some basics of Experimental Design there as well.
The Central Tenet of Experimental Psychology is really that
all behavior can potentially be explained by multiple psychological mechanism.
Just because behavior of two species or even two people look identical, it doesn't
mean the behaviors are controlled by the same psychological or cognitive mechanism.
Think about, when you shake somebody's hand.
You're really happy to see somebody that you haven't seen in a while, or
you're interested in meeting somebody new.
Or you're just trying to be polite.
All of those things can be different reasons why you're shaking someone's hand.
So different people can have different psychological reasons for
why they are doing what they're doing,
even though the behavior of shaking the hand is the same.
And then think of your dog.
Some dogs can give a paw and they can shake hands.
Do they have the same psychological mechanism underlying
the shaking of a person's hand as when people shake hands?
Are they excited to see you?
Are they interested in meeting a new person?
Or is it that they know that when they shake hands that you might scratch them,
that they might get a nice social, or even food reward.
So that's a great example showing that you can have a behavior that's very similar,
shaking hands.
And there could be different psychological mechanisms.
The only way that we can tease those things apart, and
figure out what is the mechanism driving shaking hands and dogs, or
that individual versus another, is through experiments.
Okay, so one of the things that we hear a lot about when we're studying
animal behavior is anthropomorphism.
Anthropomorphism is the idea that we see human traits in other animals and
that when we see other animals behaving we tend to attribute to animals,
and actually even objects, human traits.
And so anthropomorphism often has been argued to be problematic when we're
trying to understand animals because without experiments to test the different
mechanisms for how animals are behaving, how do you know that an animal is
solving a problem like a person is solving a problem?
And anthropomorphism in the cognitive literature is usually discussed
in association George Romanes.
George Romanes was a student of Charles Darwin's, a contemporary, and
he really answered the call of Charles Darwin after he wrote,
The Origins of Species, And the Descent of Man.
And Charles Darwin basically said that while most people before him had
been arguing between a giant gap between other animals and humans cognitively,
that animals and humans were on a continuum and that actually,
the distance between animal intelligence and human intelligence was
something that you could think about as being not as big, and potentially