Principles Of Comparative Psychology

Nicky Hayes

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317758747
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This textbook covers aspects of animal behaviour featured in both A-Level Psychology and Social Biology courses. It includes accounts and discussions of imprinting, maternal behaviour, courtship and territoriality, social organization, and animal communication. Throughout the book the principle of behavioural diversity is built upon to show the complexities of animal behaviour and its relationship with the social and physical environment. The issues and perspectives arising from evolutionary theory are explored, and the need to utilize multiple levels of analysis in the understanding of animal and human behaviour is emphasized.

Comparative psychology and evolution

1

Comparative psychology is concerned with the systematic study of animal behaviour. Psychologists have been interested in animals throughout the history of psychology: partly because learning about animals may help to inform us about ourselves; but also because animals are intrinsically interesting as subjects of study in their own right. In this book, we will be looking at some of the basic findings and theories of comparative psychology, as well as at some of the ways that comparative theories have been applied to our understanding of human beings.

Animals and human beings

The relationship between human beings and animals is a very ancient one. Animals have lived with human beings, worked for human beings, been kept by human beings, been hunted by human beings, and have been observed by them. The legends and traditions of every non-technological society provide accounts of the relationships between people and animals, and of the animals themselves, providing explanations for how their distinctive behaviours have come to be, or why they are like they are. This interest in the other creatures that share this planet persists even in technological societies: television documentaries about animal behaviour abound, people keep pets of various kinds, and go to see animals in reserves and zoos.

Interest in animals, then, is a very long-standing human tradition. Partnership with animals, in hunting, tracking, or seeking out foodstuffs, seems to be almost equally old. Human beings have used dogs, pigs, cassowaries, and many other species in day to day living, in a relationship in which the animal expresses its own behavioural inclinations in such a way that the human being can also benefit from them; and people have also observed the behaviour of other, wild species in order to identify the appropriate time to seek out sources of food.

With the development of agriculture came a change in the nature of the relationship between animal and human being. Gatherer-hunter societies depended on finding, and knowing about, plants that had grown randomly-or at least, according to evolved systems of dispersal and ecology. That isn't to say that such people were passive: for example, the Native Australians have used fire to regenerate areas of bush in a regular and periodic manner for over 30,000 years; and the Native Americans managed their plains and forests in such a way as to encourage as much growth and life as possible. But, ultimately, these societies encouraged whole systems, and left matters such as what plants would grow where to nature.

Agricultural societies, as they emerged, took such matters literally into their own hands. They decided what should grow where, and when. This produced a new type of relationship with the natural world: human beings were taking charge more, and the relationship was becoming less of a partnership. A similar change can be seen in the systematic use of animals in more structured ways, like the use of horses and cattle in farming, which appeared as agricultural societies developed. The vagaries of climate ensured that total control was never possible, and human beings learned to work within the constraints offered by their environment; but the relationship was nonetheless qualitatively different.

As technological societies emerged from agricultural ones, attitudes became even more exploitative: plants, land, and water were seen as “resources”, there to be used, and animals, too, became perceived as a resource to be used. While people have continued to keep animals as companions, and even as partners, these new approaches have become the social norm. It is only recently that human beings have begun to question the nature of our relationship with the rest of the world.

The Western philosophical tradition

Cartesian dualism

The Western philosophical tradition, beginning with the Greek philosophers, established a conceptual framework for this new relationship. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus put forward the argument that human beings are qualitatively different from, and superior to, animals because they have souls, whereas animals do not. The concept became a significant strand in Western thought, eventually becoming part of the influential distinction made by Descartes. In essence, Descartes not only reiterated this view, but also proposed that animals, unlike human beings, do not think, and that their behaviour is entirely determined by physiological mechanisms and instincts. Descartes acknowledged that human beings, too, possess physiological mechanisms-his account of the structure and functioning of the eye is often considered to be one of the very first psychological studies. But he then went on to propose that the human mind is entirely separate from, and independent of, the body anyway.

This distinction had many far-reaching effects, such as legitimising the introduction of the factory system to industry (if peoples' minds and souls are separate and distinct, then it doesn't matter what you do with their bodies), as well as having effects on medicine, and on comparative psychology. For comparative psychology, it established a framework which stated that, on the one hand, animals were entirely different from human beings as far as feelings and thoughts were concerned, so it was not necessary to worry about causing pain or distress; whereas, on the other hand, it was a good idea to study animals because their physiological mechanisms could be expected to operate on similar principles to those of humans.

