22 Zing-Yang Kuo

General Biography

Zing-Yang Kuo, born in 1898, grew up in a merchant family in the village of Tongyu, located in Guangdong Province, China (Qian et al., 2018). His first pursuit of a college education was at Fudan University, where he spent two years before deciding to leave and travel to the United States. He continued his education at The University of California, Berkeley. Here Kuo published his first paper in 1921 while finishing his undergraduate degree (Gottlieb, 1972). In 1923, while at Berkeley, Kuo was given the opportunity to obtain a doctorate in Philosophy. School authorities suggested he change some parts of his thesis. Instead of making changes, Kuo stayed firm in his original work and gave up his right to present the thesis, which kept him from receiving his doctorate. Kuo returned to Fudan University in China in 1923, where he taught as a professor and acted as a Vice President (Qian et al., 2018). While he was at Fudan, Kuo raised money to open the first Institute of Psychology in China called Sub Bin Hospital (Qian et al., 2018).

At the National Central University and Zhejiang University, Kuo taught from 1927-1936, while also serving as acting President of Zhejiang University from 1933-1936. Unfortunately, there was a large student strike from the 12-9 Movement in 1935. This movement was a response to Japanese incursions into the eastern Hopei province in China. This led to some serious conflict between Kuo and the students and faculty. This dispute ultimately caused him to step down from the university President position (Gottlieb, 1972). After he resigned from this position, Kuo became a scholar and frequented the United States as a lecturer. While traveling, Kuo worked on research studies at several American universities. The Universities he favored the most were UC Berkeley, University of Rochester, Yale University, and the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. The scholarly role Kuo contributed to the community’s academics allowed him to share his successes with current students at the universities (Gottlieb, 1972).

In 1940, while researching at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Kuo was unable to obtain tenure. According to Kuo, this led to the demise of his scientific career, as it forced him to return to China (Blowers, 2001). In 1946, Kuo left with his third wife to travel to Hong Kong, where he focused on writing his autobiography. Zing-Yang Kuo died on August 14th, 1970 in Hong Kong, at the age of 72. He had been working on a book-length manuscript, which worked to integrate his autobiographical notes with his social psychological studies of Chinese national characters (Gottlieb, 1972).

Important Achievements

Kuo’s research process can be divided into three separate stages: theoretical assumption, animal experimentation, and theory formation (Qian et al., 2018). Kuo’s most significant contribution to psychology was his anti-instinct approach. The 1920s were full of human and animal instinct theories, which suggested that instincts were inherited and genetic. Kuo went against what was believed and argued the opposite. He was a big advocate of any anti-hereditarian suggestions that surrounded behavioral roots (Greenberg, 2016). Kuo published his paper “Giving Up Instincts in Psychology” in 1922 and yearned to prove that instincts were not influential in psychology (Qian et al., 2018). Other psychologists supported Kuo’s theory and wrote articles in response to this.

In the 1930s, Kuo focused on his research titled “The Genesis of the Cat’s Responses to the Rat”. This was one of his biggest and most well-known experiments, where Kuo asked the question: “Is a cat a rat killer or lover?” He challenged the idea of instincts being hereditary through the use of cats, as they were assumed to be naturally reactive towards rats and viewed them as prey. Kuo focused on manipulating the conditions the kittens lived in, which resulted in variations in behavior towards the rat, simply due to the different living settings (Greenberg, 2016). He had the kittens raised in 9 different conditions, which varied anywhere from isolation after weaning from their mother to a vegetarian diet. Some kittens were exposed to rat-killing training, others lived with different kinds of rats, and some kittens were even trained to fear rats.

Several of the results were surprising and went against psychology’s common beliefs about instincts. A major discovery from this experiment was some kittens mirrored their mothers by attacking and eating what they saw her eat. Another finding was that kittens raised with a specific species of rats did not kill the species of rats that they cohabitated with. This experiment displayed the tremendous manipulability of behavior that was considered a characteristic of a species. This fueled the flames of Kuo’s fire, challenging what we knew about instincts and heredity. At the end of this project, Kuo was completely opposed to explanations of behavior in instinctive terms (Kuo, 1930).

