Three reasons to be interested in comparative psychology
Notes:
There was a time when it was obvious why people should be interested in comparative psychology. Behaviorist theory held that the very same processes operated in animals and in humans so it did not matter much which species one studied in order to discover the properties of those processes. Rat, pigeon, monkey, which is which?
As the evidence accumulated that there are species differences and as clinical issues came to dominate psychology, the justification for studying animals was strained. The reasons that people studied animal psychology are no longer valid, leading some to give up on the value of the interprise. If we want to learn something about human behavior, then it makes more sense to study it in humans than something else.
Despite the difficulties of doing animal research there are many important things we can learn from this research. For example, the case for biomedical models of psychological phenomena has been made frequently. The development of drugs that address the cognitive debilitation of Alzheimer’s disease, for example, depends on the development of an animal model for Alzheimer’s and on a thorough understanding of those cognitive processes in animals that correspond to the cognitive processes affected in humans by the disease. Weak and poorly understood models return poor value for the effort. In the rest of this talk, I’ll focus on three other issues that make comparative psychology not only interesting, but essential.