Inspiring Ideas

The concept of displacement behavior seems to be regarded as very open to interpretation. A writer who specializes in dogs and cats pointed out that when animals do displacement behavior and when people do procrastination, it all boils down to the same thing, which is “avoidance behavior.” People and animals become confused about what to do, and respond by doing something that impartial onlookers will identify as inappropriate or wrong. The behavior itself might be perfectly normal — like eating — but the degree of appropriateness is liable to be judged.

In “Reconceptualization of eating addiction and obesity as displacement behavior and a possible treatment,” Dr. Pretlow and Suzette Glasner wrote,

Displacement behavior is a biobehavioral mechanism that allows an animal to deal with situations that cannot readily be faced nor avoided, or that are thwarting. It may explain compulsive overeating (eating addiction).

It is thought to be due to rechanneling of overflow brain energy to another drive (e.g., feeding drive) when two drives, e.g., fight or flight, equally oppose each other.

This is the reason for looking back at such pioneers as Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, who developed the foundational ideas. Regarding Lorenz’s psycho-hydraulic reservoir concept and Tinbergen’s system of hierarchical centers: Although thought to be flawed in some respects, these paradigms have not been universally rejected and are still found useful.

Moving on to a related concept, another source explains displacement activity like this:

The physiological foundations of displacement activities have been investigated only in a few cases and appear to vary from case to case. Some behavior patterns may be dependent upon the same releasing stimuli as well as upon the same motivational sources.

In describing the displacement mechanism as a basis for eating disorders, Dr. Pretlow has also written,

Theoretically, the displacement mechanism functions by rechanneling overflow mental energy to another behavior, typically whatever behavior is most readily available at the time or is most commonly used in the animal’s repertoire, e.g., feeding. If the rechanneled behavior is destructive, it is possible for the individual to consciously rechannel the overflow mental energy to a non-destructive behavior.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Doin’ The Displacement,” ConsciousCompanion2012.com, 08/19/15
Source: “Reconceptualization of eating addiction and obesity as displacement behavior and a possible treatment,” DOI.org, 06/22/22
Source: “Ethology,” Encyclopedia.com, undated
Image by Andy Morffew/CC BY 2.0

Tinbergen’s Four Questions

Amidst the controversy that arose over the work of ethology’s founders, including Niko Tinbergen, his “Four Questions” have stood the test of time relatively well. A particular difficulty with early theories was that “the behavior of domesticated forms often differs considerably from that of the wild ancestral forms.” Consequently, the idea that animal behavior could meaningfully be extrapolated to human behavior was seen as even less likely.

Some, like bird expert Dr. Yoram Gutfreund, claimed that only humans possess “phenomenal consciousness, conscious awareness, or sentiency” — so how much useful knowledge could be gained from trying to connect ideas about human versus animal behavior?

Richard W. Burkhardt, on the other hand, urged doubters to concentrate on the big picture: the facts about other species were less important than “ethology’s whole approach of looking carefully […] and considering the causation, development, evolution, and survival value of the species’ behavior.” He wrote,

As Tinbergen put it “Whatever the shortcomings of ‘theological’ studies may be, one thing they have demonstrated convincingly: the fact that different species usually behave differently in the same situation.” The obvious implications of this were that “Facts found in one species, or hypotheses formed about one species, simply cannot be disproved by testing another species, under however well ‘controlled laboratory conditions.’”

To those in the know, Tinbergen’s most important and still valid contribution was his formulation of the Four Questions, concerning causation, ontogeny, adaptive function and phyletic evolution. The Four Questions are described by Daniel Tumminelli O’Brien and Andrew C. Gallup as “an elegantly comprehensive guide to behavioral research” which are still perfectly useful “to facilitate evolution education in the human-oriented disciplines.”

The first question has to do with how a trait works, and the second with why and how it evolved. Together, those two were expected to explain why the way the trait works is adaptive. Of what use is it to the overall improvement of the species as a whole? O’Brien and Gallup went on to say,

The third question regards ontogeny, or what is the process and timing by which it develops? This question is instrumental in understanding the complexity of traits.

The fourth issue is that of phylogeny, or, what is the trait’s deep evolutionary history? This question can occur at a number of different scales, and the appropriate one is determined by the aspect of the trait one is studying. For example, if one wants to understand the human eye, looking at this lens-like structure would require a study of vertebrate evolution. On the other hand, looking at the biochemical basis of its photosensitivity may involve analysis of ocular crystals throughout the animal kingdom.

