ABSTRACT
Ethology is the study of animal behavior (including human behavior) from an evolutionary perspective. This chapter begins with a description of Darwin’s theory. It follows with a discussion of two major 20th-century ethologists, Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, who introduced the concepts of instinct and imprinting.
The chapter then turns to the figure most responsible for applying ethology to human behavior: British psychoanalyst John Bowlby. In the 1940s, Bowlby was puzzled by how devastated toddlers became when separated from their parents in hospitals. Some never trusted people again. Bowlby and his co-worker, James Robinson, had great difficulty getting the medical community to recognize that this distress was natural. At the same time, Bowlby could find no adequate theoretical explanation for it until he read Lorenz. He then saw that toddlers’ attachment to their parents was like that in many other species and could be understood in terms like instinct and imprinting. In the environment in which humans evolved, there was the danger of large predators, and youngsters who didn’t follow their parents were easy prey.
Bowlby’s work inspired Mary Ainsworth to study how attachment develops in human infants—first in Ugandan villages and then in Baltimore. She helped Bowlby formulate phases of attachment and uncovered 3 individual patterns, one of which is most common and is healthy; the other two are more defensive. These patterns have been the subject of research throughout the world.
