The development of a genuinely biological and ethological perspective on animal collectives by no means represented a clean break from the related fields of animal psychology and mass psychology, which had been heavily influenced by the well-known works of authors such as Auguste Forel, Francis Galton, Alfred Espinas, Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel de Tarde, and Scipio Sighele. Beginning around 1990, a methodological arsenal was gradually developed that made it possible to investigate the behavior of social insects, flocks of birds, and schools of fish without having to rely on mere anecdotal overviews or to focus on interactions between humans and animals. Systematic approaches and experimental methods found their way into zoological research practices, and only then did the data produced by zoologists become comparable and ‘scientific.’ The protagonists of the early stages of ethology were especially concerned with formulating a natural-scientific basis for their research that could serve as a counterposition to the vague psychological attributions – the poorly defined and anthropomorphizing concepts of instinct, emotion, and intelligence – that had previously characterized descriptions of animal collectives. Of course, these older approaches were not ousted altogether. Theories about the quasi-metaphysical levels of understanding possessed by collectives and theories about their miraculous collective instincts and ‘souls’ persisted even within the newly institutionalized field of behavioral biology.