ABSTRACT

In the 1935 Handbook of Social Psychology (Murchison, 1935), more than a third of the chapters focused on nonhuman subjects. Almost 20 years later, Hebb and Thomson used their 1954 handbook chapter to call for the use of animals in social psychological research, arguing that social psychology will “be dangerously myopic if it restricts itself to the human literature” (p. 532). However, half a century later, the idea of using nonhuman animals seems to have largely disappeared from contemporary social psychology. In fact, none of the chapters in the latest Handbook of Social Psychology (Gilbert, Fiske, & Lindzey, 1998) focused on nonhuman animals. Here we argue that animal studies still have an important contribution to make to social and personality psychology. Just as animal studies contribute to many other areas of research in psychology (Domjan & Purdy, 1995), we suggest that social psychologists can reap great benefits from animal research. Indeed, with the emergence of new methods in genomics, neuroscience, physiology, and phylogenetics, the potential contributions to be made by animal research are greater than ever.