Winthrop N. Kellogg

To review, Kellogg had two main scientific roles during his career. First, he was a comparative psychologist and a student of animal behavior. This is best exemplified by his research on the chimp and the child and by his study of the echolocating capacity of the porpoise. Second, he investigated conditioning and learning. Particularly notable in this respect was his work on spinal conditioning in dogs. In both of these roles, Kellogg was recognized as an empirical scientist who did well-controlled, thorough experiments and who had a knack for mechanical inventiveness. His interest in theory was minimal and his research was stimulated by fundamental albeit broad questions (e.g., the contributions of heredity and environment to the development of chimpanzee behavior), by previous data (whether from his own or other laboratories), or by plain curiosity.

During his lifetime, Kellogg appears to have been recognized more for his conditioning and learning research than his comparative and animal behavior studies. To understand this, we need to consider the dominant ideas and practices of American animal psychology during the period in which Kellogg was active, 1930-65. These commitments are perhaps well known for they have been written about frequently (e.g., Beach, 1950;Gottlieb, 1979; Lockard, 1971). Accordingly, we mention them only briefly. To begin with, the subject of main interest was learning and the method for its investigation was laboratory experimentation. Kellogg's conditioning and learning projects and his laboratory skills squared perfectly with this tradition. In contrast, there were many other features of American animal psychology with which Kellogg was out of step. The preferred organism for study was the Norway rat. Similarly, the range of behaviors examined was quite limited. For the most part, rats pressed levers or ran in alleyways or mazes. A prominent casualty of the emphasis on learning was inquiry into the sensory capacities of animals. The aim of animal learning research was a theory, preferably mathematical, of behavior or learning in general. Qualitative differences among species were given short shrift. Instead, it was held that species differed mainly quantitatively and that such differences could be recognized simply by changing the constants in the equations of general behavior theory (Hull, 1945). Finally, in keeping with the emphasis on theory, it was felt that empirical science should be guided by the hypothetico-deductive method. In other words, one should generate a hypothesis from a theory and then carry out a laboratory experiment to test the hypothesis and hence the theory. Given this set of commitments, it is clear that Kellogg's professional reputation during his lifetime would have rested on his conditioning and learning research and that his comparative and animal behavior investigations would have placed him out of the mainstream of American animal psychology. Indeed, they may even have diminished his eminence in the eyes of American psychologists. We have noted previously that the professional reception of the ape-child project was lukewarm.

At the same time, much of Kellogg's research was compatible with the methodological practices of ethology, the science of animal behavior that prospered in Europe beginning with the 1930s but which failed to make much headway in America until the 1960s. The approach of ethologists, the ethological attitude, has been summarized by Burghardt (1973) as follows:(1) studying animal behavior that is meaningful given the animal's natural existence; (2)beginning with descriptive studies of an animal's behavior; (3)examining a broad range of species and behaviors;(4) comparing similar behaviors in related species; and (5) avoiding concentrating research on domesticated animals.

One may find evidence of all of these commitments in one part or another of Kellogg's research. Thus, far from concentrating on any one domesticated species, Kellogg worked with a wide range of species (fish, snakes, birds, mice, rats, dogs, porpoises, chimps, and humans), not to mention a variety of behaviors (reflexes, various expressions of sensory capacity in the porpoise, various learned behaviors, and a vast array of developing behaviors in the chimp and the human child). The ape-child investigation is also a prime example of a comparative study, and one that was as much descriptive as experimental. Similar claims could be made for the porpoise research. Moveover, the latter research well illustrates the examination of something meaningful in the natural existence of the porpoise, namely, its sonar capacity.

There are other features of Kellogg the scientist that have a decidedly ethological flavor. In the case of the dolphin, at least, he tried to acquire as thorough a knowledge as possible of the animal's behavior. Often this meant trying to see things from the porpoise's perspective. The earlier-mentioned incident of Kellogg getting into the pool to determine how a visual stimulus appeared to the dolphin is only one of a number of such examples. This sort of thing plus Kellogg's anthropomorphic comments about his animals, his taking a chimp into his home and raising it like a human for 9 months, and his ape-child and porpoise books that were written for the layperson are all reminiscent of the practices of ethologists.

At the same time, Kellogg was far from the complete ethologist. What set him apart from this tradition was exactly what gained him recognition from American psychologists, namely, his investigations of conditioning and learning, his preference for laboratory experimentation, and his zeal for the principle of control. Furthermore, Kellogg did not share the ethologists proclivity toward instinct. All of these points are plainly evident in his work, even in those projects which were most ethological in character. Thus, to the ape-child project, Kellogg brought a considerable environmentalistic bias; and in the porpoise research, he used many learning tasks to assess the sonar and problem-solving abilities of these animals. Finally, control and experimentation marked not only the porpoise research but also the ape-child study; raising a chimp in one's home is by any measure an experiment.

In sum, Kellogg was neither entirely an American animal psychologist nor a European ethologist. Rather, he represented a blend of some of the best commitments of both groups. Interestingly, the contemporary science of animal behavior represents a similar fusion of classic American animal psychology and classic ethology (Dewsbury, 1978). The excesses of both traditions are clearly declining, that is, the American overemphasis on learning and the pursuit of general behavior theory, and the ethological stress on the concept of instinct. As a result of this, a genuine comparative psychology has reasserted itself. Accordingly, from the vantage point of today's science of animal behavior, it is Kellogg's comparative research that seems most significant and enduring, especially his ape-child and porpoise projects.

Of these two, we believe it is the chimp-child study for which Kellogg will be best remembered. We find this quite understandable, for in our opinion, scientists are remembered for their ideas and not their empirical science no matter how good the latter might have been. And while both the ape-child and porpoise projects were major pioneering efforts of empirical science that were done with care, objectivity, thoroughness, concern for control, and ingenuity that few other than Kellogg were capable of, the ape-child work was more than that. It was fundamentally a good idea. First, it tackled a significant problem, namely, the nature-nurture issue. Second, it did so in an imaginative and extremely fruitful way. With the Kelloggs' son Donald serving as the control subject, the experiment was able to answer definitively the question of how human a chimp could become when raised like a human child in a human environment. When one adds in the anthropocentric flavor of the idea and its basic bizarreness in the eyes of many, it is not surprising that the ape-child study still commands recognition. We expect such recognition to continue and to ensure Kellogg a place in any serious history of comparative psychology. We would hope, though, that posterity will also remember him as one who performed important comparative and animal-behavior research in America during a time when it was not very fashionable to do so.