It must be remembered, of course, that it wasn't specifically Descartes himself who was drawing out these implications. Rather, his theory, influential as it was, established the set of assumptions in society which made these conclusions possible. In many non-technological societies, a different set of social assumptions-for example, that animals could feel, sense, and work things out in a similar way to humans, although not as well-had produced different outcomes.

With the advent of the theory of evolution, proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, the assumed qualitative distinction between human beings and animals was seriously challenged, and the social furore that resulted was enormous. By proposing a direct developmental link between animals and human beings, Darwin's theory laid open to question the whole idea of human superiority to animals, which by then had become such a central tenet of Western industrial society that to challenge it was unthinkable. As evolutionary theory took hold in society, it was quickly redefined in terms of “progress”, and various steps were taken to “show” that human beings were at the top of the evolutionary scale, and therefore still superior to other animals. Similarly, a number of “popular” versions of evolutionary theory came to be used in political debates. Although these were sometimes linked only loosely with the theory that Darwin had proposed, they exerted their influence, not just on the sociopolitical ideas of their society but also on comparative psychology. Because evolution is such a fundamental concept in comparative psychology-one that is effectively taken for granted as underlying the discipline-we will be looking at it in more detail later in this chapter.

Empiricism

Descartes was not alone in providing a framework of assumptions that helped to set the groundwork for Western technological society. Other empiricist philosophers of the 16th and 17th centuries had also produced ideas which became established as part of social knowledge. In part, these were based on the idea that human beings only had access to five types of information, provided by the external five senses of vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. This led towards assumptions about the nature of objective reality, and the idea that it is possible somehow to stand apart from that world-to know about it without being affected by it. This assumption exerted a powerful influence over methodology and theories in psychology.

But psychologists and physiologists now know that there are also internal, kinaesthetic senses, which provide internal information about internal states and reactions in the body. We don't just experience outside things, we also respond to them, and we receive information (however unconsciously) about our responses. Moreover, we perceive actively: we select what we will pay attention to, and shape the information that we receive in terms of our own prior assumptions and ideas. So it is not really possible for human beings to be detached from the world: our own responses are part of our experience too, and therefore we are involved with the world, not separate from it. Although this might seem like a digression, the idea of objectivity and detachment, and the idea that humans are somehow separate from, and above, the world around them has formed a powerful influence in the development of psychological knowledge, as well as in society.

Associationism

The empiricist philosopher John Locke argued that when the human being was first born, the mind was simply a blank slate-a tabula rasa-waiting to be written on by experience. Locke believed that our experience shapes who we are and who we become-and therefore he also believed that, given different experiences, human beings would have different characters. The influence of these ideas was profound, particularly for the new colonies in America, for example, because these were conscious attempts to make a new start and to form a new society. The new society was to operate on a different basis from that of European culture, which was based on the feudal system in which people's place in society was almost entirely determined by birth, and which therefore tended to emphasise innate characteristics. Locke's emphasis on the importance of experience in forming the human being provided an optimistic framework for those trying to form a different society.

Locke believed that the way that experience built up to have these large-scale effects was through association. An external stimulus (such as a cup) would produce a response from the person (such as drinking), and the two would become linked. That would be a learned association. This type of learning formed the basis for human experiences because one small bit of learning would link up with another small bit, and this in turn would link with a third, and so on until long chains of learning were built up. Eventually, through chains of associations, the person would be able to have quite complex experiences, like, say, being able to recognise someone at a glance from their picture.

Behaviourism

Locke's associationism formed the underlying approach of the school of thought known as behaviourism, proposed by the American psychologist J.B. Watson in 1913. Watson argued that the understanding of both human beings and animals needed to take place through the study of their behaviour, because trying to infer what was going on in the mind was unscientific and not open to objective scrutiny. Behaviour, Watson argued, should be studied in terms of the associations between the external stimulus and the behavioural response, and the way that chains of stimulus and response could be combined into complex sequences of behaviour and action.

To Watson, the stimulus-response unit was the “atom” of psychology. Following the physicists' model of the atom, or the biological model of the simple cell, Watson argued that psychology should begin by studying the simplest form of stimulus-response link. Animal learning, he argued, would be relatively uncontaminated by other kinds of factors; and so would be a suitable area of study to form the foundation of the new science. If stimulus-response links were the basic foundation of behaviour, then all stimulus-response links would be similar in essence, in the same way that different atoms in physics, or cells in biology were then considered to be similar in essence.

