In 1859, Charles Darwin made the prediction that because of his theory of evolut
ID: 3461333 • Letter: I
Question
In 1859, Charles Darwin made the prediction that because of his theory of evolution, “Psychology will be based on a new foundation.” One of the ways in which his prediction came true was that psychologists began to study animal behavior as a way to understand humans.
Find one psychological study in the literature that used animals as subjects and tell us about it.
Briefly, what were the research questions, methods used, and findings?
Do you believe there’s a close connection between animal and human behavior? Why or why not?
Explanation / Answer
Pavlov (1902) started from the idea that there are some things that a dog does not need to learn. For example, dogs don’t learn to salivate whenever they see food. This reflex is ‘hard-wired’ into the dog. In behaviorist terms, it is an unconditioned response (i.e., a stimulus-response connection that required no learning).
Unconditioned Stimulus (Food) > Unconditioned Response(Salivate)
Pavlov showed the existence of the unconditioned response by presenting a dog with a bowl of food and the measuring its salivary secretions
However, when Pavlov discovered that any object or event which the dogs learned to associate with food (such as the lab assistant) would trigger the same response, he realized that he had made an important scientific discovery. Accordingly, he devoted the rest of his career to studying this type of learning.
Pavlov knew that somehow, the dogs in his lab had learned to associate food with his lab assistant. This must have been learned, because at one point the dogs did not do it, and there came a point where they started, so their behavior had changed. A change in the behavior of this type must be the result of learning.
In behaviorist terms, the lab assistant was originally a neutral stimulus. It is called neutral because it produces no response. What had happened was that the neutral stimulus (the lab assistant) had become associated with an unconditioned stimulus (food).
In his experiment, Pavlov used a bell as his neutral stimulus. Whenever he gave food to his dogs, he also rang a bell. After a number of repeats of this procedure, he tried the bell on its own. As you might expect, the bell on its own now caused an increase in salivation.
So the dog had learned an association between the bell and the food and a new behavior had been learned. Because this response was learned (or conditioned), it is called a conditioned response. The neutral stimulus has become a conditioned stimulus.
I belive in the connection between the behvaiour of animal and humans.In the field of animal behaviour, there is one topic that is almost guaranteed to get your study in the popular press: showing how an animal behaves just like humans. This can be solving problems, using tools, acting pessimistically when feeling down, or taking care of their grandchildren. People love stories of seemingly clever animals.
Species can share a trait for two reasons: either the species are closely related and they have inherited the trait from their common ancestor, or the shared trait is an adaptation to similar evolutionary pressures. Both of these ways of looking at similarities can be enlightening when trying to understand the nature of humans.