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My partner recently asked me whether I knew why The Financial Times is printed on distinctive pink pages. I remembered reading that it was a way to distinguish themselves from competitors, so I said as much, but my partner (a brilliant geologist) replied that the pages are pink because the China clay they originally used in making the pages came from a clay pit in Cornwall (England) which was unusually discolored pink.
I realized, in that moment, that I had assumed I was being asked a question about the intentions of the people involved, but my partner had in mind a question about the mechanics of producing paper. The single ‘why’ question could be interpreted in multiple ways. That immediately made me think of an animal behavior scientist from the 1960s called Nikolaas Tinbergen, who distinguished between several different meanings of ‘why’, and I was inspired to write this article about his insights.
Let’s start with a question: Who is the person you love most in the world?
Some lucky people will find that a very difficult question to answer. One reason it can be so difficult is because the love we feel for parents, partners, friends, and fellows (to name just a few) seems to be different in kind rather than just different in degree. That is to say, they seem like different feelings described by the same word. That means a question like “Who do you love most?” can feel like it’s forcing you to rank feelings that don’t belong on the same scale.
Perhaps you’ve heard the popular idea that the ancient Greeks recognized many different ‘types’ of love and had words for each of them. Popular sources like to oversimplify matters by presenting neat lists of “the n types of love in ancient Greek” (though they often disagree about how many there were - numbers typically range from three to eight). If you’re looking for a sure-fire way to annoy classicists, just show them one of those lists. In reality, there was no single canonical ancient Greek taxonomy of love. Instead, although it was common to treat it as a concept with multiple senses, different writers theorized about it in different ways, and several of the words commonly attributed to the ancient Greeks’ conception of love were really developed by Christian theologians much later.
What you probably haven’t heard is that the word ‘why’ is similar to the word ‘love’ because it also has many meanings or kinds, but we (in English) cover them all with only one word. This article will help you to clarify your thinking about ‘why’ questions (which are of great value to any curious mind!), specifically in the context of understanding the behavior of human and non-human animals. We’re going to differentiate between five meanings of ‘why’ that you might not realize are available to you any time you want to understand behavior. Knowing these different meanings can help you to:
avoid talking past people (who might be using a different meaning than you are), and
investigate things more deeply (by asking several different ‘why’ questions, instead of one).
We’ll follow the ancient Greeks’ approach to love by giving you different words for these different meanings of ‘why’.
Most of the framework for this article comes from a classic paper in the field of animal behavior studies (known as ‘ethology’). In 1963, Nikolaas Tinbergen was attempting to lay the theoretical foundations of research for this field of study, which was then in its infancy. In doing so, he pointed out four different kinds of ‘why’ questions that people studying animal behavior should be aware of. But his insights can be applied far beyond the behavior of non-human animals, and any careful, critical thinker could do with knowing about them. In this article, we’ll cover his four kinds of ‘why’ and we’ll add one more that covers things ethologists in the 1960s weren’t interested in.
The First Meaning of ‘Why’: Mechanism
This kind of ‘why’ is asking what the mechanism is that produces the behavior being explained. In other words, it asks what is happening inside the system such that the behavior is the output. We can make this clearer by focusing on an example:
Why did Sam procrastinate on the task she wanted to get done?
If we interpret this as a mechanism-why question, the answer may involve brain activity and its causal links to procrastination. It might suggest that Sam’s procrastination occurs due to activity in regions linked to memory and thinking about the future (such as the parahippocampal cortex), increasing how aversive the task feels and making its future rewards feel distant and uncertain. To oversimplify tremendously, when this influence outweighs activity in brain systems supporting planning and action initiation, the task may fail to trigger action.
The Second Meaning of ‘Why’: Development
Sometimes, when we ask ‘why’ a behavior occurred, we’re wondering how the behavior developed in this particular individual. These kinds of questions focus on past experiences, training, and things learned over time. If we interpret the question about Sam’s procrastination as a development-why question, then our answer will involve saying things like:
Sam’s experiences with similar tasks in the past have taught her that she can get away with delaying this task and get more instant gratification in the meantime.
Sam’s personality traits, such as conscientiousness, which developed (at least in part) as a result of her individual history and genetics and which studies indicate are linked to procrastination, make her prone to acting this way.
Unlike mechanistic explanations (which describe what is happening in the moment), developmental explanations describe how the relevant tendencies came to be present in the agent at all.
The Third Meaning of ‘Why’: Fitness Function
When it comes to human and non-human animals, it often makes sense to ask, “What is that behavior for?” In other words, to ask about its fitness function. The word ‘function’ can mean lots of things but, in this context, we’re not talking about intention (more on that below). Here, the fitness function of a behavior (what it is for) is the reliable effects of that behavior that tend to support survival and reproduction (a.k.a fitness).
If we interpret the question about Sam’s procrastination as a fitness-function-why question, then we might find it hard to answer because there is evidence that procrastination is generally maladaptive (i.e., has negative effects on fitness). It’s certainly easier to answer this kind of why-question about behaviors that clearly have mostly positive effects. For example, it’s easy to see the fitness-function of pain-avoidance behaviors like pulling your hand away from a hot surface: the effect is to put distance between you and danger, which makes it more likely that you survive.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t say anything about the fitness function of procrastination. For one thing, not all researchers think procrastination is entirely maladaptive; it has been argued that procrastination can serve “the adaptive function of avoiding the cost of a current effort when there may not be a future in which the payoffs can be realized.”