Behaviourism has been a fundamental concept in comparative psychology. It dominated American and British (though not European) psychology for much of the 20th century, only becoming seriously challenged when technological developments made a more objective study of the mind possible, and cognitive psychology came to the fore. As such, behaviourism also brought the study of animals into prominence in “mainstream” psychology: the use of the term “organism” to describe the individual became common throughout the discipline, and emphasised the assumption that human and animal psychologies were essentially the same thing. Although psychology as a whole has moved on from this point, the influence of this type of comparative psychology can still be identified in the methodologies and practices of many areas of research.

Themes and traditions in comparative psychology

The American comparative tradition

The perspectives and philosophies that have just been outlined exerted a strong influence over the way that comparative psychology emerged and developed. In terms of its own more recent history, this branch of psychology developed from two very different traditions of academic thought. One of these comes from the behaviourist tradition which has just been described. This meant that, in America in particular, the study of animal behaviour tended to concentrate on laboratory studies, looking at various types of stimulus-response learning, and at behavioural aspects of motivation, such as curiosity and exploration. The idea of the stimulus-response link as the “pure” form of learning led to the idea that studying this type of learning under laboratory conditions would result in identifying the essential features of learning that were common to all organisms.

Because the idea was to conduct these studies in research conditions that were as “uncontaminated” as possible, so that only the causal features of the behaviour could be identified, standard laboratory animals, such as pigeons and small rodents-particularly the albino rat-were used extensively in these experiments, although some studies also extended to monkeys and apes. The principles of classical and operant conditioning, which we will be looking at in Chapter 2, were two fundamental psychological concepts established during this period.

The European ethological tradition

The second tradition in modern comparative psychology is the European ethological approach. This developed through the 18th and 19th centuries with the work of amateur naturalists, who would engage in the meticulous documentation of animal behaviour, often submitting papers to learned societies, and reporting their observations to journals. Around the beginning of the 20th century, this approach became systematised into a more formal discipline, which gradually came to centre on the work of the European ethologists Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen.

As an approach, ethology emphasises the study of behaviour in its natural environment. Rather than studying animals in the laboratory, ethologists are concerned that the behaviour should be seen in respect to the animal's own habitat, so that the way the animal, its environment, and its peers interact can be taken into account. Although ethologists do sometimes perform simple experiments to clarify the relationship between a behaviour and its apparent functions, for the most part, ethological studies are observational, and are concerned with observing, recording, and correlating different features of behaviour, as they occur in context.

As can be seen, the comparative and ethological traditions are quite different; but from about the 1950s or so they began to come together, as researchers in the different fields began to learn from each other. Modern comparative psychology now draws from both of these traditions, and in this book we will be looking at research from both, as each has made important contributions to our understanding of animal behaviour.

Levels of explanation

The process of describing behaviour itself isn't always as simple as it might appear to be. Whenever we make any observations, we are interpreting what we see-that's an unavoidable feature of the process of perception itself. As a result, it is very easy for those interpretations to influence our judgement, so comparative psychologists have tended to try to be very explicit about exactly what kind of behaviour they are describing at any given moment. Hinde (1970) argued that, in terms of scientific description of behaviour, it is necessary to distinguish between two different levels of description. The first level, and perhaps the most fundamental one for the comparative psychologist, is concerned with simply describing actions. For example, Lorenz (1958) performed a series of observations of the stereotyped nature of duck courtship displays, showing that the same actions were performed every time. These observations involved the meticulous description of the physical movements that the duck actually made: the movements that resulted as its muscles contracted. So this level of description includes words like “running”, “swallowing”, or “bobbing the head”.

The second level of description is to do with descriptions which focus on the effect that the animal has on its environment. Terms like “drinking”, “pressing a lever” or “running away” are all externally focused-they emphasise the context of the action, and are not just a simple description of muscle actions. This is an important distinction to make, because it is very easy to confuse the two levels, but doing so can colour what we are actually saying to the point of even changing its meaning. Describing the duck as “bobbing its head to its mate” does not assume that the purpose of the duck's ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Comparative psychology and evolution
• 2. The basis of behaviour
• 3. Courtship, mating, and reproduction
• 4. Social Organisation
• 5. Communication and information
• 6. Animal cognition
• References
• Glossary
• Author Index
• Subject Index