By the year , a survey of the 12 best selling textbooks in Introductory Psychology revealed only one reference to instincts, and that was in regard to Sigmund Freud 's referral to the " id " instincts. In this sense, instincts appeared to have become regarded as increasingly superfluous in trying to understand human psychological behavior.
Some Freudian Psychoanalysts have retained the term instinct to refer to human motivational forces such as sex and aggression , sometimes represented as Eros - life instinct and Thanatos - death instinct. This use of the term motivational forces has been replaced by the term drives to correct the original error in the translation of Freud's work.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow argued that humans no longer have instincts because we have the ability to override them in certain situations. He felt that what is called instinct is often imprecisely defined, and really amounts to strong drives. For Maslow, an instinct is something which cannot be overridden, and therefore while the term may applied to humans in the past, it no longer does.
The book Instinct established a number of criteria which distinguish instinctual from other kinds of behavior. To be considered instinctual, a behavior must: a be automatic, b be irresistible, c occur at some point in development, d be triggered by some event in the environment, e occur in every member of the species, f be unmodifiable, and g govern behavior for which the organism needs no training although the organism may profit from experience and to that degree the behavior is modifiable.
In a classic paper published in [3] , the psychologist Richard Herrnstein decries Fabre's opinions on instinct. Jean Henri Fabre , an entomologist , considered instinct to be any behavior which did not require cognition or consciousness to perform. Fabre's inspiration was his intense study of insects, some of whose behaviors he wrongly considered fixed and not subject to environmental influence. Instinct as a concept fell out of favor in the s with the rise of behaviorism and such thinkers as B.
Skinner , which held that most significant behavior is learned. Access to the full content requires a subscription. Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Psychology.
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List of Partners vendors. What is it that motivates behavior? Is the way that we behave something we are born with, or is it something that develops as we age and due to the experiences we have? What evidence supports the basis of motivation? According to the instinct theory of motivation , all organisms are born with innate biological tendencies that help them survive. This theory suggests that instincts drive all behaviors. So, what exactly is instinct?
Instincts are goal-directed and innate patterns of behavior that are not the result of learning or experience. Both of these behaviors occur naturally and automatically. They do not need to be learned in order to be displayed. In animals, instincts are inherent tendencies to engage spontaneously in a particular pattern of behavior. Examples of this include a dog shaking after it gets wet, a sea turtle seeking out the ocean after hatching, or a bird migrating before the winter season. Ethologist Konrad Lorenz famously demonstrated the power of instincts when he was able to get young geese to imprint on him.
He noted that geese would become attached to the first moving thing they encountered after they hatched, which in most cases would be their mothers. However, by ensuring that he was the first thing the geese encountered, they instead became attached or imprinted, on him.
In humans, many reflexes are examples of instinctive behaviors. The rooting reflex, as mentioned earlier is one such example, as is the suckling reflex a reflex in which babies begin sucking when a finger or nipple places pressure on the roof of their mouth. The Moro reflex is a startle reaction seen in babies less than 6 months of age, and the Babkin reflex is when babies open their mouths and flex their arms in response to rubbing the palms of their hands.
For example, brushing an infant's cheek will cause the child to turn their head and search for a nipple. Psychologist William McDougall was one of the first to write about the instinct theory of motivation. He suggested that instinctive behavior was composed of three essential elements: perception, behavior, and emotion.
He also outlined 18 different instincts that included curiosity, maternal instinct, laughter, comfort, sex, and food-seeking. Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud used a broad view of motivation and suggested the human behavior was driven by two key forces: the life and death instincts.
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