I realized, in that moment, that I had assumed I was being asked a question about the intentions of the people involved, but my partner had in mind a question about the mechanics of producing paper. The single ‘why’ question could be interpreted in multiple ways. That immediately made me think of an animal behavior scientist from the 1960s called Nikolaas Tinbergen, who distinguished between several different meanings of ‘why’, and I was inspired to write this article about his insights.
Let’s start with a question: Who is the person you love most in the world?
Some lucky people will find that a very difficult question to answer. One reason it can be so difficult is because the love we feel for parents, partners, friends, and fellows (to name just a few) seems to be different in kind rather than just different in degree. That is to say, they seem like different feelings described by the same word. That means a question like “Who do you love most?” can feel like it’s forcing you to rank feelings that don’t belong on the same scale.
Perhaps you’ve heard the popular idea that the ancient Greeks recognized many different ‘types’ of love and had words for each of them. Popular sources like to oversimplify matters by presenting neat lists of “the n types of love in ancient Greek” (though they often disagree about how many there were - numbers typically range from three to eight). If you’re looking for a sure-fire way to annoy classicists, just show them one of those lists. In reality, there was no single canonical ancient Greek taxonomy of love. Instead, although it was common to treat it as a concept with multiple senses, different writers theorized about it in different ways, and several of the words commonly attributed to the ancient Greeks’ conception of love were really developed by Christian theologians much later.
What you probably haven’t heard is that the word ‘why’ is similar to the word ‘love’ because it also has many meanings or kinds, but we (in English) cover them all with only one word. This article will help you to clarify your thinking about ‘why’ questions (which are of great value to any curious mind!), specifically in the context of understanding the behavior of human and non-human animals. We’re going to differentiate between five meanings of ‘why’ that you might not realize are available to you any time you want to understand behavior. Knowing these different meanings can help you to:
avoid talking past people (who might be using a different meaning than you are), and
investigate things more deeply (by asking several different ‘why’ questions, instead of one).
We’ll follow the ancient Greeks’ approach to love by giving you different words for these different meanings of ‘why’.
Most of the framework for this article comes from a classic paper in the field of animal behavior studies (known as ‘ethology’). In 1963, Nikolaas Tinbergen was attempting to lay the theoretical foundations of research for this field of study, which was then in its infancy. In doing so, he pointed out four different kinds of ‘why’ questions that people studying animal behavior should be aware of. But his insights can be applied far beyond the behavior of non-human animals, and any careful, critical thinker could do with knowing about them. In this article, we’ll cover his four kinds of ‘why’ and we’ll add one more that covers things ethologists in the 1960s weren’t interested in.
The First Meaning of ‘Why’: Mechanism
This kind of ‘why’ is asking what the mechanism is that produces the behavior being explained. In other words, it asks what is happening inside the system such that the behavior is the output. We can make this clearer by focusing on an example:
Why did Sam procrastinate on the task she wanted to get done?
If we interpret this as a mechanism-why question, the answer may involve brain activity and its causal links to procrastination. It might suggest that Sam’s procrastination occurs due to activity in regions linked to memory and thinking about the future (such as the parahippocampal cortex), increasing how aversive the task feels and making its future rewards feel distant and uncertain. To oversimplify tremendously, when this influence outweighs activity in brain systems supporting planning and action initiation, the task may fail to trigger action.
The Second Meaning of ‘Why’: Development
Sometimes, when we ask ‘why’ a behavior occurred, we’re wondering how the behavior developed in this particular individual. These kinds of questions focus on past experiences, training, and things learned over time. If we interpret the question about Sam’s procrastination as a development-why question, then our answer will involve saying things like:
Sam’s experiences with similar tasks in the past have taught her that she can get away with delaying this task and get more instant gratification in the meantime.
Sam’s personality traits, such as conscientiousness, which developed (at least in part) as a result of her individual history and genetics and which studies indicate are linked to procrastination, make her prone to acting this way.
Unlike mechanistic explanations (which describe what is happening in the moment), developmental explanations describe how the relevant tendencies came to be present in the agent at all.
The Third Meaning of ‘Why’: Fitness Function
When it comes to human and non-human animals, it often makes sense to ask, “What is that behavior for?” In other words, to ask about its fitness function. The word ‘function’ can mean lots of things but, in this context, we’re not talking about intention (more on that below). Here, the fitness function of a behavior (what it is for) is the reliable effects of that behavior that tend to support survival and reproduction (a.k.a fitness).
If we interpret the question about Sam’s procrastination as a fitness-function-why question, then we might find it hard to answer because there is evidence that procrastination is generally maladaptive (i.e., has negative effects on fitness). It’s certainly easier to answer this kind of why-question about behaviors that clearly have mostly positive effects. For example, it’s easy to see the fitness-function of pain-avoidance behaviors like pulling your hand away from a hot surface: the effect is to put distance between you and danger, which makes it more likely that you survive.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t say anything about the fitness function of procrastination. For one thing, not all researchers think procrastination is entirely maladaptive; it has been argued that procrastination can serve “the adaptive function of avoiding the cost of a current effort when there may not be a future in which the payoffs can be realized.”