Displacement Thoughts

Sometimes, a professional gently lets the regular people in on a secret: There is an ideal version of how experimental science is supposed to work; also, there is the version where things play out in real life. This difference was remarked on decades ago. Then, for a while, it seemed as if computers would make everything much more precise and inarguable. Sadly, that turned out not to be the case.

In a 1960 paper, G.I.C. Ingram quoted sociologist/scientist Harry Collins:

In general, when scientific discoveries are first made they’re messy and untidy, and they get cleaned up in retrospect. If you’re a scientist you’ll say that it all comes out in the end, because nature speaks with an unambiguous voice. Speaking as a sociologist, I’d say it’s a historical process, and the judgement of history can’t be anticipated.

In some areas, history moves slowly. Humans used to take it for granted that we knew a lot more about animals than we actually did, and to a large extent that is still true. There are police officers who have convinced themselves that they infallibly know when a suspect is lying, because of a particular “tell,” but their assumptions are not always correct.

Likewise, even the most dedicated scientists might not always have a handle on what animals are up to. As in any other field, previous theories were built upon or revised, or quietly discarded. Like any other idea, the whole displacement conversation had its enthusiasts. In 1964, H. Zeigler published “Displacement activity and motivational theory: A case study in the history of ethology.” He wrote,

Such behaviors were originally explained by reference to energy models of motivation…. [I]t is suggested that drive and energy concepts no longer serve any useful function in the study of species-specific behavior.

He not only suggested, but asserted it, because there were concepts that the motivational therapy practitioners needed to take into account. He wrote:

It is now known that the nature and intensity of such activities are primarily a function of 3 sets of variables: type and intensity of peripheral stimulation, the existence of behaviors incompatible with the activity in question, and the existence and duration of states of motivational equilibrium with respect to such incompatible behaviors.

In 2011, Dr. Dalbir Bindra mentioned again that observations of frustrated animals either doing the same activity to a different object, or doing a different activity, did not go anywhere near enough to explain things. He wrote:

Both psychologists and ethologists currently interpret these phenomena in terms of some kind of displacement mechanism, which is assumed to displace the “energy” or “drive” from one reaction system to another.

He too named three conditions under which “all instances of displacement phenomena can be adequately accounted for,” and they did not exactly line up with Zeigler’s:

In particular, it is suggested that in terms of the operation of three factors: (a) an increase in the level of arousal of the animal brought about by the obstructing event, (b) the relative habit strengths of the various activities in the repertoire of the animal, and (c) the nature of the sensory cues provided by the altered stimulus situation.

Meanwhile, in 1967, Dr. Juan D. Delius had been back in print again to say that while several theories had been advanced to explain the causal mechanisms of displacement activities, he was not satisfied, and felt that some notions needed revision. He wrote,

Monographic treatments of the behaviour of any one species usually indicate only two or three activities which according to the judgment of the observer occur commonly as displacement. None of the theories on displacement activities gives cogent reasons why particular behaviour patterns should be more common than others as displacement activities…

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “An interpretation of the displacement phenomenon,” ResearchGate.net, April 2011
Source: “Displacement Activities and Arousal,” Nature.com, 1967
Image by Andy Morffew/CC BY 2.0

Some Displacement Background

In 1960, G.I.C. Ingram published “Displacement Activity in Human Behavior.” The product of a different time, it was replete with classic literary references, and was largely about hobbies. He quoted an earlier authority, Niko Tinbergen, who had published “The herring gull’s world” in 1953. Ingram said that Tinbergen’s work…

[…] describes the reactions of two herring gulls contending for nesting territories on a sand dune. If both the birds are standing near the edges of their territories so that in each the urge to drive off the intruder is matched by the urge to retire into the heart of the territory, they may suddenly leave their confrontation for a few moments and pull with their beaks at grass stems.

