Temperamental characteristics of human beings, to the extent that they are not the result of inheritance, depend largely, if not entirely, on dispositional learning, a kind of learning that is, in large part, the sum of many experiences with reward and frustration, and that occurs without specific awareness. Dispositions in humans that depend on a history of inconsistent reinforcement (intermittent frustration) may be subject to the same etiological principles that, as we have seen, operate in animals. I have taken the opportunity in several places in this book to give examples of how such principles derived from animal research may apply to humans.

It now seems safe to assert, on the basis of research not only with animals but also with humans, that a connection exists between negative emotional states and frustrative events; between patterns of inconsistent reward and frustration (or smaller and larger reward or immediate and delayed reward) for what seems to be the same behavior (or effort) and persistence; and between principles of instrumental learning derived from such schedules of reward and frustration and accounts of helplessness and depression. In this book, there has been an attempt to show that there is now some basis in learning theory, and particularly in frustration theory, for coming closer to a comprehension not only of the conceptual mechanisms of these relationships, but also of their sequence in development and, to an early approximation at least, their neural underpinnings.

There are two kinds of biologically oriented scientists who study behavior – nowadays we call them behavioral neuroscientists. One of these is interested in animals in the way a naturalist is, and often the question is, What can the animal do and how well can the animal do it? Or how intelligent is the animal, in terms of the way we understand cognitive abilities in humans? The other kind of investigator of behavior, or of brain–behavior relationships, uses one of a few animal species, in biological psychology predominantly the rat, pigeon, rabbit, or monkey, as an animal model for general – and specifically human – function and is not much interested in the animal in the naturalist's or cognitivist's way, except insofar as this kind of interest or knowledge affects his or her research and its interpretation. It will become obvious that the orientation of this book is of the latter kind: The experimental animal of choice is overwhelmingly Rattus norvegicus, and its study is designed to further the comprehension of what I have called dispositional learning and memory – systems that ordinarily have a long-term historical etiology and in which learning is relatively reflexive and memory implicit and not strongly episodic.

This is a book on frustration theory and not a book on frustration theories; I try to underscore this in Chapter 3, where I provide a brief review of theories of frustration.

In this chapter, we will review the application of frustration theory to the explanation of another case of reward–nonreward intermittency – discrimination learning. We will consider the role of frustrative factors of arousal and suppression in the formation of discriminations, and the mediating action of anticipatory frustration and counterconditioning in the retardation and facilitation of discrimination learning. The discrimination learning we will consider involves separate experiences with or exposures to the discriminanda, which first the case of dispositional learning. We should therefore briefly review the history of the involvement of frustration in such “go/no-go” discriminations.

Frustrative factors in discrimination learning

The Hullian analysis of instrumental discrimination learning (Hull, 1950, 1952), which has been and continues to be influential, did not include an active, frustrative role for nonreinforcement. In broad outline, while Hull did maintain that the primary process involved was differential reinforcement, he held that its major function was (a) to neutralize the effect of the background or context stimuli that occur in the presence of both discriminanda, (b) to increase the power of the positive stimulus to evoke the (approach) response, and (c) to decrease the power of the negative stimulus to evoke that response. However, in Hull's theorizing the negative stimulus did not elicit avoidance of nonreward; rather, responses elicited by the S – permitted accumulation of an inhibitory state, reactive inhibition (IR), which, not offset by the growth of excitatory strength and particularly under massed-trial conditions, led to the extinction of responding to S –.

In D. O. Hebb's last book, Essays on Mind (1980), there is the following passage:

This statement, in Hebb's colorful prose, is an example, in phylogenetic terms, of a kind of thinking that, in its ontogenetic counterpart as well as in levels of functioning in the adult mammal, is seen increasingly in our field (e.g., Amsel & Stanton, 1980; Bitterman, 1960, 1975; Livesey, 1986; Schneirla, 1959; Wickelgren, 1979). My own point (Amsel, 1972b) was (and is) that there is a level of classical conditioning that is purely dispositional, involves implicit memory, and is less dependent on mediation than what is usually called Pavlovian conditioning, and that both levels involve a lesser degree of mediation than instrumental learning.

