ABS 2023
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Anthropocentrism may explain research disparities between animal tool use and nest-building �
Sally E. Street1, Inga Hamilton2, Susan D. Healy3. 1Durham University, Durham, England, United Kingdom; 2University of Sunderland, Sunderland, England, United Kingdom; 3University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom

Studying the behaviour of non-human species objectively is inherently challenging. Perhaps no behaviour illustrates this issue better than animal tool-use, a ‘charismatic’ behaviour that attracts large amounts of research attention and public interest compared to apparently similar behaviours, such as nest building. We use bibliometric and text-mining methods to reveal striking disparities in the treatment of tool use and nest building in the zoological literature. We find that tool use papers have much higher citation rates and make more frequent use of terminology suggestive of ‘intelligent’, human-like cognition such as ‘innovation’, ‘creativity’ and ‘technology’. Furthermore, citation rate increases with the frequency of ‘intelligent’ terminology in article abstracts, especially in tool use papers. Our findings are not confounded by taxonomic biases: we find the same disparities even when comparing tool use and nest building papers within great ape and Corvus species. Given a lack of strong evidence that tool use requires more complex cognition than nest building, we suggest that these disparities may be driven by unconscious anthropocentrism among animal behaviour researchers.