It could be reasonably suggested that this seems to make certain assumptions about animal behavior; for instance, that aggression is always the chief and only motive for anything. It seems to suggest that creatures should prefer confrontational behavior at all times. It might be interpreted as an implication that to remove the focus from hostility, even for a moment, is some type of aberration. It seems to deny the possibility that animals might adapt their behavior in a preference for peace, love, and understanding.

Overall, there seems to be a lot of anthropomorphizing in this field. People want to ascribe motives that may be either too harsh, or too kumbaya. A gull is an animal accustomed to being in vigorous motion, much of the time. Maybe he’s just intrinsically uncomfortable with immobility. He wants to be doing something, not simply standing there like a dummy.

Also, maybe he does not particularly want to go to war with his neighbor, either — and what would be wrong with that? However, he does not have a keychain or a cigarette for a prop, to interact with. For miles around, there is nothing but grass, and his options are limited.

Are humans hubristic?

Tinbergen had said that if an animal is stimulated to want to act out a basic drive, but then that action is frustrated, one possibility would be that an outlet could be found by “inducing fragments of the pattern of behavior properly belonging to another drive.”

For instance, nest-building is a necessary and proper activity that requires stalks of grass. Technically, grass-pulling was seen as a “fragment” of a different, major part of life, nest-building. It is also one of the few available actions in that time and place. It may be that nest-building is the furthest thing from a gull’s thoughts, but there is nothing else to do out there but futz around with grass, and maybe humans tend to read too much into it.

Now, skip ahead several years, to 2009, when for Nature, John Whitfield wrote about researchers who duplicated Tinbergen’s 1947 work on herring gulls. That study was not about nest-building, but about the begging behavior of chicks. Immediately, childhood obesity-related ears perk up, because what would these chicks beg for other than food? Without going into excruciating detail, the study was about different-colored spots on the beaks of parent gulls. Whitfield wrote,

The story that made it into the textbooks is that chicks have a powerful innate tendency to peck at red dots, which has evolved as a way of getting their parents to feed them. The original paper, however, shows that Tinbergen found that chicks actually pecked more at a black dot than a red one.

Tinbergen never fully tested this idea. Instead, he did another experiment… He was initially explicit about this, but by the time of his books […] he had stopped mentioning this correction, and presented the finding as if it were based on unmodified data.

Tinbergen did other experiments with gull chicks — showing for example, that they will peck even at a disembodied red spot on a stick — so he may have felt he had made his point. He may also have simplified his results for rhetorical purposes.

At any rate, the discrepancy attracted the attention of later academics, but some found “There’s no hint of fraud in Tinbergen’s work […] and we shouldn’t think any less of him.” Sure, it was sloppy, but for the time, it was advanced work. Hans Kuuuk, Tinbergen’s former student — and biographer — wrote, “He’d often simplify and gloss over complications: if these publications appeared now, they’d get hammered, but the ideas are lovely.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Displacement Activity in Human Behavior,” Wiley.com, 1960
Source: “Classic behavioural studies flawed,” Nature.com, 03/24/09
Image by John Haslam/CC BY 2.0

Displacement Phenomena, Questions and Problems

Even decades ago, researchers faced many potential complications in their quest to pin down the notion of displacement and designate what they were talking about. To anyone who knows a lot about any subject, the urge to formulate rules is irresistible.

Already there is a problem, because “rule” can mean different things. “As a rule” means it happens most of the time, or it means it is legally required and there will be painful consequences for ignoring it. There are always rule-breakers, and the fact that they often succeed in breaking a rule is a clue that “rule” does not imply “ironclad.”

For scientific purposes, and certainly for publication in journals, accuracy is highly prized. Yet, the speed of light has been recalibrated several times. The farther away from that old faithful standard a work reaches, the more complicated it gets.

Back to Dr. Bindra

In the 1950s, displacement activity was seen as an outlet for thwarted drives. Dr. Dalbir Bindra said of the displacement mechanism,

[I]t is thought that, when an animal is prevented from engaging in an activity (or “expressing a drive”), the particular response tendency or its accompanying “energy” remains active until it can be dissipated either by “displacing” it on to an irrelevant object or into an irrelevant activity.

