a lidded cup to get to some food)(1). Similarly, in some species of primates and birds, individuals with low social standing—that is, those who regularly lose fights and don’t have access to valuable resources—tend to innovate more(2,3).
The examples above tie into the theory that the individuals who are least able to gain access to good quality resources, such as food and shelter, are the most likely to innovate. This 'bad competitor' theory suggests that individuals innovate because they must do so to survive. Imagine you’re a goat (a common request, I’m sure) who can’t get access to the feeding trough because you’re not in the 'in-group'. You’d probably be more motivated to figure out how to open a container with food inside than your more popular (and well-fed) groupmates. However, while there is support for this theory in some species, many species show opposing patterns. So, being a ‘bad competitor’ doesn’t seem to be a general driver of innovation across species.
Personality appears to have a more general influence on animal innovativeness. A meta-analysis across 37 studies of animal innovation found that being brave (that is, approaching novel objects and exploring new environments) was linked to innovative behaviour(4). For example, brave ungulates and Carib grackles (a species of bird) are more likely to innovate than their more timid groupmates(1,5).
Persistence has also been linked to innovation in a variety of species, from zebra finches(3) to Asian elephants(6). Both make intuitive sense. The more likely an individual is to interact with a new problem (the braver they are), and the more time they spend trying to solve a problem (the more persistent they are), the more likely they are to find a solution.
Once an individual finds a solution to a problem, particularly a problem involving resource access, their behaviour can spread like wildfire. This is because other individuals copy problem-solving behaviours. This pattern has been observed in a huge range of species, but a particularly neat example was seen in an experiment with wild birds(7).
Researchers trained a few great tits to solve a puzzle to get to some tasty food inside. They then released these individuals into wild great tit flocks, with two 'knowledgeable individuals' per flock. Following the release of these individuals, the researchers exposed the flocks to the puzzle. After only 20 days, the problem-solving behaviour taught to the 'knowledgeable individuals' had spread to an impressive 75 percent of each flock (with flocks comprising between 30 and 100 birds). The great tits also conformed to the most popular way to solve a problem—even when they had knowledge of multiple ways to solve the puzzle, individuals tended to use the technique that was most popular in their social group. This created what we might think of as local cultural traditions. Humans aren’t the only species that are suckers for social conformity!
While innovativeness is common across the animal kingdom, what makes an individual innovative is a pretty nuanced affair, and is tied to different characteristics in different species. Across a lot of species, though, being an innovator gets you noticed. Others pay attention to someone who can problem-solve!
References
1. Caicoya AL, Schaffer A, Holland R, von Fersen L, Colell M, Amici F. Innovation across 13 ungulate species: problem solvers are less integrated in the social group and less neophobic. Proc R Soc B Biol Sci. 2023;290(1996):20222384.
2. Reader SM, Laland KN. Primate innovation: Sex, age and social rank differences. Int J Primatol. 2001;22(5):787–805.
3. Barrett LP, Marsh JL, Boogert NJ, Templeton CN, Benson-Amram S. Links between personality traits and problem-solving performance in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata). R Soc Open Sci. 2022;9(6).
4. Amici F, Widdig A, Lehmann J, Majolo B. A meta-analysis of interindividual differences in innovation. Anim Behav [Internet]. 2019;155:257–68. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2019.07.008
5. Overington SE, Cauchard L, Côté KA, Lefebvre L. Innovative foraging behaviour in birds: What characterizes an innovator? Behav Processes [Internet]. 2011;87(3):274–85. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2011.06.002
6. Jacobson SL, Puitiza A, Snyder RJ, Sheppard A, Plotnik JM. Persistence is key: investigating innovative problem solving by Asian elephants using a novel multi-access box. Anim Cogn [Internet]. 2022;25(3):657–69. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-021-01576-3
7. Aplin LM, Farine DR, Morand-Ferron J, Cockburn A, Thornton A, Sheldon BC. Experimentally induced innovations lead to persistent culture via conformity in wild birds. Nature [Internet]. 2015;518(7540):538–41. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature13998
