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The problem of raccoon intelligence in behaviourist America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2009

MICHAEL PETTIT
MICHAEL PETTIT
Affiliation:
History & Theory of Psychology/Science and Technology Studies, Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M3J 1P3. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

Even during its heyday, American behaviourist psychology was repeatedly criticized for the lack of diversity in its experimental subjects, with its almost exclusive focus on rats and pigeons. This paper revisits this debate by examining the rise and fall of a once promising alternative laboratory animal and model of intelligence, the raccoon. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, psychological investigations of the raccoon existed on the borderlands between laboratory experimentation, natural history and pet-keeping. Moreover, its chief advocate, Lawrence W. Cole, inhabited the institutional and geographic borderlands of the discipline. This liminality ultimately worked against the raccoon's selection as a standardized model during the behaviourist era. The question of raccoon intelligence was also a prominent topic in the contemporaneous debates over the place of sentiment in popular nature writing. Although Cole and others argued that the raccoon provided unique opportunities to study mental attributes such as curiosity and attention, others accused the animal's advocates of sentimentalism, anthropomorphism and nature faking. The paper examines the making and unmaking of this hybrid scientific culture as the lives of experimenters and animals became entangled.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , September 2010 , pp. 391 - 421
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2009

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138 O'Donnell, op. cit. (14), pp. 200–207.

139 See Todd, James T. and Morris, Edward K., ‘The early research of John B. Watson: before the behavioral revolution’, Behavior Analyst (1986) 9, pp. 71–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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141 L.N. Wilson, Clark University Directory of Alumni, Faculty and Students, Worchester, MA: Clark University Press, 1915, p. 17.

142 Cole to Yerkes, 15 May 1908, Yerkes Papers, Box 11, Folder 187.

143 Chiszar, David and Wertheimer, Michael, ‘The Boulder model: a history of psychology at the University of Colorado’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (1988), 24, pp. 81–863.0.CO;2-M>CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

144 Yerkes to Cole, 10 October 1912, Yerkes Papers, Box 11, Folder 188.

145 Hunter to Yerkes, 16 November 1950, Yerkes Papers, Box 27, Folder 491.

146 Hunter, op. cit. (112), p. 172.

147 See Hunter, Walter S., ‘The behavior of raccoons in a double alternation temporal maze’, Journal of Genetic Psychology (1928), 35, pp. 374–388Google Scholar; Norman Munn, L., ‘Pattern and brightness discrimination in raccoons’, Journal of Genetic Psychology (1930), 37, pp. 3–34Google Scholar.

148 Cole to Yerkes, 14 March 1934, Yerkes Papers, Box 11, Folder 189.

149 See Weidman, op. cit. (14), pp. 160–186.

150 Hunter, Walter S. and Sommermeier, E., ‘The relation of degree of Indian blood to score on the Otis Intelligence Test’, Journal of Comparative Psychology (1922), 2, pp. 257–277CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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152 Yerkes to Josephine Ball, 20 November 1925, Yerkes Papers, Box 4, Folder 55.

153 Ball to Yerkes, 24 February 1930, Yerkes Papers, Box 4, Folder 55.

154 Yerkes to Ball, 13 March 1930, Yerkes Papers, Box 4, Folder 55.

155 Ball to Yerkes, 1 March 1926, Yerkes Papers, Box 4, Folder 55.

156 On Beach's early experience with rats see Frank A. Beach, ‘Frank A. Beach’, in Gardner Lindzey (ed.), A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 6, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1974, pp. 33–58, p. 35. As a graduate student, Karl Lashley's decidedly non-behaviourist perspective had a tremendous influence on Beach's intellectual pursuits. See Dewsbury, Donald A., ‘The Chicago Five: a family of integrative psychobiologists’, History of Psychology (2002), 5, pp. 16–37CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

157 On the study of animal behaviour at the American Museum of Natural History see Mitman, Gregg, ‘Cinematic nature: Hollywood technology, popular culture, and the American Museum of Natural History’, Isis (1993) 84, pp. 637–661.Google Scholar

158 Whitney, Leon F., ‘The raccoon: some mental attributes’, Journal of Mammalogy (1933), 14, pp. 108–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 112. See also idem, ‘The raccoon and its hunting’, Journal of Mammalogy (1931) 12, pp. 29–38.

159 Leon F. Whitney and Acil B. Underwood, The Raccoon, Orange, CT: Practical Science Publishing Co., 1952, p. 127, p. 137.

160 Yerkes to Cole, 5 March 1934, Yerkes Papers, Box 11, Folder 189.