Epistemological discipline in animal behavior studies: Konrad Lorenz and Daniel Lehrman on intuition and empathy.

Can empathy be a tool for obtaining scientific knowledge or is it incompatible with the detached objectivity that is often seen as the ideal in scientific inquiry? This paper examines the views of Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz and American comparative psychologist Daniel Lehrman on the role of intuition and empathy in the study of animal behavior. It situates those views within the larger project of establishing ethology as an objective science. Lehrman challenged Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, the main founders of this field, to clarify their epistemological positions regarding how to deal with the subjectivity of the animals they studied as well as the scientist's own subjectivity. I argue that there was a tension between their desire to eliminate the subjectivities of ethological researchers (and of their subjects) and the public perception that Lorenz had a remarkable ability to enter into the lives of the animals he studied. I explain why Lorenz rejected empathy as valid in scientific inquiry, showing that his epistemological position was grounded in his ideal of science and his proposed ontology for ethology. Yet, Lehrman insisted that full detachment was neither possible nor desirable.

Beyond the Instinct Debate: Daniel Lehrman's Contributions to Animal Behavior Studies.

This paper examines the contributions of Daniel S. Lehrman (1919-1972) to animal behavior studies. Though widely cited as a critic of the early ethological program presented by Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, other significant aspects of Lehrman's career and research have not received historical attention. In this paper, I offer a fuller account of Lehrman's work by situating his debate with ethologists within the larger context of Lehrman's early scholarly development under G. K. Noble and T. C. Schneirla, by examining his scientific research on the ring-dove as well as his epistemological views about the best way to understand animal behaviour, and by presenting his leadership in institution and network-building of interdisciplinary approaches to animal behavior. This essay highlights Lehrman's impact on the evolution of ethology, endocrinology, and developmental biology.

Autism in Baltimore, 1938-1943.

This paper examines the genesis of Leo Kanner's 1943 seminal paper on autism. It shows that describing children as autistic or lacking affective contact with people was not new by this time. But Kanner's proposal that infantile autism constituted a hitherto unidentified condition that was inborn and different from childhood schizophrenia was new. It also shows that Georg Frankl's influence on Kanner was important, but Kanner did not misappropriate his ideas or his research. Kanner developed his views on the basis of his observations of several children, his knowledge of the literature on childhood conditions, and his interactions with many scholars.

Bringing the Real World Into Developmental Science: A Commentary on Weber, Fernald, and Diop (2017).

This article examines the parent intervention program evaluated by Weber et al. (2017) and argues that there are scientific and ethical problems with such intervention efforts in applied developmental science. Scientifically, these programs rely on data from a small and narrow sample of the world's population; assume the existence of fixed developmental pathways; and pit scientific knowledge against indigenous knowledge. The authors question the critical role of talk as solely providing the rich cognitive stimulation important to school success, and the critical role of primary caregivers as teachers of children's verbal competency. Ethically, these programs do not sufficiently explore how an intervention in one aspect of child care will affect the community's culturally organized patterns of child care.

Ethopathology and Civilization Diseases: Niko and Elisabeth Tinbergen on Autism.

The idea that some diseases result from a poor fit between modern life and our biological make-up is part of the long history of what historian of medicine Charles Rosenberg has called the "progress-and-pathology narrative." This article examines a key episode in that history: 1973 Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen's use of an evolutionary framework to identify autism as a pathogenic effect of progress. Influenced by British psychiatrist John Bowlby's work, Tinbergen and his wife Elisabeth saw autistic children as victims of environmental stress caused mainly by mothers' failure to bond with their children and to protect them from conflicting situations. However, the author argues that their position was not "environmental." For them, autism was due to a failure of socialization but the mechanisms that explain that failure were established by biological evolution. Situating their views within the context of Niko's concern about the derailment of biological evolution by cultural evolution, this article shows that their ideas are of special significance for understanding the persistence of the view that civilization poses a risk to human health.

The Myth of Universal Sensitive Responsiveness: Comment on Mesman et al. (2017).

This article considers claims of Mesman et al. (2017) that sensitive responsiveness as defined by Ainsworth, while not uniformly expressed across cultural contexts, is universal. Evidence presented demonstrates that none of the components of sensitive responsiveness (i.e., which partner takes the lead, whose point of view is primary, and the turn-taking structure of interactions) or warmth are universal. Mesman and colleagues' proposal that sensitive responsiveness is "providing for infant needs" is critiqued. Constructs concerning caregiver quality must be embedded within a nexus of cultural logic, including caregiving practices, based on ecologically valid childrearing values and beliefs. Sensitive responsiveness, as defined by Mesman and attachment theorists, is not universal. Attachment theory and cultural or cross-cultural psychology are not built on common ground.

