Comparative Psychology Quotes

Animals don't know as much about jealousy as people, but they're not ignorant of it, either.

Chimps can do all sorts of things we thought that only we could do - like tool-making and abstraction and generalisation. They can learn a language - sign language - and they can use the signs. But when you think of our intellects, even the brightest chimp looks like a very small child.

Chimps are far too much human to be my favorite animal.

Chimps are unbelievably like us - in biological, non-verbal ways. They can be loving and compassionate and yet they have a dark side... 98 per cent of our DNA is the same. The difference is that we have developed language - we can teach about things that aren't there, plan for the future, discuss, share ideas

One thing bothered me as a student. In the 1960s, human behavior was totally off limits for the biologist. There was animal behavior, then there was a long time nothing, after which came human behavior as a totally separate category best left to a different group of scientists.

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties...The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.

It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another...we consider those, where the intellectual faculties most developed as the highest. - A bee doubtless would [use] ... instincts as a criteria.

There isn't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. All the time, we find animals doing things that, in our arrogance, we thought were just human.

An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being's, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.

If a cat does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing, for the same reason, we call it intelligence.

It would be hard to name a more certain sign of poor self-esteem than the need to perceive some other group as inferior.

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties.

I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker - yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.

Ethologists are often accused of drawing false analogies between animal and human behaviour. However, no such thing as a false analogy exists: an analogy can be more or less detailed and, hence, more or less informative.

If you spend enough time around something like baboons, you start to look at humans differently.

I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.

He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.

The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures.

The responses of the baby monkey are very similar to those of a human baby.

Perhaps measuring animal intelligence by comparing it to human intelligence isn't the best litmus test.

There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B. F. Skinner.

Let's get into talking about how autism is similar animal behavior. The thing is I don't think in a language, and animals don't think in a language. It's sensory based thinking, thinking in pictures, thinking in smells, thinking in touches. It's putting these sensory based memories into categories.

For origin and development of human faculty we must look to these processes of association in lower animals.

I may say that the only differences I expect to see revealed between the behavior of the rat and man (aside from enormous differences of complexity) lie in the field of verbal behavior.

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?