Should Humans Use Animals For Psychological Research
Reasons for Using Animal Subjects
Psychologists study animals for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they study the behavior of a detail animal in order to solve a specific problem. They may study dogs, for case, to learn how best to train them as watchdogs, chickens to acquire how to prevent them from fighting one some other in henhouses, and wildlife to learn how to regulate populations in parks, refuges, or urban areas. These are all examples of what is called applied inquiry.
Most psychologists, though, are more than interested in human behavior only study animals for practical reasons. A developmental psychologist, for example, may report an animal that has a much shorter life span than humans so that each report takes a much shorter time and more studies can be done. Animals may too be studied when an experiment requires strict controls; researchers can command the food, housing, and fifty-fifty social environment of laboratory animals but cannot control such variables in the lives of human being subjects. Experimenters can even control the genetics of animals by breeding them in the laboratory; rats and mice have been bred for so many generations that researchers can special-order from hundreds of strains and breeds and tin can fifty-fifty obtain animals that are as genetically identical every bit identical twins.
Some other reason psychologists written report animals is that there are fewer ethical considerations as compared to research with human subjects. Physiological psychologists and neuropsychologists, in particular, may utilise invasive procedures (such equally brain surgery or hormone manipulation) that would be unethical to perform on humans. Without animal experimentation, these scientists would have to do all their research on man victims of accident or disease, a situation which would reduce the number of research subjects dramatically too every bit raise additional ethical considerations.
A number of factors make creature research applicative for the study of homo psychology. The first factor is homology. Animals that are closely related to humans are probable to have similar physiology and behavior because they share the same genetic blueprint. Monkeys and chimpanzees are the animals most closely related to humans and thus are homologically nigh similar. Monkeys and chimpanzees brand the best subjects for psychological studies of circuitous behaviors and emotions, but because they are expensive and hard to keep, and because there are serious ethical considerations when using them, they are not used when another animal would be equally suitable.
The second factor is analogy. Animals that accept a similar lifestyle to humans are likely to have some of the same behaviors. Rats, for example, are social animals, equally are humans; cats are not. Rats also show similarity to humans in their eating beliefs (which is ane reason rats commonly alive around human habitation and garbage dumps); thus, they can be a good model for studies of hunger, food preference, and obesity. Rats, yet, practise not have a similar stress response to that of humans; for studies of exercise and stress, the hog is a better animal to study.
The tertiary factor is situational similarity. Some animals, particularly domesticated animals such as dogs, cats, domestic rabbits, and some birds, adjust hands to experimental situations such as living in a cage and existence handled by humans. Wild animals, even if reared from infancy, may not behave usually in experimental situations. The behavior of a chimpanzee that has been kept alone in a cage, for example, may tell something about the behavior of a human kept in solitary confinement, but it will not necessarily exist relevant to agreement the behavior of most people in typical situations.
Past far the most common laboratory animate being used in psychology is Rattus norvégiens, the Norwegian rat. Originally the choice of the rat was something of a historical blow. Because the rat has been studied so thoroughly over the by century, it is now often the animal of choice and then that comparisons can be made from study to study. Fortunately, the rat shares many features with humans. Other animals oftentimes used in psychological research include pigeons, mice, hamsters, gerbils, cats, monkeys, and chimpanzees.
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Source: https://www.europeanmedical.info/psychology-basics/reasons-for-using-animal-subjects.html
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