Anthropomorphism and teleology

Anthropomorphism in the context of animal behaviour means “the ascription of human mental experiences to animals” (Asquith 1984, p. 138). We are familiar with three kinds of mental (= subjective, conscious) experience: feelings — pleasure, pain, the various emotions and sensations (sense-impressions), motivations — the goals and purposes of our actions, and thought more or less independent of motor action. We are directly aware of these things only in ourselves, through introspection. This means that simply taking it for granted that animals feel and think too, or explaining a piece of animal behaviour “by merely pointing to the goal, end or purpose” of it (as Tinbergen (1951) complained) are by definition examples of unwarranted anthropomorphism — effectively a throw-back to primitive animism.

There is an important source of confusion here that must be cleared away immediately. It is in the pejorative sense of Asquith's definition above that I shall be using the word anthropomorphism throughout this book. Sometimes, however, the word is used to mean merely pretending for argument's sake that an animal can think or feel as we do. That pretence, the so-called ‘intentional stance’ which I shall call ‘mock anthropomorphism’, can be very valuable for the hypotheses it generates about the functions of the animal's behaviour, as described in 5.1 on ‘Intentionality’.

Anthropomorphism in the study of animal behaviour has been a hobby-horse of mine for more than fifty years. During those years the pendulum has swung both ways between anthropomorphism and behaviourism. I was enjoined long ago to develop my concern with this problem into a book, but I could ill afford the concentration it demanded; and doing experiments was anyway much more fun than writing. Perhaps it is not a bad thing that the book has had to wait so long to be written, brief though it is, since of course my thoughts on the subject have meanwhile been changing, most of all in the last few years. But at the same time the status of anthropomorphism itself has been changing, too. Once a live issue, a butt for behaviourists, it now gets little more than an occasional word of consensual disapproval (and exceptionally a spirited defence). What now gave me pause was doubt that any readers would be found for a book that criticized anthropomorphism. Most people might suppose, nowadays, that a book with that word in its title could only be flogging a dead horse. I have to thank three strategically placed people for convincing me that a book on the particular lines of this one would be worth the effort: Vince Dethier, Jeffrey Gray and Pat Bateson, the last being good enough to read and criticize the whole manuscript.

People have always been very ready to believe that animals are like us in having feelings and purposes and acting upon them. Yet there has never been any direct evidence for this ancient anthropomorphic belief, and some three centuries ago René Descartes broke with tradition by arguing that animals were, in principle, machines. Their behaviour, he thought, could be explained straightforwardly by the material mechanisms inside them. Descartes thus sowed the seed of a materialist conception of animal behaviour. The seed fell on rather stony ground and took 200 years to germinate, but by the 1960s the majority of professional students of animal behaviour had rejected traditional anthropomorphism in favour of Descartes on this point. Keeton spelled out their position at that time:

Chapter 3 included two generally recognized errors (see 3.4 and 3.5) that did not spring from teleology but from another form of anthropomorphism, namely ascribing our cerebral abilities to animals. This chapter presents three other cases where it is unjustifiably assumed that the animals share these abilities, and one case of assuming that they share our feelings.

Intentionality

We have intentions, and we tend to assume that animals have them too, which we cannot know. To the layman ‘intentionality’ sounds like nothing more than a learned synonym for purposiveness (4.2), but it has come in for a good deal of discussion recently especially among philosophers and psychologists. For instance, Asquith queried the intentions imputed to higher primates by workers who describe these animals as giving each other “warning” signals: “‘Warning’ conspecifics about a possible predator may be recognized (defined) by the function that the behaviour fulfils regardless of how it was manifested (for instance, by shaking branches, calling, running or freezing). However… the animal's intention to perform the function… is not scientifically testable” (Asquith 1984, pp. 142–3). Intentionality is indeed scientifically untestable in animals, but among people warnings are, by definition, intentional. Hence describing an animal's actions (shaking branches, etc.) as a warning to its fellows effectively takes it for granted that those actions were intentional on the part of the animal.

The three case-studies making up this chapter deal with unwitting anthropomorphism in forms not already discussed.

