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TYPES OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND THEIR SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE—INSTINCT, HABIT, AND EMOTION

Instinctive behavior. We have already noted the fact that both men and animals are equipped with a wide variety of unlearned responses to given stimuli. In the case of human beings, this original equipment varies from such a specific reaction as pulling away the hand when it is pinched or burned, to such general innate tendencies as those of herding or playing with other people. In a later stage of this discussion we shall examine the more important of these primary modes of behavior. At this point our chief concern is with certain general considerations that apply to them all.

The equipment of instincts with which a human being is at birth endowed must be considered in two ways. It consists, in the first place, of definite and unlearned mechanisms of behavior, fixed original responses to given stimuli. These are, at the same time, the original driving forces of action. An instinct is at once an unlearned mechanism for making a response and an unlearned tendency to make it. That is, given certain situations, human beings do not simply utilize inborn reactions, but exhibit inborn drives or desires to make those reactions. There is thus an identity in man's native endowment between what he can do and what he wants to do. Instincts must thus be regarded as both native capacities and native desires.

Instincts define, therefore, not only what men can do, but what they want to do. They are at once the primary instruments and the primary provocatives to action. As we shall presently see in some detail, human beings may acquire mechanisms of behavior with which they are not at birth endowed. These acquired mechanisms of response are called habits. And with the acquisition of new responses, new motives or tendencies to action are established. Having learned how to do a certain thing, individuals at the same time learn to want to do it. But just as all acquired mechanisms of behavior are modifications of some original instinctive response, so all desires, interests, and ideals are derivatives of such original impulses as fear, curiosity, self-assertion, and sex. All human motives can be traced back to these primary inborn impulses to make these primary inborn responses.[1]

[Footnote 1: The clearest statement of the status of instincts as both mechanisms of action and "drives" to action has been made by Professor Woodworth in his Dynamic Psychology. No one else, to the best of the author's knowledge, has made the distinction with the same clarity and emphasis, though it has been suggested in the work of Thorndike and McDougall. In McDougall's definition of an instinct he recognizes both the responsive self and the tendency to make the response. An instinct is, for him, an inherited disposition which determines its possessor, in respect to any object, "to act in regard to it in a particular manner, or at least to experience an impulse to such action."]

The necessity for the control of instinct. The human being's original equipment of impulses and needs constitutes at once an opportunity and a problem. Instincts are the natural resources of human behavior, the raw materials of action, feeling, and thought. All behavior, whether it be the "making of mud pies or of metaphysical systems," is an expression, however complicated and indirect, of some of the elements of the native endowments of human beings. Instinctive tendencies are, as we have seen, the primary motives and the indispensable instruments of action. Without them there could be no such thing as human purpose or preference; without their utilization in some form no human purpose or preference could be fulfilled. But like other natural resources, men's original tendencies must be controlled and redirected, if they are to be fruitfully utilized in the interests of human welfare.

There are a number of conditions that make imperative the control of native tendencies. The first of these is intrinsic to the organization of instincts themselves. Human beings are born with a plurality of desires, and happiness consists in an equilibrium of satisfactions. But impulses are stimulated at random and collide with one another. Often one impulse, be it that of curiosity or pugnacity or sex, can be indulged only at the expense or frustration of many others just as natural, normal, and inevitable. There is a certain school of philosophical radicals who call us back to Nature, to a life of unconsidered impulse. They paint the rapturous and passionate moments in which strong human impulses receive satisfaction without exhibiting the disease and disorganization of which these indulgences are so often the direct antecedents. A life is a long-time enterprise and it contains a diversity of desires. If all of these are to receive any measure of fulfillment there must be compromise and adjustment between them; they must all be subjected to some measure of control.

A second cause for the control of instinct lies in the fact that people live and have to live together. The close association which is so characteristic of human life is, as we shall see, partly attributable to a specific gregarious instinct, partly to the increasing need for coöperation which marks the increasing complexity of civilization. But whatever be its causes, group association makes it necessary that men regulate their impulses and actions with reference to one another. Endowed as human beings are with more or less identical sets of original native desires, the desires of one cannot be freely fulfilled without frequently coming into conflict with the similar desires of others. Compromise and adjustment must be brought about by some intelligent modification both of action and desire. The child's curiosity, the acquisitiveness or sex desire or self-assertiveness of the adult must be checked and modified in the interests of the group among which the individual lives. One may take a simple illustration from the everyday life of a large city. There is, for most individuals, an intrinsic satisfaction in fast and free movement. But that desire, exhibited in an automobile on a crowded thoroughfare, will interfere with just as normal, natural, and inevitable desires on the part of other motorists and pedestrians.

Still another imperative reason for the control of our instinctive equipment lies in the fact that instincts as such are inadequate to adjust either the individual or the group to contemporary conditions. They were developed in the process of evolution as useful methods for enabling the human animal to cope with a radically different and incomparably simpler environment. While the problems and processes of his life and environment have grown more complex, man's inborn equipment for controlling the world he lives in has, through the long history of civilization, remained practically unchanged. But as his equipment of mechanisms for reacting to situations is the same as that of his prehistoric ancestors, so are his basic desires. And the satisfaction of man's primary impulses is less and less attainable through the simple, unmodified operation of the mechanisms of response with which they are associated. In the satisfaction of the desire for food, for example, which remains the same as it was under primitive forest conditions, much more complex trains of behavior are required than are provided by man's native equipment. To satisfy the hunger of the contemporary citizens of New York or London requires the transformation of capricious instinctive responses into systematic and controlled processes of habit and thought. The elaborate systems of agriculture, transportation, and exchange which are necessary in the satisfaction of the simplest wants of men in civilization could never be initiated or carried on if we depended on the instincts with which we are born.

