The Misuse of Instinct in the Social Sciences.

Abstract

There is sufficient agreement at the present time as to the meaning of instinct to permit of a definition. Practically all English speaking psychologists reject the continental practice of considering it as any automatic action pattern, whether acquired or inherited, and limit it to those definite stimulusresponse processes or action patterns which are inherited. This limitation to hereditary action-patterns is not, of course, identical with the term 'inborn' processes. The point of birth is nine months subsequent to the point of fertilization, at which the combination of hereditary characters takes place in the individual newly beginning life. During this intervening period many traits, which appear as automatisms at birth or for which the ground work is then laid, are acquired. An instinct is not only an inherited action pattern, but it is also definite. It is a specific response to a specific stimulus or set of stimuli. 1 One can not inherit an abstraction. Inheritance is either of concrete organs or tissues or of combinations of such, that is, of structures which determine the patterns of actions which inevitably proceed from them under unmodified conditions. These patterns of action, thus determined by the inherited organization of structures, we call instincts. Strictly speaking, one cannot inherit activities, but one may inherit the structure, the functioning of which determines the action pattern. This is our justification for speaking of the inheritance of instinct. But action patterns can also be determined by acquired organization and functioning of structures. Practically all of the skills are such acquired or synthetic organizations of structure, functioning in different or more complex ways than 1 Instinct as here used includes the reflex.

The “enduring mission” of Zing‐Yang Kuo to eliminate the nature–nurture dichotomy in psychology

“…Before concluding this discussion, it is important to note that many of Kuo's reasons for rejecting instincts, radical as they were, were not altogether unique. As a case in point, only 1 month after Kuo had submitted his first paper, Luther Lee Bernard (1921) published a critique of the instinct concept that overlapped considerably with Kuo's viewpoint. For example, Bernard pointed to the role of prenatal experiences as potentially generating the instincts seen at birth, that invoking the term instinct usually reflected the writer's failure to analyze the development of the action pattern in question, that studies of heredity must deal with definite physiomorphological facts (and not abstractions), that vitalistic thinking is metaphysical and patently illogical yet pervades discussions of innate determining tendencies and the like, and that social environments are critical in the development of behavior.…”

The rise and fall of McDougall's instinct doctrine

“…Of all the criticisms, the analysis of the proposition that instincts are in reality acquired responses, was the most common and also the most ambiguous. Bernard's (1921) view can be taken as representative of the critics' position:…”

“…Accepted and new instincts were joined together to explain the nature of political institutions (Wallas, 1914) , economic behavior (Parker, 1918;Tead, 1919), and social problems (Patrick, 1920). These works employ the instinct concept in a more or less systematic fashion; examples of capricious extensions of the term (see Bernard, 1924) would number in the thousands.…”

“…Criticism 1: Ambiguity. In an exhaustive survey of the usage of "instinct," Bernard (1924) found 14,000 different instincts employed since 1900. When an explanation was needed for the occurrence of such responses as "backscratching" or "writing an analysis of anti-instinct attacks," the prefix "instinct for" was deemed sufficient.…”

“…Some authors were content with a listing of specific instincts; others developed higher order instincts to subsume particular instincts. As Bernard (1924) demonstrates, little reliability is found among authors as to the number or nature of instincts included and in their mode of classification.…”