Human Traits and their Social Significance

l 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 l

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 react

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 behavio

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

f 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

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 satisf

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

hrough 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 com

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 the

y 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 nativ

zed 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 impuls

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

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 fr

whole mental life. Unfulfilled desires may give rise to various forms of "complex," distortions of thought, action, and emotion of which the individual himself may be unaware. They may make a man unduly sensitive, or fearful, or pugnacious. He may, for example, cover up a sense of mortification at failure by an unwarranted degree of bluster and brag. A particular baffl

ehavior, noticeable in such cases, are simply extreme forms of the type of distortion that takes place in the case of normal individuals whose desi

l the more surely promote a harmonious satisfaction of all our desires. A society whose arrangements are such that instincts are, on the whole, being repressed rather than stimulated and satisfied, is frustrating happiness rather than promoting it. At the very least, a life whose natural impulses are not being fulfilled is a life of boredom. The ennui which is so often and so conspicuously associated with the routine and desolate "gayeties" of society, the listlessness of those bored with their work or their play, or both, are symptoms of social conditions where the native endowments of man are handicaps rather than assets, dead

originality, and spontaneity are perhaps particularly valued in our own civilization because of the multiple restraints of business and professional occupations. Even under the most perfect social arrangements there will always exist among men conflicts of desire. Their control over their environment will, of necessity, be imperfect, as will their mastery of their own passions and their clear adjustment to one another. That complete agreement between man's desires

e in need of it than those of the sub-human forms. Even among animals under conditions of domestication, instinct tends largely to be replaced by habitual or acquired modes of behavior. The human being, born with a nervous system and a brain in extremely unformed and plastic condition, is so susceptible to every influence current in his environment that most of his actions within a few years after birth

, or the withdrawing of a hand from flame, such is the physiology of the process. But where an immediate adjustment cannot be made by an instinctive response, where satisfaction is not secured by the passage of a sensory stimulus to an immediate motor response, the nervous impulse is, as it were, deflected to the brain area, auditory, visual, or whatever it may be, which is associated with that particular type of sensation. The path to the brain area is far from simple; the nervous impulse, which might be compared to an electric current, must pass through many nerve junctions known as "synapses," at which points there is some not complete

cDougall: Physiolo

am and the oyster, and in some of the lower vertebrates, perhaps, instinctive activity is almost exclusively present. But in the case of man, so complicated are the situations to which he is exposed that random instinctive responses will not solve his problems. He must, as with his highly modifiable nervous system he can, acquire new modes of response which will, in the complexity of new situations serve as effectively as his original tendencies to act would serve him

new and more adequate response. One is the method of trial and error, already discussed, whereby animals and humans try every possible instinctive response to a situation until one brings satisfaction and is retained as a habitual reaction when that si

with some difficulty. With successive repetitions their performance becomes more rapid, more immediate, and more adjusted to the specific situation to be met. And as they

particular individual, there occur what are known as "plateaux," during which no progress in speed or accuracy of response is to be observed. In experiments with the learning of typewriting, for example, it has been found that the beginner makes rapid progress up to the point, say, where he can write fifty words a minute without error; there is a long interval not infrequently before he can raise his efficiency to the point of writing seventy words a minute correctly. Analogous conditions have been observed in the speed with which the sending and receiving of telegraphic messages is learned. These "plateaux" of learning are sometimes to be accounted for by muscul

anical habits. The most attentive appreciation of the proper things to be done in playing tennis or the piano will not by itself make one an expert in those activities. The effective responses must actually be performed in order that the appropriate connections within

Woodworth: Physiological

ts significant factors, and attend to these in successive repetitions. The superiority of deliberate learning over the brute method of trial and error consists precisely in that the deliberate and attentive learner can pick out the important steps of any process, and learn rapidly to eliminate random and useless features of his early performances without waiting to have the right way "knocked into him" by experience. He will short-circuit the process of learning by choosing appropriate responses in advance, noting how they may be made more effective and discovering methods for making them so, and for eliminating useless, random, and ineffective acts. What we ca

and rapidity when the organism is fatigued. At such times there seems to be an unusually high resistance at the synapses or nerve junctions (where there is a lowering of resistance to the passage of a nerve current when habits are easily formed). After a certain point of fatigue, whether in the acquisition of motor habits

t some conditions remain constant. For instance, in experiments with memory tests (memory being a form of habit in th

to a more acute degree. The toxins and poisons in the nervous system at such times operate to prevent the formation of new habits and the breaking of old ones. For while the synapses (nerv

were, unconsciously preferred by the nervous system. The capacity to form habits is most pronounced in the young child in whose nervous structure no one action rather than another has yet had a chance to be ingrained. The more connections that are made, the more habits that are acquired, the less, in a sense, can be made. For the organism will tend to repeat those actions to which it has previously been stim

acquired become so fixed that they are almost inescapable, is of supreme importance to the individual and so

against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed ever

es: Psychology,

ngs as possible without thinking is to free thinking for new situations. Our experiences would be very restricted indeed if we could not reduce a large portion of the things we do to the mechanics of habit. Walking, eating, these, though partly instinctive, were once problems requiring thought, effort, and attention. If we had to spend all our lives learning to dress and undres

to oblige the movement to be made in a different way. But our higher thought centers know hardly anything about the matter. Few men can tell off-hand which sock, shoe, or trousers-leg they put on first. They must first mentally rehearse the act; and even that is often insufficient-the act must be perfo