Kuo also studied and experimented with factors that could determine fighting in animals. This work, titled “Studies on the Basic Factors in Animal Fighting: I: General Analysis of Fighting Behavior,” was published in 1960 in The Journal of Genetic Psychology. For this research, Kuo used a wide variety of creatures, including fighting crickets, Siamese fighting fish, Japanese grey quails, chickens, dogs, various species of fish, and more than 30 types of birds, cats, rats, rabbits, and guinea pigs. A major discovery with the Japanese grey quail was that nutrition, hormones, developmental, and environmental factors all play a pivotal role in their behavioral patterns (Qian et al., 2018).

Kuo also studied the behavior and physiology of the embryonic nervous system by using embryos derived from chicks. With this research, he discovered a completely new way to study an embryo without causing harm to it, which was called the “Kuo Observation Window” (Qian et al., 2018). Kuo was able to do this successfully by cutting away at the shell and outer shell membrane over the air space of an egg (Valsiner, 2017). After doing this, biologists praised his work, saying, “Kuo was the first to peer inside an egg since Aristotle did so” (Qian et al., 2018).

Historical Context

Many events were taking place around the time of and shortly after Zing-Yang Kuo’s work. The biggest event which shook the world was World War II. The anti-Semitism, racial injustices, and eugenics movement that took place during the war went against the exact nature of Kuo’s work. These movements suggested that specific behaviors or qualities within specific populations of people (e.g., people of color and the intellectually disabled) are of innate origin, there is something that makes them different from birth and “lesser than others”. Although not true, that is what was believed at the time, and these ideas led to the Holocaust. Kuo’s work suggested that all behaviors were a result of and were maintained through interactions between changing environments and a developing organism (Honeycutt, 2011). It was possible that Kuo’s work could have become irrelevant. However, two American scientists defended his work in the aftermath of the second world war (Blowers, 2001).

Kuo’s work was inspired by and based on John B. Watson’s approach to behaviorism, which completely separated the idea of instinct from human and animal behaviors (Chen et al., 2021). This idea went against what society believed at the time. During this period, almost all human behavior was interpreted in relation to instinct. This was based on Darwin’s theory of evolution, which created the controversial issue of instinct and reflexes (Chen et al., 2021). Kuo’s work insisted that simply using the terms nature and nurture to describe the development of a trait was not enough and that describing trait development required a greater understanding of other factors (Honeycutt, 2011). The phrase “nature versus nurture” was coined by Sir Francis Galton and was the beginning of Galton’s founding of eugenics. At the time, Galton’s eugenics was based on the belief in differing intelligence across racial groups. His idea was that intelligence was innate, as it was inherited generationally and genetically linked (Kelly, 2023). Galton’s work became popular around the time Kuo was beginning the idea that behavior was not innately driven. These two ideas clashed, and the work of Galton likely influenced Kuo.

Kuo was foundational to the work within ethological and comparative approaches to behavior in animals (Freeberg, 2021). With his work being rooted in prenatal behavioral development, it was controversial and began the discussion of this topic for many future studies. Kuo’s work served as the basis for Gilbert Gottlieb’s and William Smotherman’s work (Greenberg, 2016). Gottlieb considered his most important work to be research on species-typical postnatal behavior, which had been greatly influenced by Kuo (Miller, 2007). Postnatal behavior at the time was considered as instincts, such as flight, reflexes, and postural control with bodily movements. Kuo and Gottlieb thought that instincts were not just born in someone, but that environmental changes in the womb caused an individual to learn these instincts and movements.

It was Gottlieb that worked to explain the importance of events and experiences on the influence of development. Specifically, Gottlieb provided an understanding of how linear and nonlinear experiences influence development (Miller, 2007). The linear concept suggested that event A will lead to B. The nonlinear concept suggested that A leads to C, which in turn leads to B. This view was important, as failing to look at C can delay the understanding of a developmental process (Miller, 2007).

