Clever Hans : the horse of Mr. Von Osten

By Oskar Pfungst, R. Rosenthal. 1911

Subfields: Cognitive Science & Psychology

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In Cognitive Science & Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Anticipating Safety Issues in E2E Conversational AI: Framework and Tooling (2021, neutral): “These effects are reminiscent of the case of Clever Hans, a horse who was thought to have arithmetic ability but was instead skilled at reading human reactions (Pfungst, 1911).”
CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning (2016, background): “Careful observation revealed that Hans was correctly “answering” questions by reacting to cues read off his human observers [30].”
Revisiting the Evaluation of Theory of Mind through Question Answering (2019, background): “Related Work on Dataset Artifacts It is challenging to determine what specific competence is revealed by the successful completion of a task, as illustrated by the case of Clever Hans, the famous horse whose skill at reading human reactions passed for arithmetic ability (Pfungst, 1911).”
How can we capture the subject’s perspective? An evidence-based approach for the social scientist (2011, background): “…‘Clever Hans’ (a horse, said to be able to count, giving the results of additions by tapping the floor with its hoof) was finally elucidated when Oskar Pfungst noticed that the horse sensed the nonverbal reaction of spectators to its tapping and adjusted its ‘answers’ accordingly (Pfungst, 1911).”
Anthropomorphism and the social robot (2003, background): “From an observer perspective, one could pose the question whether the attribution of artificial emotions to a robot is analogous to the Clever Hans Error [36], where the meaning and in fact the result is primarily dependent on the observer and not the initiator.”
Gradient Starvation: A Learning Proclivity in Neural Networks (2020, background): “In 1904, a horse named Hans attracted worldwide attention due to the belief that it was capable of doing arithmetic calculations (Pfungst, 1911).”
Affect, Relationality and the `Problem of Personality' (2008, background): “It was concluded that, ‘unintentional minimal movements (so minimal they had not been perceived until now) are performed by each of the humans for whom Hans had successfully answered the questions’ (Despret, 2004a: 113).”
When Choosing Plausible Alternatives, Clever Hans can be Clever (2019, background): “performance is an instance of the Clever Hans effect1 (Pfungst, 1911): Models trained on datasets with superficial cues learn heuristics for exploiting these cues, but do not develop any deeper understanding of the task.”
The Illusion of Conscious Will (2018, background): “But Hans’s feats were the topic of continued investigation by Oskar Pfungst (1911), a student of the psychologist (and commission member) Carl Stumpf.”