Cooperation,Conflict,Crowding and Stress: An Essay on Method

The science of animal behaviour is still evolving from its pre-scientific past. It rests on exact description, but is an experimental discipline. Techniques of experiment and mathematical procedures are well advanced; but, in Wittgenstein's phrase, ‘conceptual confusion’ remains. The confusion is especially prominent in the analysis of social behaviour. It is worst when generalizations are extended to man.

In this review I discuss, in an ethological framework, some of the principles of method that lie behind concepts such as those of altruism, crowding, dominance, stress and territory; and I try to replace the illusion that ethology can solve the problems that face us with a statement of what ethology can actually do. I hope in this way to contribute to the use of exact and rational methods in the sciences of behaviour.

Social ethology analyses the species-typical signals of animals, and can provide methods for studying human non-verbal communication. It has suggested useful ideas about human behaviour in infancy, and about relationships between parents and children. But human languages are argumentative and reflexive, and are quantitatively superior to other signal systems by several orders of magnitude.

Findings on animals, especially rodent populations, have led to no valid conclusions on how their numbers are regulated; but they have suggested testable hypotheses about man. The expected ill effects of crowding have not been found, but other sources of human malaise notably isolation, have been revealed by researches based on such hypotheses. The physiological concept of stress, though vague and excessively general, has also inspired useful studies both of animal and of human groups.

The concepts of territory and of dominance and subordination have been valuable in the study of the species-typical conduct of animals; but as knowledge grows these simple notions are giving way to a more plural account of social behaviour. They are of little use in the analysis of human societies.

Detailed statements on the course or causes of the evolution of behaviour can be only surmise. The concept of homology has little application to behavioural features. General laws may be sought on the relationship of existing animal social systems with habitat or mode of life, but have still to be established.

Man is uniquely versatile and has no single habitat or mode. Hence the human species must fall outside any analysis in which habitat and species-typical conduct are related. Human societies rest on verbal traditions maintained not only by imitation but also by teaching—a neglected facet of social behaviour and distinctive of man.

Current fashionable comparisons of man with other species reflect the prejudices of the writers, and have no scientific validity. The notion that men are ineradicably violent among themselves is a recent version of a pessimistic outlook which has been expressed repeatedly throughout history. Biological findings have been used, unjustifiably, to support both this view and its opposite. The concept of innate behaviour, and of genetically fixed patterns of conduct, is being replaced by an epigenetic interpretation: behaviour, like other features, is a product of an ontogeny in which genotype and environment interact. Human diversity creates immense problems for man, but also provides means of solving them by conscious, voluntary action.