Clever Hans, as you may have heard, was a horse who learned all kinds of amazing skills

like solving math problems and having conversations, all by stomping his hoof.

You may have also heard that his handlers were either consciously or unconsciously guiding

Hans to do this, and he actually had no idea what he was doing, and we now call this

the Clever Hans Effect. But what you probably didn't know is the surprisingly rich history

of this truly unique horse. Clever Hans is coming up next on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. The horsey history of Clever Hans.

You've almost certainly heard the story of Clever Hans. The horse, who in the early 1900s,

amazed Europe with his apparent ability to count, perform mathematical calculations,

and demonstrate other even more impressive feats of intellect. You've probably also heard

that it was eventually discovered that these abilities were found to be nothing more than the

horse reacting to unconscious cues given by the people testing him. A phenomenon that today we call

the Clever Hans Effect. But you may not know just how deep was his impact upon the use of experimental

controls and a variety of sciences, including psychology and communication, even parapsychology.

Today, we're going to learn about the amazing life of this famous horse, and find out just how

he came to be so influential, even more than a century later. To learn about Hans, we must first

learn about his owner, Wilhelm von Osten, a retired Prussian schoolmaster in Berlin, Germany.

Crotchety, foul tempered, slouched, and slavently in appearance. He had bought a carriage horse in 1888,

and named it Hans, and had grown impressed with the horse's ability to know its way around and

apparently make conscious decisions. von Osten trained Hans to drive without rains,

responding only to commands, and also to stamp its hoof to indicate numbers up to five.

von Osten made public demonstrations of Hans' abilities beginning in 1891. By all accounts,

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