mes: loc. cit.,

personal habits of dress, speech, etc., but become habituated to social institutions, to certain occupations, to the prestige attaching to some types of action and the punishment correlated with others. Education in the broadest sense is simply the acquisition of those habits which adapt an individual to his social environment. It is the instrument society uses to hand down the habits of thinking, feeling, and action which characterize a civilization. Society is protected from murder, theft, and pillage by law and t

hing which was not suggested by a first-hand impulse, or if no one were more honest or punctual or industrious than he was led to be by his co

ham Wallas: Grea

olence and congratulation to the most important "customs of the country," with respect to marriage, property, and the like, w

that he will acquire good habits (that is, habits serviceable to his own happiness and to that of his fellows) is not guaranteed by nature. Habits are indeed more notorious than famous, and examples are more frequently chosen from evil ones than from good. Promptness in the performance of one's professional or domestic duties, care i

in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may n

mes: loc. cit.,

action have been established, but that with them go deep-seated habits of thought and feeling. The repression of people's accustomed ways of doing things may bring with it a sense of frustration almost as complete and painful as if these obstructed activities were instinctive. This is not true merely in the melodramatic instances of drug addicts and

cquisition of any habits at all. Man in learning new habits, "learns to learn." This ability to learn is, of course, correlated with a plasticity of brain and nerve fiber which is most present in early youth. The disappearance of this capacity is hastened by the pressure which forces individuals in their business and professional life to cling fast to certain habits wh

ired. If they were learned merely through mechanical drill, they will be fixed and rigid. If they were learned deliberat

eneral "open sesames" which, learned in one situation, will apply with indiscriminate miraculousness to a variety of others. Just as an instinct is a definite resp

orth, if the habit has been established in one case, the identical response of "tidying up" in the other. But unless there are marked points of similarity between two different sets of circumstances, specific habits remain specific and non-transferable. There is in the laws of habit no guarantee that an industrious application to the batting averages of the major league on the part of an alert twelve-year-old will provoke the same assiduous assimilation of the facts of the American Revolution; that a boy who wo

. They are intellectual as well as merely motor in character; they are deliberate and conscious methods rather than mechanical rules of thumb. Habits that have been drilled into an individual will appear only when the situation very closely approximates the one in which the drill has been performed. The cat that has learned to get out of a certain type of cage by pressing a button will be utterly at a loss if the familiar features of the cage are changed. The intelligent human will detect and take pains to detect among the minor differences of the situation some significant fact which he has met in another setting, and he will apply a habit u

, which means the development of habits as methods of control, will enable the individual to modify habits acquired in slightly different circumstances to new situations where the major conditions remain the same. To be merely habitual is to be at best an efficient machine, utterly unable to do anything except to run along cert

intelligence. The technique of this adjustment is the technique of thinking or of

those in which he is being passively acted upon. This awareness or consciousness is not detached intellectual perception, but is accompanied by, as it is by some held to be merely the consciousness of, certain specific bodily disturbances. Thus the emotions of fear and grief are not cold and abstract perceptions of situations that belong in the classes dangerous or deplorable, respectively. The awareness of these situations by the individual is intimately and invariably connected with certain out

tion of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face? The present writer, for one, certainly cannot. The rage is as completely evaporated as the sensations of its so-called manifestations, and the only thing that can possibly be supposed to take its place is some cold blooded and

es: Psychology,

ch go to make up each of them that he did not think it misleading to say "we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we stri

ances which accompany fear, rage, and the like, and which are caused immediately by the perception of the appropriate obje

od stream, which fluid stimulates the heart to activity, constricts the blood vessels of the internal organs, causes the liver to pour out into the blood its stores of sugar, and affects in one way or another all the organs of the body. The general effect is to put the body into a state of preparedness

nected with the primary tendencies of man. McDougall, for example, says that each of the great primary impulses is accompanied by an emotion. Indeed, McDougall considers, as earlier noted, that the emotion is the affective or conscious aspect of an instinct which, at the same time, has a perceptual and impulsive aspect; that, in the case of fear, the perceptual aspect

by both their fulfillment, their conflict, and their frustration. The variety of emotions results from the fact that no single one of our instincts is stimulated at a time, and that the peculiar specific quality of each emotional experience is due to the specific point of conflict, fulfillment, or frustration in each particular case. It may be further noted that those emotions are, in general, pleasantly toned which accompany the fulfillment or the approach to the fulfillment of a native disposition; and those ar

by these emotional disturbances which accompany them. It is proverbially difficult to think straight when angry; the surgeon in performing an operation must not be moved by pity or fear; and love is notoriously blind. The facts with which reflection must deal are presented in distorted and exaggerated form under the stress of competing impulses. Stim

r serve to stimulate and reinforce it. Emotions are, in many cases, merely the inner or subjective awareness of one of these great driving forces, or a complex of them. Anger, pity, and fear, in their less extreme forms, pour floods of energy into the activities in which they take overt expression. It needs no special knowledge to recognize the fact that the normal interests and enterprises of life are quickened and sustained when some great emotional drive can be roused in their support. Ambition, loyalty, love, or hate may stir men to and sustain them in long and difficult enterprises which they would neither undertake nor continue were these motive forces

gling of many and diverse feelings. And these particular complexes of emotions become for each individual organized about particular persons or objects or situations. The emotional reactions of an individual are, indeed, accurately symptomatic of the character of the individual and the culture of his time. They are aroused, it goes without saying, on very different occasions and by v

y made habitual, their performance will bring pleasure, and will thereby be better insured than by any amount of preaching or punishment. If the actions which the group approves are not early made habitual in the younger members of the group, they will not be enforced either through logic or electrocution. It is not enough to give people reasons for doing good, th