Animal Images in College Psychology Textbooks

This article consists of three interrelated studies analyzing the presentation of animals and animal research in popular introductory college psychology textbooks. The introductory textbook is a good source for discovering the underlying and implicit attitudes about animals, since it plays a major and persuasive role in socializing students in scientific psychology. Psychology textbooks unquestionably shape the attitudes of their readers, providing them with a conceptual framework for making sense of the actions of people and animals around them. If these textbooks portray animals chiefly as useful for experimentation, this may foster utilitarian and manipulative attitudes towards animals. Alternatively, if these textbooks take a more naturalistic and ethological approach, this may have very different consequences. It may foster respect for animals as beings with their own unique behaviors and feelings, worthy of being understood and valuable in their own right. This viewpoint would be a less behavioral, mechanistic, and detached one. It would provide a conceptual framework for underanimals, individual differences among animals, empathy with animals, and so on.