[By Rabbi Yair Hoffman for the Five Towns Jewish Times]

At times, science can shed some light on our understanding or interpretation of a particular Gemorah or a Midrash.

The Gemorah will sometimes say something, and a commentator will question it. Sometimes he will remain with a question. At other times there is a proposed answer.

Let’s start with the Gemorah in Psachim 53b. The Gemorah asks, “What did Chananya Mishael and Azarya see that inspired them to risk their lives in the furnace [during the first exile in Babylonia]? The Gemorah answers that they were inspired by the behavior of the frogs in the second plague in Egypt. Just as frogs who are not commanded in sanctifying the Name of Hashem – jumped into the ovens, certainly we, who are commanded in the Mitzvah of sanctifying Hashem’s Name, must do so!

Rabbi Shmuel Yaffe Ashkenazi (1525- 1595), rabbi in Istanbul and the author of the Yefei Toar commentary to the Midrash (Shmos Rabba Parshas VaEira 10:3) asks: What kind of Kal Vachomer is this? Frogs do not have bechira – free choice, only human beings have free choice! How then could they have been inspired by the frogs?

ANIMALS HAVE A LIMITED FORM OF BECHIRAH

Perhaps we can gain some understanding from a recent scientific study.

The study finds that, like humans, some animals can be optimists or pessimists, and that some of them [the pessimists] are more strongly affected by their current environments.

The study is described in the journal Biology Letters, and demonstrate that the complex interplay between personality and mood may extend to animals. This would show that animals do have some limited form of Bechira – choice.

“This finding demonstrates that humans are not unique in combining longer-term personality biases with shorter-term mood biases in judging stimuli,” the study authors wrote.

According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, the study explains that we know that “humans process information differently depending on their mood: If they’re feeling negative, they’ll tend to expect a worse outcome when facing ambiguous situations that could go either way; if they’re feeling positive, they may expect a better one. Mood, together with baseline personality, influences a person’s cognitive bias – patterns of thinking that may lead to deviations in good judgment.

Researchers have increasingly looked at cognitive bias in animals to study animal mood, the study authors wrote, but the results from these experiments have been inconsistent. Perhaps that’s because the interaction of personality and mood, which together generate cognitive bias in humans, hadn’t really been studied in animals until now.”

Apparently, a team of scientists from Great Britain looked to probe that mood-personality dynamic in 36 pigs.

The researchers tested whether they had proactive or reactive personalities by studying how they behaved in an area with an unknown object. Proactive behavior is more active and less flexible; reactive behavior is more passive and more flexible. (In humans, proactivity has been linked to extraversion and reactivity has been linked to neuroticism.)

The scientists also tested their cognitive bias by training the pigs to recognize that the bowl in one corner of the room had yummy chocolates (a good outcome) and the bowl in the other corner had bitter coffee beans (a bad one, presumably). They’d been coated in sugar so that the pigs couldn’t sniff them out until they reached their chosen bowl. The researchers then began putting more bowls in ambiguous spots – in the middle of those two corners, or slightly toward the chocolate corner, or slightly toward the coffee corner.

Before the tests, the animals would be put either in economy or deluxe lodgings. Both had solid floors, a slatted area and wooden blocks on chains for what the study authors called “enrichment.” But the deluxe lodgings were roomier and had deep, comfy straw.

The scientists found that the pigs with proactive personalities tended to check out the middle bowl, even without the sure promise of a reward, regardless of the quality of their accommodations. Being stuck in the economy lodgings didn’t change their underlying optimism.

Pigs with reactive personalities, on the other hand, were more optimistic about their chances of finding a chocolate in the middle bowl if they’d had the deluxe accommodations – and more pessimistic if they’d been in the less comfortable pen. Reactive animals, then, were much more affected by their environment, and their mood likely skewed their choices.

“These results suggest that judgment in non-human animals is similar to humans, incorporating aspects of stable personality traits and more transient mood states,” the authors wrote. The findings could help explain why previous tests of cognitive bias in animals were so inconsistent, the researchers said.”

The Yalkut Shimoni (Remez 182) explains that frogs and birds also have de’ah. Perhaps this study can further enlighten us as to what the Midrash meant.

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