DennisPTate
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- Nov 6, 2025
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"Clever Hans" was a topic that my Psychology Professor got into one day in class nearly thirty years ago.
This is the kind of story that we can never really forget about.
My Psychology 240 professor felt that Clever Hans gave powerful evidence that horses and cats and dogs may well have senses that we humans have lost. He felt that this was an example of animals being what could be termed "psychic."
Do you have any stories about your horses or cats or dogs exhibiting what might have been the ability to read minds or our emotions or see or hear what we could not see or hear?
This is the kind of story that we can never really forget about.
My Psychology 240 professor felt that Clever Hans gave powerful evidence that horses and cats and dogs may well have senses that we humans have lost. He felt that this was an example of animals being what could be termed "psychic."
Do you have any stories about your horses or cats or dogs exhibiting what might have been the ability to read minds or our emotions or see or hear what we could not see or hear?
Clever Hans (German: der Kluge Hans; c. 1894 – c. 1916) was a horse that appeared to perform arithmetic and other intellectual tasks during exhibitions in Germany in the early 20th century.
In 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reactions of his trainer. The horse was responding directly to involuntary cues in the body language of the human trainer, who was entirely unaware that he was providing such cues.<a href="Clever Hans - Wikipedia"><span>[</span>1<span>]</span></a> In honour of Pfungst's study, this type of artifact in research methodology has since been referred to as the Clever Hans effect and has continued to be important to the observer-expectancy effect and later studies in animal cognition. Pfungst was an assistant to German philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, who incorporated the experience with Hans into his further work on animal psychology and his ideas on phenomenology.<a href="Clever Hans - Wikipedia"><span>[</span>2<span>]</span></a>
Spectacle
During the early twentieth century, the public was especially interested in animal intelligence owing in large part to Charles Darwin's recent publications. The case of Clever Hans was taken to show an advanced level of number sense in an animal.
Hans was a horse owned by Wilhelm von Osten, who was a gymnasium mathematics teacher, an amateur horse trainer and phrenologist and was considered to be a mystic.<a href="Clever Hans - Wikipedia">[1]</a> Hans was said to have been taught to add, subtract, multiply, divide, work with fractions, tell the time, keep track of the calendar, differentiate between musical tones, and read, spell, and understand German. Von Osten would ask Hans, "If the eighth day of the month comes on a Tuesday, what is the date of the following Friday?" Hans would answer by tapping his hoof eleven times. Questions could be asked both orally and in written form. Von Osten exhibited Hans throughout Germany and never charged admission. Hans' abilities were reported in The New York Times in 1904
Clever Hans - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
