The Use of Animals in Research (DP IB Psychology)

Overview: The Use of Animal Models in Research to Provide Insight into Human Behaviour

The use of animals in research

• Around 29 million animals per year are used in experiments in the USA and the EU

• Rats and mice make up around 80% of the total number of animals used in research 

• The use of animals in experiments has fallen by half in the past 30 years as ethical considerations have become more prominent and technology has progressed so that their use is unnecessary

• Research into behaviourism drew strongly on animal models e.g. Pavlov’s dogs and classical conditioning; Skinner’s rats and operant conditioning

• Animals are also widely used in the biological approach e.g. the use of pigeons, mice and rats in understanding drug tolerance and addiction

Arguments which support the use of animals to provide insight into human behaviour

• Human beings are animals and it is only via experimentation that insight into particular types of behaviour can be achieved, particularly at the biochemical level of experimentation

• Using human beings as participants can only go so far, due to ethical restrictions placed on the use of humans in research: this is when the use of animals as subjects is useful

• There are some perceived similarities between human brains and animal brains, particularly with higher-order animals such as chimpanzees, who share 98.8% of their DNA with humans therefore this has real value as a model of human behaviour

• Some animal studies involve injecting animals with hormones, lesioning part of their brain or implementing genetic modification: all techniques that would be unethical to use on humans but which may provide scientific breakthroughs

Animals in research: to use or not to use?

Arguments against the use of animals in research to provide insight into human behaviour

• There are strong moral and ethical arguments for not using animals in research: causing distress to the animal; depriving the animal of their natural environment; destroying the animal for the sake of the research; using animals without considering possible alternative solutions; the assumption that an animal life is less valuable than a human life

• Humans and animals share similarities but they are, clearly, not completely identical: humans are more sophisticated in terms of their cognitions, motivations and higher-order thinking than animals so the results of animal studies cannot be completely generalised to humans

• Some research using animals has been prone to methodological flaws e.g. not using random allocation to conditions, not using a single‐blind design, baseline measurements being unreliable, testing the animals in the artificial environment of the lab, rather than in the wild

Research which investigates the use of animal models to provide insight into human behaviour

• Rosenzweig et al. (1972): neuroplasticity in rats' brains

• Fadda et al. (1996): neurotransmission in rats' brains

• Shively et al. (2009): the effect of elevated cortisol on monkeys' brains

• Martin et al. (2005): the role of pheromones in red-backed salamanders and territoriality

• Weaver et al. (2004): epigenetic changes in rats

• Lassi & Tucci (2017): gene-environment interaction and attachment in mice