NO, Don't call me an Animal

So I bought my intro to psych text today. Did I mention I'm taking an intro psych course? Apparently it's required of ling majors here, I no understand such logics. But anyway I'm reading the intro here, and maybe this is simply me being a douche from a different major, but I can't help but pick out some flaws here. The one that just bugs me is assuming that studies on animals will give us better understanding of our own behavior. I'm not one of them animal rights people saying lab rats are protected under the bill of rights or anything, but simply assuming animals and humans have similar behavior patterns seems like an offly dangerous and tempting trap.

It always seems like people enojy thinking of themselves as animals. It justifies us in some way. Our actions are easily explained. "It was just an instinct" or something like that helps explain why we ate that extra peice of pie or whatever. You see it a lot in literature or stories too, likening characters to animals or beasts, there's this certain fascination with animalistic behavior.

So here is why it bugs me, and again it is probably because I'm just an ignorant asshole with a different perspective. We humans aren't animals, at least not in the behavioral sense. And yea, you probably saw this comming, but what makes us different is language, a means of expressing ourselves that is far far far and away more complicated than any other method an animal can utilize.

We have this ability to precisely convey our thoughts, and it allows us to coordinate with those that surround us. Yea we have basic instincts like, "I'm hungry therefore I will eat," but I'll just go out on a limb here and say that most of our normal behavior is somehow related to interaction with others. And I guess my point is that these ineteractions occur through complex language, something that really isn't quite fully understood in its own right. I guess it just feels like, if we watch a mouse run through a maze, we can note its behavior and whatnot and try and apply that to humans. But how does watching a mouse tell us anything about humans? We can study tactics used in the American Revolution (stand in an open field and shoot red dudes), but it really isn't applicable to modern warfare is it?

Perhaps that's a bad analogy, I realize more and more I suck at making my points clear, but what I am failing to say here is, and sorry if this is fucking elitist but it's how I feel, we are way more fucking complicated than animals, chiefly in our ability to communicate and organize so efficiently with each other. To try and find reason for our actions in an animal that has only a fraction of a fraction of our analytical mind power seems like folly.

OK, I'll take a step back, maybe there is similarities between us and field mice. Maybe we are just mere animals with egos that make us think we are above all else. But to just simply assume animal behavior can explain human behavior just sounds way to easy an answer to me, and just tells me someone wasn't taking their experiments seriously. Then again, I'm just a lazy college student mouthing off about the introduction to his lower level psych textbook, soley for the purpose of procrastination. I'm really finding this school thing difficult guys, I hope I make it through this year.