Scholar's Award: A Critical Analysis of Natural and Behavioral Scientists' Use of Animal Studies to Better Understand Human Emotional and Cognitive Processes

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

The proposed research investigates how and why behavioral and natural scientists came to believe that they could learn as much about human nature by studying primates and other animals as they could by studying human beings. Between the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) statements on race in the early 1950s and the highly visible fights over human nature as defined by sociobiology starting in the mid-1970s, behavioral and natural scientists began to look at animals for insight into humans' emotional and cognitive processes. Although physicians, biologists, and other natural scientists have long used animal studies to better understand human biology and disease, scientists' turn to animal studies as a way to investigate human emotions, learning processes, and group formation emerged post World War II in the United States. Anthropologists were an important part of this shift, as they moved away from studying non-Western countries to studying primates and other animals for insight into what it means to be human. This turn did not stay contained in the academy; it was also taken up in popular media and was incorporated into new curriculum for elementary school students. To explore how and why anthropologists, psychologists, and other behavioral scientists turned to animal studies, the Principle Investigator will conduct oral history interviews, engage in archival research, and analyze the professional and popular scientific literature on human nature. Using multiple research methods, this research explores the political, cultural, and educational contexts in which these conversations about human nature took place. The intellectual merits of this project rest in its elucidation of the cultural stakes as scientists struggled to make sense of whether the human and animal were opposites and different, or if in fact animals were similar enough that study of them could provide insight into human decision making, group interactions, and emotional bonding. The project's broader impacts lie in its potential to reconceive the history of the natural and behavioral sciences by bringing to light the cross-disciplinary exchanges and disciplinary struggles that characterized the human sciences as the decision to study animals for insight into human nature took hold. Most importantly, this project will contribute substantially to an understanding of how scientists and non-scientists in the United States sought to answer, "What is human about human beings?"