Triumph and tribulation in the history of American comparative psychology.

Abstract

The accomplishments of the last 100 years of American comparative psychology have been exemplary. However, throughout this time the status of comparative psychology has been ambiguous. It has been the study of nonhumans in a science of human behavior and mind and thus peripheral to the main endeavor. The need for special resources, unique problems caused by work with animals, and frequent problems of job availability affected the development of the field. The accomplishments of comparative psychology have been achieved in spite of a substantial and continuous loss of young scientists initially attracted to the field but unable to sustain careers in comparative psychology. The tragedy of comparative psychology is that so many psychologists began their careers in animal research and later moved to other fields, especially educational psychology. The "miracle" is that so much was accomplished.Editor's note. This article was solicited (but also subjected to the standard reviewing process) and appears as the lead article in this first 1992 issue of the Journal of Comparative Psychology (Vol. 106) to commemorate the Centennial Celebration of the American Psychological Association.

A crisis in comparative psychology: where have all the undergraduates gone?

“…These include the use of a restricted number of species (Beach, 1950; Bitterman, 1965), lack of an appreciation of evolutionary theory (Lockard, 1968; Hodos and Campbell, 1969; Kalat, 1983), decline in the number of animal facilities available for comparative research (Gallup and Eddy, 1990), scientists who begin their career as comparative psychologists only to change disciplines (Dewsbury, 1990), the expense and resources needed to fund a comparative program (Dewsbury, 1992; Varnon and Abramson, 2013), few articles containing more than one species (Lester, 1973), whether animals are needed for psychological research (Bowd, 1980; Robinson, 1990), and a lack of jobs (Dewsbury, 1990). All of these issues have contributed to the crises we now face.…”

The Visual Cliff's Forgotten Menagerie: Rats, Goats, Babies, and Myth‐making in the History of Psychology

“…Restoring the visual cliff to its original context within the comparative research of depth perception puts the neglect of its animal subjects in a new light. The status of comparative research within psychology has been called “ambiguous” (Dewsbury, , p. 14) and “peripheral” (Dewsbury, , p. 4), due to its several unique challenges. The factors that helped to marginalize comparative psychology likely also influenced the way the visual cliff experiment was perceived and remembered.…”

“…For example, it seems relevant that Eleanor Gibson's early inclination toward comparative psychology and subsequent shift toward more human‐centered research was a common career pattern in the early part of the twentieth century. Dewsbury () has documented how during this period young comparative psychologists tended to abandon their comparative research after graduate school because they were unable to secure jobs or research funding in what was deemed a peripheral area of psychology.…”

Can behavioral evolution be measured on a staircase? a commentary

“…From its inception, comparative psychology was a deliberate extension of Darwinian evolution from anatomy to the behavioral and mental realm (Darwin, 1872;Romanes, 1893). These historical roots have fed its history through the 20th century (Boakes, 1984;Dewsbury, 1992).…”