The striking intelligence of crows and their relatives has long been credited to their use of tools: a bird that fashions a hooked twig to extract grubs, the reasoning went, must have evolved a large brain to do so. Recent comparative work unsettles this tidy account. When researchers mapped brain size against behavior across dozens of species, the strongest correlate of neural expansion was not tool use, which is rare and patchy across the family, but the size and stability of the social group in which a bird lives. Species that maintain long-term partnerships and navigate shifting alliances, whether or not they ever manipulate an object, tend toward the largest brains. Tool use, on this reading, is better seen as one incidental expression of a general intelligence that arose to meet the demands of social life, not as the pressure that produced the intelligence in the first place.