The two authors took the liberty of adding a fifth crucial question to Tinbergen’s model. Humans are the only species in which “culture is a pervading aspect of its environment.” So, if these other factors that pertain to any creatures are to be considered, how can all of this theory make sense in terms of the animals known as humans?

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Mind-Evolution Problem: The Difficulty of Fitting Consciousness in an Evolutionary Framework,” FrontiersIn.org 08/24/18
Source: “Dilemmas in the Constitution of and Exportation of Ethological Facts,” lse.ac.uk, August 2008
Source: “Using Tinbergen’s Four Questions (Plus One) to Facilitate Evolution Education for Human-Oriented Disciplines,” BiomedCentral.com, 01/25/11
Image by Gary Bembridge/CC BY 2.0

Tinbergen’s Later Phases

Concerning such ideas as displacement behavior, the work of many others preceded that of Dr. Pretlow. One of the founders of ethology, the science of animal behavior, was Nikolaas Tinbergen. In 1968, he delivered a lecture at Oxford, called “On War and Peace in Animals and Man” (published in the journal Science). It apparently led to considerable debate over the validity of comparing animal and human behavior at all.

Encyclopedist Hans Kruuk wrote that Tinbergen…

[…] pointed out the malfunction of our “innate” appeasement gestures when long-range weapons were being used. He urged scientists not blithely to apply animal results to people (and he criticized Lorenz for this), but merely to use the methodology of ethology in the human context.

Later, with his wife, Tinbergen co-authored a book about autism that was described thusly:

Using an ethological analysis, studying approach of and avoidance by children, the researchers concluded that defective parental behavior is the main cause of autism.

Over the years, Tinbergen received numerous awards and honors, held many important and official posts, and supervised around 40 Ph.D. students, several of whom (e.g. Desmond Morris and Richard Dawkins) achieved worldwide renown. A major event occurred in 1973, when the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch for their pioneering work in ethology.

And yet, their premises and conclusions were still questioned, which is, after all, the way in which science is supposed to proceed. In 2008, Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr. wrote,

Early ethologists such as Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz faced a problem: What constituted a fact about behaviour? How reliably must a behaviour be exhibited (and in how many specimens) before it could be said to be species-typical? And how similar do the behaviours of two species need to be before it is reasonable to say that the behaviour is true of both?

Pinning down facts that would hold up across multiple species was difficult. Even more controversially, many scientists were having trouble with the untrammeled practice of assuming parallels between animal behavior and human behavior. The “relatively esoteric discipline of ethology” and the field of comparative psychology were in disagreement. Once humans entered the picture, so did politics, and when a clash with science is involved, that rarely leads to a good place.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Tinbergen, Nikolaas (Niko),” Encyclopedia.com, 06/27/18
Source: “Dilemmas in the Constitution of and Exportation of Ethological Facts,” lse.ac.uk, August 2008
Image by Nils Rinaldi/CC BY 2.0

Tinbergen, Lorenz, and Animals (Continued)

The previous post described the collaboration between Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz in the 1930s, followed by the publication in 1942 of Tinbergen’s “An Objectivistic Study of the Innate Behaviour of Animals,” in which his hierarchical model of instinctive action was explained. His landmark work, The Study of Instinct, was published in 1951. It discussed the experiments he and Lorenz had conducted, in which birds were tricked into believing that they were threatened by aerial predators, and from which he had drawn general conclusions about bird behavior.

It seemed very clear that an escape response is instinctive, and that a fake silhouette of a raptor could trigger it. However, later students who tried to duplicate the experiments were unable to achieve the same results. The Study of Instinct also inspired other objections. A later writer, Colin Beer, said of it:

The book offered a conception of instinct as a built-in motivational system analogous to a hydraulic mechanism. The assumption of innateness and the lack of physiological credibility of the instinct model met with adverse criticism, which Tinbergen conceded to a large extent.

Actually, the psycho-hydraulic reservoir model was more of a Lorenz concept which, says Prof. Sindhu Radhakrishna, came to be critiqued over the years — as did Tinbergen’s hierarchical theory (or “system of centres” as it was also known). In what appears to be a student paper, Mercia Keslley explained both:

Lorenz postulated that for each instinctive act there is a specific energy which builds up in a reservoir in the brain […] with a spring valve at its base that an appropriate stimulus could act on, much like a weight on a scale pan pulling against a spring and releasing the reservoir of energy, an action which would lead an animal to express the desired behavior.

Tinbergen added complexity to this model… He suggested that motivational impulses build up in nervous centres in the brain which are held in check by blocks. The blocks are removed by an innate releasing mechanism that allows the energy to flow to the next centre […] in a cascade until the behavior is expressed.

