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I wonder if there's any way to measure rationality in animals.
Bear with me for a second. The Cognitive Reflection Test is a measure of how well you can avoid the intuitive-but-wrong answer and instead make the more mentally laborious calculation. The Stroop test is also a measure of how well you can avoid making impulsive mistakes and instead force yourself to focus only on what matters. As I recall, the "restrain your impulses and focus your thinking" skill is a fairly "biological" one -- it's consistently associated with activity in particular parts of the brain, influenced by drugs, and impaired in conditions like ADHD.
Could we -- or have we already -- design a variant of this made out of mazes that rats could run through?
I might look into this more carefully myself, but does anyone know off the top of their heads?
See Rosati et al., The Evolutionary Origins of Human Patience: Temporal Preferences in Chimpanzees, Bonobos, and Human Adults, Current Biology (2007). Similar to the marshmallow test.