ABSTRACT
When the first scientific work on “comparative” psychology was conducted during the last decades of the 19th century all people concerned with this type of research were expecting results relevant to human behavior, aside from results that were useful for the study of psychological processes in animals. Work on learning, perception, memory, problem solving, social behavior, sexual behavior, and even psychopathology and communication, was supposed to throw light on very basic psychological factors, common both to humans and to other animals. No one attempted to extrapolate the results obtained in cats, rats, chickens, dogs, or monkeys to humans. Actually, the reverse process was more common, to extrapolate human behavior to animals different from men (anthropomorphism).
