on the contrary, whether bees experience cognitive biases mostly isn't an empirical question

beeing contrarian for absolutely no good reason

In a recent Thing of Things article, Ozy Brennan says (emphasis mine):

Often, people mix empirical and non-empirical questions in their thought experiments. For example, you might do a thought experiment to find out whether people should care about bees. But “should we care about bees?” is actually two different questions:

• “What traits do bees have?”

• “What traits does a beeing have to have beefore we care about it?”

Thought experiments can help us figure out what kinds of beeing we care about, but they are absolute garbage at figuring out what bees are like. No matter how hard you contemplate, you’re not going to bee able to figure out from first principles whether (say) bees experience cognitive biases. That question is a subject for entomological research, not for philosophy.

This is poppycock. To be clear, I endorse a lot of Ozy’s post, and this minor point about cognitive biases in bees hardly detracts from it in any way. I just happen to think that determining whether bees experience cognitive biases or not is a pretty good use case for a priori¹¹ Title drop reasoning.

I will note that the title of this post does say mostly for a reason. You do need to understand at least a little about what a bee is, to try to draw conclusions about whether bees experience cognitive biases. Descartes did not say “I think, therefore bees (don’t) experience cognitive biases”, and for good reason: it would have been anachronistic. The notion of a cognitive bias was only introduced, according to Wikipedia, in 1972(!), by Tversky and Kahneman²² Descartes did, however, know about bees..

I will now go down Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases and share my opinion on whether bees can be said to experience each of them:

• Aesthetic-usability effect: Bees are well known to like pretty flowers.

• Attribute substitution: Bees make decisions³³ Contesting this point is one way you could try to argue that bees do not experience cognitive biases. Personally I think it is pretty clear that bees make decisions, but either way I think disputes over this question are more philosophical than entomological in nature., but are not gods⁴⁴ I guess if you really wanted you could also contest this point, and argue that bees should be viewed as omniscient gods with very strange value systems. Again, that would be a philosophical objection., so they do this.

• Availability heuristic: Bees probably have limited memories.

• Conjunction fallacy: Unclear, this one probably does need an entomologist.

• Hot-cold empathy gap: As bees do not make estimates of the size of the impact of their visceral drives on their beehavior at all, they cannot underestimate them, so bees don’t experience this one.

• Tachypsychia: Needs an entomologist, it seems plausible to me that bees need to keep really good track of time for flight navigation or something? But also it seems plausible that it’s possible for this to get miscalibrated, especially if you give the bee a drug or something.

• Time-saving bias: I suspect that bees do not especially make estimates of how much time could be saved or lost by speeding up or slowing down a little, but would be interested in an entomologist’s take.

• Travis syndrome: My guess is that bees do not have opinions on how special the present moment is.

• Anchoring bias: Maybee? Call an entomologist.

• Base rate fallacy: I’m leaning “mostly no”, but I’m not sure.

• Dunning-Kruger effect: Do bees form estimates of how good they are at things compared to other bees? They might do this. Entomologist.

• Gambler’s fallacy: Maybee?

• Hard-easy effect: Eh.

• Hot-hand fallacy: Probably.

• Insensitivity to sample size: Maybee?

Okay I’m bored of the estimation category. Let’s try the decision category.

• Ambiguity effect: Sure, bees probably like predictability. Something something Friston.

• Authority bias: Do bees have authority figures at all?

• Automation bias: Definitely not.

• Default effect: Probably?

• Dread aversion: I’d expect that bees do not like dread?

• Framing effect: Probably.

• Hyperbolic discounting: Probably.

• Compassion fade: I think bees do not behave compassionately except towards maybee other members of their hive?

• Neglect of probability: Not very much, probably?

• Non-adaptive choice switching: Probably not.

• Prevention bias: Bees do not invest money.

• Pseudocertainty effect: I think this one flat out is not a bias, that’s just normative behavior.

• Risk compensation: Maybee.

• Zero-risk bias: Probably not? I don’t know. Do bees think about risks very often?

• Ballot order effect: No way.

Is that enough? That’s probably enough. The point is not that I expect you to agree with my first-pass guess on each of these specific cognitive biases—I imagine if I sat in my armchair a little longer I would change my mind on several of them. I just hope to establish the reasonably common sense idea that bees experience some cognitive biases but not others. I don’t think we need to call up an entomologist to get at least that far.

If anyone cares to make a case for the stance that bees don’t experience cognitive biases, I will bee interested to hear it! However, I am pretty sure such a case would have to bee largely philosophical in nature—I do not particularly expect an entomologist to present me with convincing empirical evidence that actually, bees don’t ever substitute simple heuristics for more computationally complex questions, thereby exhibiting the cognitive bias of attribute substitution. You’d have to argue to me that attribute substitution and the availability heuristic and so on actually aren’t cognitive biases at all—a position which I might bee somewhat sympathetic to, in some cases, but which mostly doesn’t depend on the insight of entomologists.

I am open to the idea that you might, after some philosophical work, end up with a conception of what constitutes a bias which manages to bee crisply defined enough that you can easily resolve the question with some entomological insight, while still beeing unsure up until you ask the entomologist. You probably could do that if you tried hard enough. But personally I think bees totally experience cognitive biases.