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

这项拟议的研究调查了行为和自然科学家如何以及为什么相信他们可以通过研究灵长类动物和其他动物来了解人性，就像研究人类一样。从20世纪50年代初联合国教科文组织（UNESCO）关于种族问题的声明，到20世纪70年代中期开始的社会生物学对人性的定义的明显争论，行为和自然科学家开始观察动物，以深入了解人类的情感和认知过程。尽管内科医生、生物学家和其他自然科学家长期以来一直利用动物研究来更好地了解人类生物学和疾病，但科学家们转向动物研究作为研究人类情感、学习过程和群体形成的一种方式，是在第二次世界大战后出现在美国的。人类学家是这一转变的重要组成部分，因为他们从研究非西方国家转向研究灵长类动物和其他动物，以深入了解人类的意义。这种转变并没有局限在学院里；它也被大众媒体采用，并被纳入小学学生的新课程。为了探索人类学家、心理学家和其他行为科学家转向动物研究的方式和原因，首席研究员将进行口述历史访谈，参与档案研究，并分析有关人性的专业和通俗科学文献。使用多种研究方法，本研究探讨了这些关于人性的对话发生的政治、文化和教育背景。这个项目在智力上的价值在于它阐明了文化上的利害关系，因为科学家们正在努力弄清楚人类和动物是相反的、不同的，还是动物实际上足够相似，对它们的研究可以为人类的决策、群体互动和情感联系提供洞见。该项目更广泛的影响在于，它有可能通过揭示跨学科交流和学科斗争来重新认识自然科学和行为科学的历史，这些交流和学科斗争是人类科学在决定研究动物以洞察人性时所特有的。最重要的是，这个项目将大大有助于理解美国的科学家和非科学家如何寻求答案，“人类的什么是人类？”

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?"