Lloyd Morgan's canon

n. The idea that we should interpret animal behavior as a function of the lowest possible level of mental organization instead of thinking about it in terms of human thinking, which leads to anthropomorphizing, or perceiving animals from a human-centered perspective. This idea appeared in C. Lloyd Morgan's textbook (1894), in which he wrote, "In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale."