Question

Why did behaviorists commonly use animals in their experiments?

Answer 1

Behaviourist used animals for experiment in psychology to understand the human behaviours rather than humans, because the use of animal is more ethical and easy than humans. We can prepare various experiment on animals because we can control the conditions and variables while research on humans we can get many ethical and human right problems. Another factor is, we can replicate our experiment if we do with animals. Behaviourist assumes that the human behaviour can also define by animal behaviour so that psychologist chose animals for experiment.

Thorndike, Skinner, Pavlov and many other psychologists used animals for their research in control environment which is very important factor to analyse data.