Bindra characterized this as “quite inadequate.” A much more nuanced explanation was needed, for why a particular animal might do a certain thing, and for whether the action was appropriate to the situation, and so forth. But as for the activity itself, he saw only two possibilities. It might resemble the prevented activity, or it might be different. Some of his words were quite brisk, and he asserted that…

In order to formulate a meaningful and experimentally fruitful hypothesis, the exact empirical variables that control the occurrence of displacement activities must be stated explicitly.

Dr. Bindra also saw only two basic questions:

First, how did the particular activity develop in the organism’s repertoire?

We can assume that the activities usually described as displacement activities (preening in birds, grazing in sheep, grooming in chimpanzees. thumbsucking in the human infant, and so on) have already developed in the organism’s repertoire.

He placed much more emphasis on the other question:

Secondly, what factors determine that this activity, rather than any other activity of which the organism is capable, will occur at a given time and place, and the details (e.g. latency, duration, errors) of the way in which the activity occurs?

Dr. Bindra proposed that all displacement phenomena depended on three general types of variables: “level of arousal, habit strength and sensory cues.” He considered this not an explanation, but a guideline to more fully exploiting the benefits of research in order to reach an explanation. Figuring out how various animal responses fitted into the three categories could be accomplished by pinpointing the appropriate experimental frameworks to demonstrate the differences.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “History of the Speed of Light ( c ),” OU.edu, 1996, 2002
Source: “An interpretation of the “displacement phenomenon,” Baillement.com, 1959
Image by various brennemans/CC BY-SA 2.0

Displacement Is a Multifactorial Thing

Not surprisingly, this whole topic started with Sigmund Freud and his talk of a displacement mechanism, back in 1913. Childhood Obesity News will look at several of the other works that helped form thoughts and opinions, in the minds of both professionals and the general public, about these ideas.

As we have seen, early displacement theorist Dr. Juan D. Delius opined that, as yet, there have been no defining rules for the condition. In looking back to some previous writers on the subject, perhaps it will become evident why he thought that. With all due respect, the conclusion that the subject had such fuzzy boundaries is reminiscent of Judge Potter Stewart’s pronouncement about hardcore pornography: “I know it when I see it.” This is the sort of distinction that separates the hard sciences from the soft sciences.

Dr. Pretlow once had occasion to remind a colleague that “contributions to the literature largely ceased in the 1970s.” They were talking about displacement, and a perhaps inadequate amount of discussion of it. This happens in life, sometimes. Promising leads are dropped because of — well, many reasons. Funding resources shift, and that is often due to a change in the priorities of a fickle public. In any field it is important, for many reasons, to check back on the efforts of earlier experts. Every conscientious researcher is part historian.

In 1959, the British Journal of Psychology published Dr. Dalbir Bindra’s interpretation of the “displacement phenomenon.” It was recognized that, in certain scenarios involving conflict and frustration, animals would do things that seemed illogical to scientists. It was assumed that the purpose was to “displace the ‘energy’ or ‘drive’ from one reaction system to another.” The displacement phenomena possibilities fell into two categories:

[A]nimals obstructed in the execution of a particular ongoing or customary activity tend either to direct the same activity toward another object or to engage in a completely different activity.

Dr. Bindra called these interpretations “vague and ad hoc,” at best providing “only a redundant description of the observed phenomena.” His idea was that so-called displacements activities are “a special case of the general question of the factors determining the occurrence of any activity that exists in an animal’s repertoire. ”

It was generally believed that displacement activities arose from three scenarios, which Delius enumerated: “motivational conflict, frustration of consummatory acts and physical thwarting of performance.”

As we have seen, those interested in this topic have tended to say there are two possible outcomes when an animal is thwarted or threatened; two possible meanings of “displacement.” The first is the same (or “same general class”) activity directed toward a different object. The second occurs if the animal “shows some other, “irrelevant,” but fairly specific, activity.” It was fair of Bindra to place “irrelevant” in quotation marks, because the question has been raised whether humans are qualified to judge relevance in a realm so unknown to them.

