Now you might be wondering based on the title; What the heck is animal psychology?! That's a thing?!
Yes, animal psychology is a thing. As you might have guessed, Animal psychologists study the psychology and behavior of animals.
Also known as Comparative psychology, Animal psychology is the study of any non-human organism. Animal psychologists study many factors that define a species and how they interact with their environment.
“The main goal of this field of inquiry is to examine differences (or lack thereof) in observed behaviors across many different species. This includes how animals interact with one another, how they interact with their environment, and how they interact with human beings.” — OnlinePsychologyDegree
Studying animals and how they work and live and thrive in our world is a creative and interesting way of looking at the world overall. People interact with most humans on a daily basis (and maybe the occasional dog, cat, or pigeon) but we never really stop to appreciate the full beauty of all the living things around us.
We live in a very structured world, full of automation and reformation, and the rolling hills and forests are generally far from home. We’ve built zoos for goodness sake! A place where we can go and just be with nature and its many varying animals.
Taking time to go out and study the minds of animals is fascinating to me. An educated way of examining the inhabitants of our world and how they came to be.
In Mindfield Episode 1 on Youtube, Michael Stevens (Also known as VSauce) explains how monkeys have incredible memory compared to humans, and even shows a monkey taking a memory test and totally crushing him. This whole study is a result of Animal Psychology, studying how Monkeys learn and memorize simple facts — and they totally blew us away!
My take on Cognitive Psychology is this:
It's freaking awesome! A Study related to just animals and non-human organisms, analyzing the way they function and learn similarly and differently from us, how evolution has changed their survival and cognitive ability, even just documenting new animals and discovering crazy facts (like how Chickens are related to dinosaurs! Who discovered that?) and sharing them with the world is such a great way to bring people together in agreement and discovery.
Stay Nerdy 😊🧐 🤓
SOURCES:
What is an Animal Psychologist?, Sean Jackson, The Online Psychology Degree Guide, May 2021, https://www.onlinepsychologydegree.info/faq/what-is-an-animal-psychologist/
The Cognitive Tradeoff, Mindfield S3 E1, Michael Stevens, Vsauce, Dec 5, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktkjUjcZid0
The Rise of the Machines — Why Automation is Different this Time Kurzgesagt — In A Nutshell, Youtube, June 8, 2017
