Commentary: A crisis in comparative psychology: where have all the undergraduates gone?

Abramson’s (2015) article confirmed what I have come to realize in several years of teaching: many psychology students have a general lack of enthusiasm for studying animals. In my department, the consequence is that courses in animal behavior and cognition have been offered on an infrequent basis, canceled due to low enrollment, or given more human content to widen their appeal. For example, a third-year course on learning processes that traditionally focused on animal research now covers learning disabilities or language learning. Abramson suggests that a number of factors contribute to our difficulties with recruiting students in comparative psychology, including a paucity of courses and graduate programs, a lack of choice in textbooks, and sparse mention of the subject in introductory texts. Domjan and Purdy (1995) also reported a common failure of introductory texts to acknowledge animal studies, and they found that findings from animal research were often presented as if they had been obtained from humans. All of this sends students the message that research with animals is uncommon, unimportant, or irrelevant in psychology. Another way we send this message is in our failure to portray the animal aspect of psychology on university websites. Most undergraduate program homepages include a brief definition of psychology and/or a description of what psychologists do. I work in Canada, so I took a look at the (non-exhaustive) list of universities on the Canadian Psychological Association’s website1. Of 55 institutions offering undergraduate programs, less than a third referred to animals (including using words like “organisms” or “other species”) in their descriptions of psychology. Most websites also included an image on the undergraduate homepage, depicting everything from inkblots, to brain scans, to students and faculty engaged in research. However, in only a couple of instances did the image include or make reference to animals. Granted, departments without animal research facilities may not want to mislead prospective students; but they do not need to have such facilities to acknowledge that psychology, as a field, involves the study of both human and nonhuman animals. Abramson mentions that introductory textbooks are students’ first source of information about a field, but students may form even earlier impressions while perusing university websites. While most of us have little say in the content of introductory textbooks, we can all quickly and easily check our program website to make sure it acknowledges the study of animals in psychology. If yours does not, you can contact the person responsible for website content to request that this be corrected.