In animal research within behaviourism, what is a key concern when extrapolating to humans?

• A. Generalising from animals to humans
• B. The generalisability issue does not exist
• C. Animals always behave the same as humans
• D. It's unethical to run experiments on animals

Answer: (A)

The main idea here is generalising from animals to humans. In behaviourism, researchers study learning processes using animals, but humans differ from other species in biology, cognition, motivation, and social context. These differences mean the learning principles observed in animals may not apply in the same way to humans, so extrapolating results across species has limited external validity. The point isn’t that animal study has no value, but that applying those findings to human behavior requires caution because what holds for animals isn’t guaranteed to hold for people. The other statements miss this extrapolation issue: generalisability does exist across species, animals don’t always behave like humans, and while ethics is important, it isn’t the focus of this extrapolation concern.