What Is Behavior Anyway?

What do animal behaviorists mean by the word behavior?

Posted Jul 17, 2012

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What do animal behavioristsethologistsmean by the word behavior? It turns out
that this is a nontrivial question, and one that ethologists have grappled with for some
time. Early ethologists like Niko Tinbergen defined behavior as the total movements
made by the intact animal, but it strikes me that this is far too general a definition, in
that it incorporates almost everything that an animal does. But, if a definition
proposed by one of my scientific heroes, Tinbergenwho by the way, shared a Noble
Prize as a founder of the study of animal behaviordoesnt suffice, how should we
define behavior? One solution is to survey ethologists to get a discipline-wide view of
the way the term behavior is employed.
In a review paper on definitions of behavior, Daniel Levitis and his colleagues
surveyed 174 members of three different professional societiesThe Animal
Behavior Society, The International Society for Applied Ethology, and somewhat
oddly (though I sort of understand why) The Society for Plant Neurobiologyto
determine what researchers meant when they employed the term behavior. What
they found was lots and lots of variation. Based on their survey results, Levitis and
his colleagues argued that many of the definitions that ethologists use can be
captured by a few published, but quite dated definitions already in the
literature.These include (but are not limited to) Tinbergens above definition and the
following:

Externally visible activity of an animal, in which a coordinated pattern of

sensory, motor and associated neural activity responds to changing external or
internal conditions" (Beck et al. 1981)

A response to external and internal stimuli, following integration of sensory,

neural,endocrine, and effector components. Behavior has a genetic basis,

hence is subject to natural selection, and it commonly can be modified through

experience" (Starr and Taggart 1992)

Observable activity of an organism; anything an organism does that involves

action and/or response to stimulation" (Wallace et al. 1991)

What an animal does" (Raven and Johnson 1989)

Each of these has its pluses and minuses. If behavior has a genetic basis, which it
certainly does in many instances, does that mean that we should exclude all actions
that do not have a clear underlying genetic basis when we speak of behavior? Surely
not. For any of the definitions above we could pose equally strong objections. But we
need to have some definition of behavior and so here is my two cents worth on the
matter: I suggest a slight modification of the definition proposed by Levitis and his
colleagues, namely that behavior is the coordinated responses of whole living
organisms to internal and/or external stimuli. I like this definition for a number of
reasons (all of which are somewhat subjective): 1) it seems to capture what most
modern ethologistsand behavioral ecologists I interact with at national and
international behavior meetings mean when they use the term behavior, 2) it makes
an important distinction between organism and organ. What I mean here is that, as
Levitis et al. note, sweating in response to increasing body temperature is not
generally thought of as a behavior per se. But when an animal moves to the shade in
response to heat and its own sweating, most ethologists would agree that this is a
behavioral response, and the definition I propose above is in line with this
interpretation.
And for my British friends, this all applies to behavior as well as behavior.
Click here(link is external), for more on the different causes of behavior
My latest trade book is The Prince of Evolution(link is external): Peter Kropotkin's
Adventures in Science and Politics
Speaking engagements(link is external): I have had the opportunity to speak about
my work on both the evolution of social behavior and the history of science at
universities and venues, in the U.S., England, Taiwan, Mexico, Denmark,

Switzerland, Sweden, Finland and more. I lovevisiting with interesting groups of

people, hearing about their work, and talking about research.
Citations: Levitis, D.A., Lidicker, W.Z., and Freund, G., 2009. Behavioural biologists
do not agree on what constitutes behaviour. Animal Behaviour 78, 103-110.
All other citations above can be found in Levitis et al. 2009.