What were Tinbergen’s four aims? What is the ethological attitude?
Nikolaas Tinbergen was a Nobel Prize winner Dutch biologist and ornithologist, who studied the organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns in humans and animals.
Tinbergen postulated four points, named Tinbergen’s four questions, which explained the behavioral studies. It focused on integrative understanding behavioral analysis and an understanding of current mechanisms.
The four aims of Tinbergen are:
Causation: This asks the causes or stimuli that result for production of the response. The answer is pain, discomfort, hunger or separation.
Survival Value: How does behavior and animal’s survival is interrelated is answered, that is, care, survival, oneness for survival rates.
Ontogeny: This explains the behavior development in animal’s lifetime, which develops via cognitive maturation, several environmental factors, experiences, care, and others.
Evolution: This explains how the behavior arises in all the species. The reply is via supplemental means by enforcing loving and caring relationship among each other.
Ethologists focus on studying and observing the meaningful behavior in animals. They follow descriptive studies. They also study animal behavior and take on a broad range of species for their comparative studies. Tinbergen’s four aims were also in line of ethologists.