STRANGE Personalities: A new approach that could help scientists better understand animal behavior
Just because scientists haven’t previously given animals the credit for their individuality or distinctiveness doesn’t mean that they don’t have it. And see them not as robots, but as individual beings that also have a value in themselves.
ELIZABETH PRESTON: Scientists are increasingly realizing that animals, like people, are individuals. They have distinct tendencies, habits and life experiences that may affect how they perform in an experiment. That means, some researchers argue, that much published research on animal behavior may be biased. Studies claiming to show something about a species as a whole — that green sea turtles migrate a certain distance, say, or how chaffinches respond to the song of a rival — may say more about individual animals that were captured or housed in a certain way, or that share certain genetic features. That’s a problem for researchers who seek to understand how animals sense their environments, gain new knowledge and live their lives.
“The samples we draw are quite often severely biased,” Christian Rutz, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, says. “This is something that has been in the air in the community for quite a long time.”
In 2020, Rutz and his colleague Michael Webster, also at the University of St. Andrews, proposed a way to address this problem. They called it STRANGE… They proposed that their fellow behavior researchers consider several factors about their study animals, which they termed Social background, Trappability and self-selection, Rearing history, Acclimation and habituation, Natural changes in responsiveness, Genetic makeup, and Experience…
It might be impossible to remove every bias from a group of study animals, Rutz says. But he and Webster want to encourage other scientists to think through STRANGE factors with every experiment, and to be transparent about how those factors might have affected their results.
“We used to assume that we could do an experiment the way we do chemistry — by controlling a variable and not changing anything else,” says Holly Root-Gutteridge, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom who studies dog behavior. But research has been uncovering individual patterns of behavior — scientists sometimes call it personality — in all kinds of animals, from monkeys to hermit crabs.
“Just because we haven’t previously given animals the credit for their individuality or distinctiveness doesn’t mean that they don’t have it,” Root-Gutteridge says.
This failure of human imagination, or empathy, mars some classic experiments, Root-Gutteridge and coauthors noted in a 2022 paper focused on animal welfare issues. For example, experiments by psychologist Harry Harlow in the 1950s involved baby rhesus macaques and fake mothers made from wire. They allegedly gave insight into how human infants form attachments. But given that these monkeys were torn from their mothers and kept unnaturally isolated, are the results really generalizable, the authors ask? Or do Harlow’s findings apply only to his uniquely traumatized animals?…
Rutz’s hope is that widespread adoption of STRANGE will lead to findings in animal behavior that are more reliable. The problem of studies that can’t be replicated has lately received much attention in certain other sciences, human psychology in particular… he says, if studies are better designed, it could mean that fewer animals need to be caught in the wild or tested in the lab to reach firm conclusions. Overall, he hopes that STRANGE will be a win for animal welfare.
In other words, what’s good for science could also be good for the animals — seeing them “not as robots,” Goymann says, “but as individual beings that also have a value in themselves”. SOURCE…
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