Hierarchy

In 3.4, unintended anthropomorphism was held to be partly responsible for the eventual disappointment of early hopes of bridging the great gap in knowledge between “what nerve cells do and how animals behave”. But anthropomorphism has served indirectly to frustrate those bridge-building hopes in another way, by compromising the important principle of a hierarchy among the causal mechanisms of behaviour. It was probably Tinbergen (1950, 1911) who brought this idea of hierarchical organization into the ethological mainstream, when he proposed it as one of the principles of the Grand Theory of instinct (see 3.1). This was unfortunate because “it came to grief in the general, deserved destruction of simplistic energy models”, although it was “a much more powerful principle in its own right” (R. Dawkins 1976a). The principle is now almost universally accepted in general biological theory and in behavioural theory specifically (Bullock 1957, 1965; Dethier & Stellar 1961; Medawar 1969b; Tavolga 1969; Tinbergen 1969; Hinde 1970, 1982, 1990; Anderson 1972; Ayala & Dobzhansky 1974; Fentress & Stilwell 1974; Baerends 1976; R. Dawkins 1976a; Bunge 1977; Granit 1977; Allen 1978, 1983; Gallistel 1980; Huntingford 1980; McFarland 1981; M. S. Dawkins 1983; Halliday & Slater 1983; Buss 1987; Szentágothai 1987; Weiskrantz 1987; Greenberg & Tobach 1989).

The eleven subject-sections that make up Chapters 4 to 6, discuss notions that are more controversial than those in the preceding chapter. There is as yet no general agreement among neobehaviourists that these notions are erroneous, but neither are they entirely accepted and it will be argued that they are in fact erroneous. All the case-studies in this chapter concern errors arising from teleological thinking, the most common form of unwitting anthropomorphism. Three of the essays in Chapter 3, comprising 3.2, 3.3 and 3.5, came into that category, wherein an animal's behaviour is supposedly ‘goal-directed’, meaning that the animal attains a certain end situation by making compensatory responses to any discrepancy between its current sensory input and some sort of internal representation or ‘mental image’ of that ‘goal’ situation. This chapter presents four more cases in the same category.

Migration

Baker's (1978) monumental treatise on migration is influential because it has no competitor, being the only fairly recent single-author survey of the whole field of migration and an invaluable mine of references. He used the same data in condensed form in a subsequent book (Baker 1982) as a vehicle for fuller exposition of his entirely new view of migration, which he says (ibid., p. 3) required a “major purge of the old ideas” as part of the “behavioural ecology revolution” whereby behavioural ecology, being “a new ideology, completely different from ethology” (ibid., p. v), became “the new establishment” in the study of animal behaviour (ibid., p. 1).

Illusions

Most neobehaviourists (as defined on p. 6) ceased to worry about anthropomorphism years ago. They consider the battle against it was very necessary but was won by about the middle of the century. They do not believe that that way of thinking now represents any danger to the scientific study of animal behaviour. They are more concerned, especially in North America, with disposing of the last remnants of radical behaviourism. They believe that anthropomorphic language does no harm these days, at least among behavioural scientists, because they believe it is used purely metaphorically and refers only to functions, not causes. That is the view of zoological neobehaviourists at any rate, as expressed by Krebs & Davies (1981, p. 351) as we saw earlier (pp. 52–3). Also by Ridley:

These are no doubt comfortable beliefs but they do not seem tenable in the light of the preceding chapters.

Instinct

The history of ethology must be almost unique. Its founders were awarded a Nobel Prize, which they richly deserved, and yet the theoretical core of the discipline as they founded it survived only a few decades. Most of the overhauling occurred in the 1950s and took the form not so much of revising that original theoretical core, the theory of instinct, as of simply demolishing it, leaving nothing of comparable generality in its place. By 1968 the theory of instinct put forward by Lorenz (1937, 1950) and Tinbergen (1950, 1951) and commended by Thorpe (1948, 1954), could be alluded to by Bateson, then a seasoned editor of Animal Behaviour, in the following terms:

This was not an unfair judgement. It has been echoed by R. Dawkins (1976a) and Barlow (1989) and repeated recently by Bateson & Klopfer (1989). Ridley (1982) even described a book in which Lorenz (1981) defended his original ideas, as “awkwardly antediluvian”.