Paper: Wild animals suppress the spread of socially transmitted misinformation

Fish: I think there’s a shark over there

Other Fish: Oh yeah? Where’d you learn that, school? Wake up.

I started reading The Handbook of Linguistics recently and this reminds me of some cool info it had in the first chapter about some type of small monkey responding to calls from other monkeys in their group. Basically they have different calls for different types of predators that incite different defensive actions, such as one call for a snake where they would respond by running up into the trees, another for a bird where they would run to the ground, etc. Initially scientists thought the calls were just calling attention to the monkey making the call and the other monkeys were mimicking it’s behavior, but they played recordings of various calls and the monkeys still reacted accordingly without being able to see any monkey making the call, suggesting the monkeys were reacting to the calls themselves. They also saw that the monkeys were able to distinguish the calls of individual monkeys, much like humans can recognize someone by their voice, and after repeated false alarms using the same recording where a call was played without the relevant predator present, the monkeys stopped reacting to the calls made by that particular voice for that specific predator, but would still respond if the voice made a call for a different predator, or if a call for the same predator was made using a different voice, suggesting the monkeys can learn which other monkeys are reliable sources for alerting them to the presence of a particular predator

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I'd guess this is easily overcome in humans with social media.

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