Some of the foundational studies in the field were neither ethical by today’s standards nor replicable. But we can do better.

The goal of animal behavior research is to observe animals as they respond to stimuli (whether naturally occurring or experimentally provided) and draw conclusions based on their actions. These actions can be conscious choices or automatic responses, as in the famous studies by foundational Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. As interest in animal behavior has grown, the cheerful tale of Pavlov’s dogs drooling upon hearing a bell has become one of the best known anecdotes about the field, featuring in thousands of jokes, cartoons, and memes.

Unfortunately for both the field and the dogs themselves, the truth is considerably darker. To measure the output of the dogs’ salivary glands, Pavlov surgically exposed these glands and fixed saliva-collecting tubes to the dogs’ cheeks. The oft-quoted “bell” used as a conditioned stimulus was a sanitized version of reality, too. While Pavlov did use auditory stimuli in his experiments, including a buzzer, electric shocks were also in his repertoire. Yet these grim details are relatively unknown, even to experts in animal behavior or psychology. The shocking images of what happened to the dogs in the service of science are far from the public imagination, and Pavlov is frequently given plaudits for his scientific achievements while the ethical shortcomings of his work are rarely discussed.

He was not alone in undertaking experiments that would be refused approval by most ethics boards today. Some of the greatest figures of psychology or animal behavior often used methods that by modern standards were unethical. For example, as we describe in a recent paper, well known and often cited works by Harry Harlow on attachment and Martin Seligman on learned helplessness are rarely interrogated, and many scholars citing their work do not even realize that these scientists’ investigations involved animal suffering. For example, to reach the conclusion that infant rhesus macaques chose to cling to a soft terry-cloth-covered model as a surrogate mother and safe haven, rather than to a bare wire “mother” that gave milk, Harlow and colleagues subjected infant monkeys to social isolation from birth and repeatedly exposed them to fear-inducing stimuli such as mechanical wind-up toys. Seligman and colleagues devised experiments in which dogs were subjected to painful, inescapable electric shocks delivered to their feet. They found that the experience of not being able to escape such a stimulus resulted in an animal that was helpless and subsequently failed to move away from unpleasant stimuli, even if free to do so.