Shortly after the publication of The Study of Instinct, comparative psychologist Daniel Lehrman severely criticized both Lorenz and Tinbergen. He did not believe in simple innate behavior, or the idea that a single cause for similar behavior patterns existed across species. Nor was he on board with underlying neurophysiological mechanisms, “which in any case were likely to be different between species.” Encyclopedist Hans Kruuk noted,

Tinbergen agreed with many of Lehrman’s points, especially with the criticism that ethology made a clear distinction between innate and learned behavior (nature/nurture), and Tinbergen agreed that there had been much oversimplification.

The encyclopedia entry also noted that, “In general, the ideas of both Lorenz and Tinbergen about causation of behavior have largely been discarded,” and said of Tinbergen that…

[M]any of his studies had failings that would not have passed a present-day reviewer… Some of the celebrated simplicity of the experiments caused flaws, among others because in the absence of blind tests there often was a subjective influence of the observer. But Tinbergen encouraged such critical rejection.

This history is being traced here because it encompasses some of the basic ideas that underlie Dr. Pretlow’s current project, “Reconceptualization of eating addiction and obesity as displacement behavior and a possible treatment,” as published in the journal Eating and Weight Disorders — Studies on Anorexia, Bulimia and Obesity.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Niko Tinbergen and questions of instinct,” ScienceDirect.com, August 2019
Source: “Nikolaas Tinbergen, the Careful Scientist,” AC.in, August 2018
Source: “Tinbergen,” Academia.edu, 2015
Source: “Tinbergen, Nikolaas (Niko),” Encyclopedia.com, 06/27/18
Source: “Reconceptualization of eating addiction and obesity as displacement behavior and a possible treatment,” Springer.com, 06/22/22
Image by Jitze Couperus/CC BY 2.0

Tinbergen, Lorenz, and Animals

The two most recent posts have focused on Nikolaas Tinbergen because he was one of the scientists who contributed most to the earliest theories about ethology, which eventually led to matters often discussed by Dr. Pretlow, like displacement behavior.

Tinbergen asked questions about animal behavior that no one else had thought about. Most academics at the time were in the habit of doing research at their own convenience, on animals who had been removed from natural environments and sequestered in labs, in utterly foreign and uncongenial circumstances. But what could be the value of knowledge gained from subjects in captivity, deprived of every vestige of their accustomed lives?

In the field

Particularly fascinated by birds and insects, Tinbergen reckoned he would learn more by going out to where the animals were, living the way nature intended. Rather than ripping creatures from their supportive environments and traumatizing them into abnormal states, his concept of a reasonable experiment was to change a single factor and see what happened.

His observations, although made in the natural setting, were nonetheless systemic and even elegant. Although less rigid than those of by-the-book investigators, his methods paradoxically managed to tease out truths that had been either ignored or deprecated. This paragraph is typical of the things written about him:

One set of (now well-known) field experiments there was aimed at the analysis of the pecking response gull chicks directed at their parents’ bills (thus eliciting food regurgitation): which colors, bill shapes, and movements could make the chicks peck. It was published in Behaviour in 1950; it could be criticized in its methods, but the innovative approach opened new avenues in biology.

In 1936 Tinbergen met up with Konrad Lorenz, who was destined to become another giant in the area of ethology:

Lorenz’s early scientific contributions dealt with the nature of instinctive behavioral acts, particularly how such acts come about and the source of nervous energy for their performance. He also investigated how behavior may result from two or more basic drives that are activated simultaneously in an animal.

Together they experimented with…

[…] cardboard models that were pulled overhead over young goslings and turkeys… The models resembled a bird of prey (short neck, long tail) when pulled in one direction, and a duck when pulled in the other. The goslings responded as the investigators expected, reinforcing the idea of a very simple set of stimuli that directs behavior.

In 1942, Tinbergen published “An Objectivistic Study of the Innate Behaviour of Animals,” which suggested that the internal and external causes of animal behavior can be ranked in a hierarchical fashion. For instance, the reproductive drive is at the top, and then splits into sub-drives like nest-building, courting, or fighting. In this scheme, different drives were seen to be mutually exclusive:

All such behavior patterns would be inherited and innate, and he referred to them as “stereotyped movements” (later “fixed action patterns”), each set off by a release mechanism that was triggered by a specific stimulus.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Tinbergen, Nikolaas (Niko),” Encyclopedia.com, 06/27/18
Source: “The Study of Instinct — work by Tinbergen,” Britannica.com, undated
Image by Brian Ralphs/CC BY 2.0