Introduction to the Routledge International Handbook of Comparative Psychology

Abstract

Comparative psychology has a long history in the study of animal behaviour. The term ‘comparative psychology’ has meant many different things to different researchers in the field over this long history. The traditional view of comparative psychology from the middle of the 1900s contrasted it with ethology as an academic discipline. A foundational perspective to the study of animal behaviour, shared by current research in comparative psychology, is the framework built by Niko Tinbergen. A theoretically powerful way of conceptualizing and empirically studying behaviour that emerged in the middle part of the 1900s involves what is now called a behavioural systems view. Early notions of behaviour systems largely viewed systems as being composed of mutually exclusive behaviours. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.