The 'Disadapted' Animal: Niko Tinbergen on Human Nature and the Human Predicament.

This paper explores ethologist Niko Tinbergen's path from animal to human studies in the 1960s and 1970s and his views about human nature. It argues, first, that the confluence of several factors explains why Tinbergen decided to cross the animal/human divide in the mid 1960s: his concern about what he called "the human predicament," his relations with British child psychiatrist John Bowlby, the success of ethological explanations of human behavior, and his professional and personal situation. It also argues that Tinbergen transferred his general adaptationist view of animal behavior to the realm of human biology; here, his concern about disadaptation led him to a view of human behavior that was strongly determined by the species' evolutionary past, a position that I call evolutionary determinism. These ideas can be seen in the work he carried out with his wife, Elisabeth Tinbergen, on autism. The paper concludes that Tinbergen's vision of human nature constitutes another version of what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called in 1966 the "stratigraphic" conception of the human: a view of human nature as a composite of levels in which a universal ancestral biological core is superimposed by psychological and cultural layers that represent accidental variation at best and pathological deviation at worst.

Introduction: The secret lives of textbooks.

Textbooks have a low status in the history of science because they have been seen as mere repositories for scientific knowledge. But historians have recently shown how they play a number of roles that can illuminate different aspects of the history of science, from priority disputes to pedagogical practices. The essays in this Focus section aim to expand our vision of textbooks further by showing how they perform various hybrid functions in scientific development.

Playing the game: Psychology textbooks speak out about love.

Starting in 1958, Harry Harlow published numerous research papers analyzing the emotional and social development of rhesus monkeys. This essay examines the presentation of Harlow's work in introductory psychology textbooks from 1958 to 1975, focusing on whether the textbooks erased the process of research, presented results without hedging, and provided a uniform account of Harlow's work and results. It argues that many textbooks were not passive vehicles of knowledge transmission; instead, they played a role similar to articles of meta-analysis and literature reviews.

The social nature of the mother's tie to her child: John Bowlby's theory of attachment in post-war America.

This paper examines the development of British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby's views and their scientific and social reception in the United States during the 1950s. In a 1951 report for the World Health Organization Bowlby contended that the mother is the child's psychic organizer, as observational studies of children worldwide showed that absence of mother love had disastrous consequences for children's emotional health. By the end of the decade Bowlby had moved from observational studies of children in hospitals to animal research in order to support his thesis that mother love is a biological need. I examine the development of Bowlby's views and their scientific and social reception in the United States during the 1950s, a central period in the evolution of his views and in debates about the social implications of his work. I argue that Bowlby's view that mother love was a biological need for children influenced discussions about the desirability of mothers working outside the home during the early Cold War. By claiming that the future of a child's mind is determined by her mother's heart, Bowlby's argument exerted an unusually strong emotional demand on mothers and had powerful implications for the moral valuation of maternal care and love.

The evolution of Harry Harlow: from the nature to the nurture of love.

Harlow deserves a place in the early history of evolutionary psychiatry but not, as he is commonly presented, because of his belief in the instinctual nature of the mother-infant dyad. Harlow's work on the significance of peer relationships led him to appreciate the evolutionary significance of separate affectional systems. Over time, Harlow distanced himself from the ideas of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth as well as from Konrad Lorenz's views about imprinting and instincts. Harlow's work did not lend support to Bowlby's belief in an innate need for mother love and his thesis that the mother was the child's psychic organizer. Nor did Harlow agree with Lorenz's view of instincts as biological, unmodifiable innate needs, unaffected by learning.

The father of ethology and the foster mother of ducks: Konrad Lorenz as expert on motherhood.

Konrad Lorenz's popularity in the United States has to be understood in the context of social concern about the mother-infant dyad after World War II. Child analysts David Levy, René Spitz, Margarethe Ribble, Therese Benedek, and John Bowlby argued that many psychopathologies were caused by a disruption in the mother-infant bond. Lorenz extended his work on imprinting to humans and argued that maternal care was also instinctual. The conjunction of psychoanalysis and ethology helped shore up the view that the mother-child dyad rests on an instinctual basis and is the cradle of personality formation. Amidst the Cold War emphasis on rebuilding an emotionally sound society, these views received widespread attention. Thus Lorenz built on the social relevance of psychoanalysis, while analysts gained legitimacy by drawing on the scientific authority of biology. Lorenz's work was central in a rising discourse that blamed the mother for emotional degeneration and helped him recast his eugenic fears in a socially acceptable way.