The Man Who Taught a Gorilla to Lie

Imagine the scene: a steel sink, an object of considerable weight and fortitude, has been ripped clean from its moorings on the wall. It lies on the floor, a testament to an incredible act of force. In the room is Koko, a 250-pound western lowland gorilla, and her tiny, beloved pet kitten, a tailless Manx she named All Ball.

Dr. Francine “Penny” Patterson, the psychologist and researcher who had spent years teaching Koko a modified form of American Sign Language, enters the room. Taking in the destruction, she asks the gorilla a simple, direct question: “What happened here?”

Koko, fluent in over 1,000 signs, does not confess. She does not cower. Instead, she looks at Patterson and signs, with what one can only imagine was a straight face, a truly astonishing sentence:

CAT DID IT.

She then pointed accusingly at little All Ball. This single, extraordinary moment—a gorilla blaming her kitten for an act of vandalism—has become a cornerstone in the ongoing, heated debate about animal cognition, language, and the very nature of truth.

Who Was Koko?

To understand the significance of the “sink incident”, you first have to understand Koko. Born in 1971, Koko (a portmanteau of her full name, Hanabiko, Japanese for “fireworks child”) became the subject of the longest continuous study of interspecies communication in history. Dr. Penny Patterson began working with Koko in 1972, founding The Gorilla Foundation to support “Project Koko.”

The project’s goal was to see if a gorilla could learn and use human language. Using a modified ASL they dubbed “Gorilla Sign Language” (GSL), Patterson and her team taught Koko an astonishing vocabulary. By adulthood, Koko could actively use over 1,000 signs and reportedly understood around 2,000 words of spoken English. She could ask for food, express emotions like happiness and sadness, and even create novel terms. Famously, she combined the signs for “finger” and “bracelet” to describe a ring, and “white” and “tiger” to describe a zebra.

Koko’s emotional life was as rich as her vocabulary. Her deep affection for her kittens, starting with All Ball, captivated the world and demonstrated a capacity for gentle, nurturing care that many found surprising in such a powerful animal.

The Anatomy of a Lie

Let’s return to the scene of the crime. After Koko implicated the kitten, Patterson expressed her disbelief. A tiny cat couldn’t possibly rip a sink from a wall. After a bit of back and forth, Koko seemed to understand she wasn’t fooling anyone. She then made a sign that could be interpreted as “frown”, “shame”, or “trouble”, effectively confessing to the deed.

This incident is far more than a cute anecdote. To lie is a profoundly complex cognitive and linguistic act. It requires several layers of understanding:

• Causality: Koko understood that an agent (someone) caused the sink to break.
• Blame and Consequence: She understood that the one responsible would face negative consequences (disapproval from Patterson).
• False Narrative: She was able to construct an alternative sequence of events—a story where the cat was the culprit.
• Intent to Deceive: Most importantly, she acted with the intention of making Patterson believe something that was not true to avoid punishment.

This points directly to one of the most debated concepts in animal psychology: Theory of Mind.

A Glimpse into the Mind of Another?

Theory of Mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, knowledge—to oneself and to others, and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions that are different from one’s own. It’s the reason you don’t spoil a movie for a friend who hasn’t seen it yet; you understand that their state of knowledge is different from yours.

An effective lie is a masterclass in applied Theory of Mind. The liar must:

1. Recognize that the other person does not know the truth.
2. Formulate a falsehood that the other person might find plausible.
3. Predict that if the other person believes the falsehood, the liar will benefit.

Did Koko’s lie meet this high bar? When she signed “CAT DID IT”, was she truly manipulating Penny Patterson’s mental state? Or was she simply making a series of associations: sink broken… me trouble… cat there… sign cat? This is the question that divides the scientific community.

The Skeptics’ Corner

Not everyone is convinced that Koko’s actions represent a true, human-like lie. Critics of ape language research, most notably Herbert Terrace with his work on “Nim Chimpsky”, have long argued that apes in these studies are not truly using language. They propose alternative explanations:

• The Clever Hans Effect: This refers to a horse in the early 20th century that appeared to do arithmetic but was actually responding to subtle, unconscious cues from his trainer. Skeptics suggest Koko may have been an expert at reading her human companions’ body language, not at understanding abstract concepts.
• Over-Interpretation: Researchers who spend years building a bond with an animal may be prone to anthropomorphism—attributing human characteristics to a non-human. Was Patterson seeing a complex lie where there was only a jumble of associated signs?
• Conditioned Response: Perhaps Koko had simply learned that pointing to other things when “trouble” occurred sometimes deflected negative attention, without a deeper understanding of deception.

These criticisms are valid and essential for scientific rigor. It is incredibly difficult, perhaps impossible, to definitively prove what is happening inside another being’s mind—be it animal or human.

A Lie That Speaks Volumes

Whether Koko’s tall tale was a calculated deception or a simpler association, the incident remains profoundly important. It pushes the boundaries of our understanding and forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about the uniqueness of human cognition.

The story of Koko and the sink is not really about a gorilla who taught herself to lie; it’s about a researcher, Dr. Penny Patterson, who created an environment where a gorilla could demonstrate cognitive abilities that we once thought were exclusively human. Deception, after all, is not just a sign of mischief. It’s a sign of a mind at work—a mind that can model the world, predict the future, and even try to rewrite the past.

Koko passed away in 2018, but her legacy endures in these fascinating, unanswerable questions. The gorilla who blamed her kitten didn’t just break a sink; she shattered some of our most cherished assumptions about what it means to communicate, to think, and perhaps, to be.