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over others in the lab. The average pigeon will learn to peck a disc to obtain food but will not learn to peck a disc to avoid a shock. For a rat, the same learning pattern is found: it can learn to press a bar to obtain food but cannot learn to press a bar to avoid a shock. "Preparedness" and the Garcia Effect suggest that learning can be promoted or inhibited by a preprogrammed mental set in an organism. This is the effect of the schema on humans—it makes learning of certain things easier and others more difficult.
Outside the lab, animals of all kinds may be fooled by mimicry and deceitful displays of members of their own and other species. Birds, for example, may be tricked into playing hosts to the eggs (which usually look something like their own) and young of the scores of brood parasites which infest the avian world. In the case of the cuckoo, the hosts end up rearing the parasites' young to the exclusion of their own. Beyond showing the ability to cope more or less successfully with reality, higher vertebrates evince the cognitive capacity to live in a world of fantasy. This was demonstrated experimentally by B.F. Skinner's "Superstitious pigeons", or so we like to believe. The birds came to make idiosyncratic jerking movements in response to randomly scheduled food reinforcement, behaving as if they thought their actions caused the production of food. Likewise, the "Rain dance" of Jane Goodall's chimpanzees suggests a mental ability to associate effects with noncauses. Of course, in this case as well, the behavior does not necessarily indicate the cognitive world of the performers. The animals may simply be displaying emotion and releasing tension without presuming to influence that great chimp in the sky who makes it rain. However, it is reasonable to assert that such behavior indicates mammals can carry maladaptation to new levels of confusion. In general, the mammalian life style emphasizes extended learning in fewer, slower developing individuals in contrast to more rigid behavior patterns in swarms or schools of quicker developing insects or fish. This necessarily means there is a premium on the adaptability of the individual in times of crisis, rather than a reliance on numbers to carry the species through. However reliable they may usually be, the patterns of behavior which are learned in the routine of daily life may be maladaptive in a short-term emergency situation. Adjustment of behavior to novel necessity is very much a learned process typical of the more adaptable mammals, like the primates and particularly ourselves. As with all of our other special traits, human stupidity is the culmination of a long train of development shaped by our evolutionary past, but meaningful generalizations about our psychic evolution are difficult because we are a compromise of all the incongruities of life. For example,
 stupidity.net 
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