Comparative psychology came into its own as a science of animal minds, so a standard story goes, when it abandoned anecdotes in favor of experimental methods. However, pragmatic constraints significantly limit the number of individual animals included in laboratories experiments. Studies are often published with sample sizes in the single digits, and sometimes samples of one animal. With such small samples, comparative psychology has arguably not actually moved on from its anecdotal roots. Replication failures in other branches of psychology have received substantial attention, but have only recently been addressed in comparative psychology, and have not received serious attention in the attending philosophical literature. I focus on the question of how to interpret findings from experiments with small samples, and whether they can be generalized to other members of the tested species. As a first step, I argue that we should view studies with extreme small sample sizes as anecdotal experiments, lying somewhere between traditional experiments and traditional anecdotes in evidential weight and generalizability