So, each of the three scenarios has two ways it could go at the next stage. That unfolds to six possibilities. Additionally, Bindra wrote,

In particular, it is suggested that all instances of displacement phenomena can be adequately accounted for in terms of the operation of three factors: (a) an increase in the level of arousal of the animal brought about by the obstructing event, (b) the relative habit strengths of the various activities in the repertoire of the animal, and (c) the nature of the sensory cues provided by the altered stimulus situation.

So each of the six possible activities also includes those three possible branches, making a total of 18 plausible definitions of displacement behavior.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “An interpretation of the “displacement phenomenon,” Baillement.com, 1959

Images by aeneastudio, Enrico, and poppet with a camera/CC BY 2.0

Displacement As a Concept

Before looking at earlier writings about displacement, there are some interesting points in a relatively recent (1967) assessment of the situation from psychologist/zoologist Juan D. Delius. At the time, it was taken for granted that animal displacement activities arose from three scenarios: “motivational conflict, frustration of consummatory acts and physical thwarting of performance.”

Dr. Delius wrote that “no binding rules exist by which displacement behavior can be recognized.” In general, displacement comes into discussion of “behavior patterns which appear to be out of context with the behavior which closely precedes or follows them…”

Precedes or follows — that covers a lot of ground!

If an enemy threatens, and a bird flies away, it is reasonable to conclude that there is a connection. It is seen as cause and effect, “in context” with the previous event, the perception of a threat. Whether the bird continues to fly for a while, or immediately lands on a branch — wouldn’t either one of those choices be equally in context with what came before — i.e., the flying off?

If an enemy threatens, and a bird starts to preen itself, this is seen by humans as displacement behavior, a way of discharging nervous energy through arbitrary activity, because for some reason flight is not an option, and neither is fighting or other possible actions that might actually be useful in averting the threat.

This may be where unjustified anthropomorphism comes into the picture. Human judgment might cloud the understanding of another, as-yet-unrealized truth. One point is, preening is not the same for birds as for humans. The bird isn’t just checking its teeth for lipstick smears, or tossing a lock of hair aside. Preening is essential maintenance, a combination of cleaning, pest removal, waterproofing, and other necessary chores. If the feathers are not in good order, flying might be impossible — a serious consequence.

Okay, says the human, so it’s not just fiddling, it’s important survival-oriented behavior. But the timing is inappropriate. An enemy is poised to pounce. This failure to defend oneself, or to at least remove oneself from the scene, is looked upon by humans as aberrant.

An open question?

But with what rationale? Maybe the animal has good and sufficient reasons to try out this tactic. Maybe it hears some inner voice: “Pick your battles. Try distraction. Try waiting out the clock. Try hoping that the enemy is so dim, it will forget it was even looking at you.” Many creatures have been getting along for millennia without human opinions, operating on criteria that humans would perhaps condemn as poor judgment. Maybe we don’t know everything about why animals do the things they do.

Dr. Delius said another thing that seems to deserve more attention than perhaps has been granted:

None of the theories on displacement activities gives cogent reasons why particular behavior patterns should be more common than others as displacement activities, apart from stating that the causal agents which usually elicit them in non-displacement situations can also be presumed to be present, if only weakly, in the displacement context, or remarking that these patterns are prepotent in the repertoire of the animal.

The phrase, “the causal agents which usually elicit them in non-displacement situations” seems meaningful, and connected to the idea that preening, for instance, is not just a silly distraction, but an activity that is quite ordinary and vital to the bird’s existence. Just possibly, it is not for humans to judge whether he is doing it at the right time, or not. Possibly, this is what the author meant by saying that “no binding rules exist by which displacement behavior can be recognized.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Displacement Activities and Arousal,” Nature.com, 06/17/67
Image by Emmy Silvius/CC BY-ND 2.0