Conwy Lloyd Morgan

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Conwy Lloyd Morgan

1852-1936

British zoologist and psychologist who has been called the founder of comparative, or animal, psychology. Morgan's work in comparative psychology emphasized the importance of objectively describing animal behavior without resorting to anthropomorphism. He studied animal behavior independently of human mental evolution. Morgan argued that no action could be attributed to a higher mental faculty if it could be linked to a lower one. This idea has since become known as the principle of parsimony.