ABSTRACT
There has long been resistance to the idea that our understanding of human behavior can be enhanced by the study of nonhuman behavior and, as a social psychologist who has been drawn to experimental and scholarly research on animals, I am naturally sensitive to this resistance. Such negativism can be amply documented in academic essays (Montagu, 1968), certain of which manage to reach a rather strident pitch. For instance, Smith and Daniel (1975) assert that in looking back on the corpus of comparative animal research, they have the impression that it: “represents one of the greatest wastelands of modern science or social science or pseudoscience,” and that should a history of this activity be compiled, it would reveal a “story of almost unparalleled stupidities and horrors which have, in toto, contributed little or nothing to man’s knowledge of himself …, and very little to our knowledge of the animals that have been the objects of these experiments [p. 168].”
