I work on animal behavior,

specifically primate behavior sometimes some other species but mostly primates.

And actually since I'm an evolutionary biologist also at the same time,

there's a lot of parallels with child development.

Because I always feel that in the field of

psychology that child development is the closest to

evolutionary biology because they follow the beginning stages and then later stages,

and then it gets more and more complex.

And that's of course,

what evolution is also doing all the time.

So they have a more like sequential view of things.

How is it that animal behavior can tell us

something about human behavior and human development?

Humans are animals.

So automatically animal behavior is human behavior also includes it.

You may not feel like it's included,

but we feel that it is included.

I think human behavior is very much organized the same way as animal behavior.

There's a learning component and a developmental component,

but there's also a genetic and biological component.

So all of that is basically the same.

In some species it gets very close like,

for example a chimpanzee is adults when they're 16 or something.

Humans are maybe adult when they're 20 I don't know where you put the point.

Elephants have even a slower development.

So in terms of reaching adulthood and all the experiences that go into it,

some of the species have the same sort of time scale even.

But that I would say also a mouse which has of course a much shorter time scale,

has a piece of development in there which things are being learned.

And so in that sense very similar to what happens in humans.

Could you say then that if you see some sort of

core of similarity between human behavior and certain animal behavior,

that studying animals showing their behavior in trying to understand the behavior in

their context may help us explain certain aspects of human behavior?

Perhaps things that may seem irrational at first,

but if you put them back in the right context,

if you know their origin and then somebody is kind of like "Aha,

so it has a function, now we understand."

Yes. That's true for many phenomena.

For example, today and in the lecture on morality I talked about the sense of fairness.

And the sense of fairness we tend to look at that as an intellectual achievement.

We have formulated a fairness principle that we apply in society or something like that.

But I think it starts very simply with being affected by what others have.

If you have more than I do that's maybe bad,

unless you have good reasons why you have more than I do.

But if we are in the same circumstances and you

have a salary that is three times my salary and you do the same things,

I may feel bad about that.

And I think that's where the sense of fairness starts.

It starts with comparing and being resentful

and trying to find the reasons why you have more than me and so on.

And those senses we can find in other species.

And so we've found that monkeys have

a very strong resentment if someone

gets a much better deal than they do for the same type of work.

And then we started testing chimpanzees and we found that it even gets much

closer to the human sense of fairness and that they try to equalize outcomes,

which humans also try to do.

Now that doesn't mean that our sense of fairness is just an instinct.

People say that sometimes.

If animals do it must be just an instinct,

because a chimpanzee is a very intellectual creature with

a big brain and so they put a lot of cognition into it just like we do.

And it just means that same principle of, let's say,

fairness can develop in

a highly intellectual animal like a chimpanzee just

as it does in humans and humans probably take it further even,

I would think, than chimpanzees.

But we haven't discovered yet how much more complex it would be in humans.

So for the moment we are looking at the parallels.

I think this is true for many of the things that humans do is

we we tend to think if we do things that animals do it must be just an instinct.

But actually many animals have long developments and a lot of learning that goes into it.

And so it's a cognitive feature also.

So during this MOOC I try to emphasize a lot

the need to collaborate and to do interdisciplinary research.

It seems that you are a great example of such an interdisciplinary research.

Is it true? Do you collaborate a lot with other people?

I'm a biologist by training and I'm a biologist from here from Utrecht.

I got my PhD here in Utrecht then I went to the US and in

the US animal behavior was sort of kicked out of biology.

And actually that's happening in Holland also.

The biologists have become very molecular; microbiology,

molecular biology and they don't have room for what we

call organismal biology where you have all animals.

So that all ended up in psychology.

Psychology has a long tradition of what they call

comparative psychology where the animal studies are.

And so I ended up in

the psychology department and I collaborate with all sorts of people.

I collaborate also with philosophers since I'm interested in moral evolution,

and that's very much a philosophical issue.

So yes, I collaborate. I collaborate with neuroscientists.

Recently just last year we published a paper on voles,

which are rodents, little rodents.

We did a rodent study with the neuroscientist who used

my behavioral paradigm that I had developed for the primates and the rodents.

Yes, so there's all sorts of collaborations possible.

Yeah. So that also requires a certain persistence?

If they are willing. If they're willing.

Of course, if you're dealing with a professor,

let's say you're a graduate student of a professor,

who insists that; let's say I'm

a psychology professor and I insist that you become a psychologist.

I don't know why a professor would do that but some people they

have these very disciplinary bounds and they want to stay within their discipline.

And they will ask questions like,

"Is it really psychology?"

Which is a nonsense question because the only good question in science is,

"Have you formulated the problem very well and can we address the problem?"

That's the only two questions that matter whether

it's psychology or biology or what it is.

Those are just labels.

But yeah, some people try to stick to these labels.

But I think that's a fruitless position.

Zooming out - Interview with a biologist

Understanding child development: from synapse to society

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