ABSTRACT
Social interactions among conspecifics depend on the development of a variety of basic skills. Some of these skills, including attention, emotion, learning, and memory, were reviewed in Chapter 11 on the basis of studies involving nonsocial behavioral settings. However, such skills apply equally to social situations. The study of social development is complicated by the fact that the experimenter does not have full control over the interactions among organisms. Often, the behavior of one animal (e.g., a singing male sparrow) may influence another to respond in a certain way (e.g., a female approaches the male’s territory), which, in turn, influences the first animal to respond, and so on. In some lines of research, careful naturalistic observations have given way to experimental research in which a key aspect of the social situation takes a physical dimension. For example, the duckling’s attachment to its mother observed under natural conditions can be studied in the laboratory by substituting an inanimate object for the real mother. In this case, the researcher has greater control over the features of the stimulus and over the actual “behavior” of the stimulus. Tapes of vocalizations and substitute mothers have been extensively used in place of the original objects for the same reasons. Obviously,
inanimate objects simplify the social situation, impoverishing the testing interaction such that some aspect of the process that occurs under natural conditions could be lost in the laboratory situation. Still, the complexity of these phenomena is considerable and their development is often intricate, involving interactions between genetic, physiological, and experiential factors that comparative and developmental psychologists are just beginning to understand.
