A branch of zoology concerned with the scientific analysis of animal behaviour. Principally it wants to know why animals do what they do and what evolutionary advantage they derive from it. Its perspective is biological rather than psychological and it tends to look across a range of species, rather than at single animals. Its object of study is what is usually referred to as instinct, behavioural triggers âhard-wiredâ into the brain determining in a fixed way how an animal will respond to a specific stimulus. For example, experiments show that nesting graylag geese will roll any egg-like object (such as a golf ball) towards their nest if they see it and will continue the rolling action even if you remove the egg. Another well-known example is the notion of âpecking orderâ, which ethologists observed in chickens. Ethology is also interested in the way animals learn, from each other and their environment, and develop new types of response to stimulus. Ethology was established as a discipline by the Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen in collaboration with Austrian biologist Konrad Lorenz in the 1960s. Together with Karl von Frisch they were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology in 1973. In the 1970s, through publications such as Robert Ardreyâs The Social Contract (1970) and E. O. Wilsonâs Sociobiology (1975), there was an attempt to use ethology to account for human behaviour. French critical theorists Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, FĂ©lix also use the notion of ethology in Milles Plateaux (1980), translated as A Thousand Plateaus (1987), which they connect to the work of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Analytical psychologist Jung, Carlâs theory of the archetype has been compared to ethology inasmuch as it also seeks to describe a system of innate patterning of behaviour.