ABSTRACT
Animals have been central to human psychology at least since the first cave paintings 30,000 years ago. Their behaviour has been used to encode psychological insights certainly since Aesop’s Fables and the biblical Book of Proverbs while folkpsychological language is rich with animal terms. Physiognomists like the Italian G.B. Della Porta in the sixteenth century and J.C. Lavater in the eighteenth century drew heavily on similarities between human and animal forms as indicators of character. After Charles Darwin the relationship became even closer, if different in kind, and Psychology continued the traditional practice of looking to animal behaviour to provide insight into our own. What I want to do here is consider some of the ways Psychology has used this ‘resource’. Although animal behaviour may be studied in its own right, it is invariably, perhaps inevitably, construed as having broader implications relating to human behaviour. There are, I think, four, infrequently spelled out, uses to which animal behaviour research has been put. Each has been particularly in vogue at different times and places, although none ever entirely absent. One underlying message is that the use being made of animal behaviour evidence will determine the kind of theories being produced, and also to some degree the research methods employed. That is to say, psychologists do not approach animal behaviour in a neutral fashion, but with prior assumptions about why they are doing so. (Before proceeding further I would draw attention to Donna Haraway (1989), a provocative feminist exploration of this line of thinking in regard to primate research.) The four kinds of use which I am provisionally identifying are:
1 To trace the evolutionary roots of human behaviour. 2 As ‘behavioural units’ for studying something called ‘behaviour’. 3 As sources of insight into behavioural dynamics, especially social dynamics. 4 To trace the borderline of what is distinctively human.