There are thus seen to be at least three distinct reasons why our native endowment of capacities and desires needs control and direction. In the life of the individual, instinctive desires must be adjusted to one another in order that their harmonious fulfillment may be made possible. The desires and native reactions of individuals must be checked and modified if individuals are to live successfully and amiably in group association, in which they must, in any case, live. And, finally, so vastly complicated have become the physical and the social machinery of civilized life that it is literally impossible to depend on instincts to adjust us to an environment far different from that to which they were in the process of evolution adapted. In the light of these conditions men have found that if they are to live happily and fruitfully together, certain original tendencies must be stimulated and developed, others weakened, redirected, and modified, and still others, within limits possibly, altogether repressed. Individuals display at once curiosity and fear, pity and pugnacity, acquisitiveness and sympathy. Some of these it has been found useful to allow free play; others, even if moderately indulged, may bring injury to the individual and the group in which his own life is involved. Education, public opinion, and law are more or less deliberate methods society has provided for the stimulation and repression of specific instinctive tendencies. Curiosity and sympathy are valued and encouraged because they contribute, respectively, to science and to coöperation; pugnacity and acquisitiveness must be kept in check if people are not simply to live, but to live together happily.

But the substitution of control for caprice in the living-out of our native possibilities is as difficult as it is imperative. As already noted, instincts are imperious driving forces as well as mechanisms. While we can modify and redirect our native tendencies of fear, curiosity, pugnacity, and the like, they remain as strong currents of human behavior. They can be turned into new channels; they cannot simply be blocked. Indeed, in some cases, it is clearly the social environment that needs to be modified rather than human behavior. Though it be juvenile delinquency for a boy to play baseball on a crowded street, it is not because there is intrinsically anything unwholesome or harmful in play. What is clearly demanded is not a crushing of the play instinct, but better facilities for its expression. A boy's native sociability and gift for leadership may make him, for want of a better opportunity, a gangster. But to cut off those impulses altogether would be to cut off the sources of good citizenship. The settlement clubs or the Boy Scout organizations in our large cities are instances of what may be accomplished in the way of providing a social environment in which native desires can be freely and fruitfully fulfilled.

Social conditions can thus be modified so as to give satisfaction to a larger proportion of natural desires. On the other hand, civilization in the twentieth century remains so divergent from the mode of life to which man's inborn nature adapts him that the thwarting of instincts becomes inevitable. Impulses, in the first place, arise capriciously, and one of the conditions of our highly organized life is regularity and canalization of action. Our businesses and professions cannot be conducted on the spontaneous promptings of instinct. The engineer, the factory worker, the business man, cannot allow themselves to follow out whatever casual desire occurs to them whenever it occurs. Stability and regularity of procedure, demanded in most professions, are incompatible with random impulsive behavior. To facilitate the effectiveness of certain industries, for example, it may be necessary to check impulses that commonly receive adequate satisfaction. Thus it may be essential to enforce silence, as in the case of telephone operators or motormen, simply because of the demands of the industry, not because there is anything intrinsically deserving of repression in the impulse to talk.

Again, the mere fact that a man lives in a group subjects him to a thousand restraints and restrictions of public opinion and law. A child may come to restrain his curiosity when he finds it condemned as inquisitiveness. We cannot, when we will, vent our pugnacity on those who have provoked it; we cannot be ruthlessly self-assertive in a group; or gratify our native acquisitiveness by appropriating anything and everything within our reach.

But because there are all these social forces making for the repression of instincts, it does not mean that these latter therefore disappear. If any one of them is unduly repressed, it does not simply vanish as a driving force in human behavior. It will make its enduring presence felt in roundabout ways, or in sudden extreme and violent outbursts. Or, if it cannot find even such sporadic or fruitive fulfillments, "a balked disposition" will leave the individual with an uneasiness and irritation that may range from mere pique to serious forms of morbidity and hysteria. A man may for eight or ten hours be kept repeating the same operation at a machine in a factory. He may thereby repress those native desires for companionship and for variety of reaction which constitute his biological inheritance. But too often postponed satisfaction takes the violent form of lurid, over-exciting amusements and dissipation. The suppression of the sex instinct not infrequently results in a morbid pruriency in matters of sex, a distortion of all other interests and activities by a preoccupation with the frustrated sex motive. Assaults and lynchings, and the whole calendar of crimes of violence with which our criminal courts are crowded, are frequent evidence of the incompleteness with which man's strong primary instincts have been suppressed by the niceties of civilization. The phenomenal outburst of collective vivacity and exuberance which marked the reported signing of the armistice at the close of the Great War was a striking instance of those immense primitive energies which the control and discipline of civilization cannot altogether repress.