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  • The Social Psychology of the Human-Animal Bond

    The Social Psychology of the Human-Animal Bond by Bègue-Shankland, Laurent;

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      • Publisher's listprice GBP 24.99
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    11 938 Ft

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    Product details:

    • Edition number 1
    • Publisher Routledge
    • Date of Publication 28 November 2025

    • ISBN 9781032899602
    • Binding Paperback
    • No. of pages180 pages
    • Size 254x178 mm
    • Weight 453 g
    • Language English
    • Illustrations 63 Illustrations, black & white; 33 Halftones, black & white; 30 Line drawings, black & white; 1 Tables, black & white
    • 700

    Categories

    Short description:

    This book looks at our relationships of dominance with and affection for animals. It reviews how animals played a pivotal role in ancient civilizations, and still play a fundamental part in human lives, and looks at how many humans feel deep affection and other strong emotions towards animals.

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    Long description:

    Winner of the 2024 Prix Emile Girardeau prize, rewarding exceptional work in the economic or sociological sciences, this book examines afresh our relationships of dominance with and affection for animals. It reviews how animals played a pivotal role in ancient civilizations, and still play a fundamental part in human lives, and looks at how many humans feel deep affection and other strong emotions towards animals. This book offers an understanding of human relationships with animals, providing an analysis of paradoxical human behaviour towards animals and a look at how empathy toward animals can be manipulated. Most notably, this book offers an in-depth look at Bègue-Shankland's adaptation of the famous Stanley Milgram’s experiment on submission to authority (this time, ordinary men and women are led to harm what they believe to be a lab animal (actually a robot) for the sake of science) to shed new light on what influences our behaviour and empathy towards animals. This book shows how much our relations with animals – from attachment to abuse – reveal our identity and our relations with others. It will provide a valuable resource not only to students and researchers studying human-animal relations, zoology, and human psychology, but also to a general reader interested in animal advocacy.

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    Table of Contents:


    Introduction


    Poison- control Fish at the G20 Meeting


    Milgram’s Experiment Revisited


    Humans Facing Animals


    Kundera’s Moral Test


    1 Humans are Animals to an Extent


    Humans, the Pinnacle of Creation


    Darwin: One Hell of a Fall


    With New Perspectives Come New Biases


    The Test of Consciousness, a Mismeasure of Animals


    What it’s Like to Be an Animal


    Evolving Representations


    2 The Role of Animals in Human Cultures


    Ancestral Companionship


    Mutual Attraction


    From Oracles to Religions


    From Representation to Mimicry


    Animals as Tools and Resources


    The Beneficial Presence of Animals


    Partisan Zoology


    From Aesop to Disney


    3 Interwoven Relationships Between Animals and Humans


    Dehumanising a Group by Animalising it


    Are People Who Care More about Animals Also More Compassionate with Humans?


    A Framing Effect


    Categorising Animals and Depriving Them of Individuality


    4 The Origins of Our Prejudices Against Animals


    Where Animals and Humans Meet


    Three Types of Animal Threats


    Conflicts Over Resources Influence Representations


    The Two Dimensions of our Perception of Animals


    5 The Paradoxes of Might Makes Right


    Cognitive Dissonance


    How to Solve the Problem of Meat Consumption?


    6 The Fluid Boundaries of Empathy


    Are Fish Outside the Scope of our Empathy?


    Fish Culture


    Conditions for Empathy


    7 Cruelty Towards Animals and Deviance


    Is there a Connection between Animal Abuse and Violence against Humans?


    Serial Killers and a Norman Peasant


    Violence and the Sociozoological Scale


    Who by Fire, Who by Water?


    What We Learn from General Population Studies


    Cruel Teenagers


    Psychological Deficiencies and Trauma


    8 Why Are Human Societies Cruel to Animals?


    Reasons for Ordinary Violence


    The Escalation Hypothesis


    Of Mice and Norms


    9 How Empathy Gets Turned Off


    Double Sacrifice


    The Harmful Principle


    A Risk of Emotional Anaesthesia?


    Laboratory Strategies and Semantic Tricks


    Talking Points and Euphemisms


    “Nameless”


    10 Arguing Over Animal Bodies


    Descartes’s Animal Machine: What Exactly Are We Talking About?


    The Case of the Brown Dog


    The Politicised Animal


    Direct Action Movements


    Class Oppositions


    The Political Denunciation of Vivisection


    The Overrepresentation of Women


    Presidential Dogs


    11 How Many Dogs for Every Human?


    The Trolley Problem


    Opinion Polls on Animal Experimentation


    Mental Attributions and their Uses for Research


    Mental Frameworks and Animal Instrumentalisation


    12 Human Obedience in the Lab: The Milgram Experiment


    Looking Back at Milgram’s Experiment


    Milgram, 60 Years After the First Shocks


    Obedience to Authority is Not What Milgram Thought it Was


    A Ratchet Effect?


    Science as a Higher Goal


    A Model of Rational Obedience


    13 An Experimental Study Using a Robotic Fish:


    A Variation of the Milgram Experiment


    In Silico: The Scientist and the Artist


    A Biomimetic Fish


    Describing the Injection Protocol


    The Recruitment Process and the Different Steps of the Experiment


    The Impact of the Protocol


    Spotting Suspicious Participants


    14 What the Study Reveals About Us


    Behavioural Predictions: A Better- Than- Average Effect


    Consented Authority


    How Does a Pro- science Attitude Influence Behaviour?


    15 Neutralising the Gaze of Animals


    Touched by a Gaze


    Selective Empathy


    Zero Degrees of Empathy


    The Empathy Quotient and Behaviour


    Hierarchising Living Beings


    Converging Influences


    16 Moral Dilemmas


    Stress and Tension


    Moral Pain Relief


    Self- exoneration


    Altruism or Rebellion?


    The “Pet as Ambassador” Hypothesis


    Poignant Personal Experiences


    Once the Experiment is Over


    Afterword: A Canary in the Coalmine


    Our Compromises with Animals


    After Milgram: Revisiting Our Conceptions of Submission to Authority


    With a Canary in the Coalmine


     


    Acknowledgements


     

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