Smotherman’s work focused on studying early neurobehavioral development and found that specific stimuli, such as milk or an artificial nipple, evoked responses in fetal subjects (Smotherman, 1996). Smotherman examined those postnatal behaviors and reflexes and determined that specific stimuli evoked responses and not just any random stimuli. An example of a reflex is the rooting reflex, which causes a baby to turn their head and open their mouth to follow the direction of a stroke or touch to the corner of their mouth. Smotherman’s work paired with Kuo’s work, as Smotherman found that changes in the environment, or the quality of interactions, can lead to unanticipated developmental outcomes that are evident in the whole organism (Smotherman & Robinson, 1996). This supported Kuo’s suggestion that all behaviors were a result of and were maintained through interactions between changing environments and a developing organism (Honeycutt, 2011)

Historical Impact

Zing-Yang Kuo attracted the attention of the American Psychology Committee simply from his work. The American Psychology Committee, founded in 1892 by Granville Stanley Hall, had 26 behavioral psychologists as members. This committee was formed to help psychologists collaborate and build new theories (Greenberg, 2016).  Kuo’s impact left him known as a radical behavioral psychologist. Behavioral psychology was not a known topic before the 1920s. Kuo showed there was more to the psychology of fighting behavior patterns than was expected. Through multiple animal experiments, it was revealed that hormonal, environmental, developmental, and nutritional factors are what changed the display of an animal or person’s behavior (Blowers, 2001). Before the 1920s, it was strongly theorized that instincts were biologically inherited behavior and were not influenced by nurture.

One of the most well-known experiments displaying this discovery was Kuo’s use of chick embryos. Kuo used the previously mentioned method of opening an egg and studying the embryo to understand the embryonic nervous system. This study positively impacted psychology and biology, as Kuo was the second person to look inside an egg. Scholars were interested in pioneering this research method and used the experimental technique for many generations (Qian et al., 2018). This experiment of prenatal behavioral development has still continuously been studied, decades after being initially performed by Kuo.

Kuo was also the pioneer of behavior epigenesis, which distinguished how an animal’s behavior potential was determined by the specific environment it grew up in (Quian et al., 2018). This progressed modern society to do a closer evaluation of the nature versus nurture debate, and led to recognizing how nurture greatly impacts a person’s behavior. This idea blossomed into Kuo’s very first publication while he was an undergraduate at Berkeley (Greenberg, 2016). This showed the psychology community how all behavior is adaptable under the right circumstances.

Psychology has progressed in many ways simply by looking at human behavior as something modifiable with time, effort, and commitment. Behavior Modification is now used by psychologists on clients who need and want to change destructive habits. Zing-Yang Kuo has changed and will continue to change the lives of many people with the use of his behavior techniques.

References

Blowers, G. H. (2001). “to be a big shot or to be shot”: Zing-Yang Kuo’s other career. History of Psychology, 4(4), 367–387. https://doi.org/10.1037/1093-4510.4.4.367

Chen, W., Wang, Y., & Guo, B. (2021). Unfinished instinct: Zing-yang Kuo and the anti-instinct movement in China. Acta Psychologica Sinica, 53(4), 431–444. https://doi.org/10.3724/SP.J.1041.2021.00431

Freeberg, T. M. (2021). Zing-Yang Kuo and ’Giving up instincts in psychology’, 100 years later. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 135(2), 151–155. https://doi.org/10.1037/com0000280

Gottlieb, G. (1972). “Zing-Yang Kuo: radical scientific philosopher and innovative experimentalist (1898-1970).” Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 80(1), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0032745.

Greenberg, G. (2016). Zing-Yang Kuo (Part 1). The Behavioral Neuroscientist and Comparative Psychologist. https://www.apadivisions.org/division-6/publications/newsletters/neuroscientist/2016/12/kuo-part-1

Honeycutt, H. (2011). The “enduring mission” of Zing-Yang Kuo is to eliminate the nature-nurture dichotomy in psychology. Developmental Psychobiology, 53(4), 331–342. https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.20529

Kelly, A. (2023). Darwin and his psychological legacy [Class handout]. University of North Dakota, PSYC405.

Kuo, Z. Y. (1930). The genesis of the cat’s responses to the rat. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 11(1), 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0075723

Miller, D. B. (2007). Gilbert Gottlieb (1929-2006). American Psychologist, 62(1), 52. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.62.1.52

Qian, Y., Chen, W., & Guo, B. (2018). Zing-Yang Kuo and behavior epigenesis based on animal experiments. Protein & Cell, 11(6), 387–390. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13238-018-0516-9

Smotherman, W. P., & Robinson, S. R. (1996). The development of behavior before birth. Developmental Psychology, 32(3), 425–434. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.32.3.425

Valsiner, J. (2017). Thinking in Psychological Science: Ideas and Their Makers. Routledge.