A displacement activity is the result of two contradicting instincts in a particular situation. Birds, for example, may peck at grass when uncertain whether to attack or flee from an opponent; similarly, a human may scratch his or her head when they do not know which of two options to choose.

Displacement activities often involve actions to bring comfort such as scratching, drinking or feeding.

The first description of a displacement activity (though not the use of the term) is probably by Julian Huxley

Julian Huxley

Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS was an English evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century evolutionary synthesis...

 in 1914. The subsequent development of research on displacement activities was a direct consequence of Konrad Lorenz

Konrad Lorenz

Konrad Zacharias Lorenz was an Austrian zoologist, ethologist, and ornithologist. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch...

's works on instincts. However, the first mentions of the phenomenon came in 1940 by the two Dutch researchers Nikolaas Tinbergen

Nikolaas Tinbergen

Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen was a Dutch ethologist and ornithologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns in animals.In the 1960s he...

 and Adriaan Kortlandt

Adriaan Kortlandt

Prof. Dr. Adriaan Kortlandt was a Dutch ethologist.He was famous for his work on displacement activities and the hierarchy of instincts. Already in the thirties he realised the common characteristics between instincts in humans and other animals...

.

External links

• Cats international about displacement activities with cats.