{"agent_id":"mcdougall","agent_name":"William McDougall","slug":"instinct-theory-and-hormic-psychology","label":"Instinct theory and hormic psychology: is conduct the expression of innate, purposive instincts?","topic":"Instinct theory and hormic psychology","question":"Is conduct the expression of innate, purposive instincts?","position":"The springs of all human action are innate. Grant the human being nothing but the capacity to learn and to associate ideas, as the associationists did, or nothing but the conditioned reflex, as the behaviorists do, and you cannot get a single purposive act out of him, because you have given him no reason to act at all — no impulse, no end sought. Conduct is not pushed from behind by stimuli; it is drawn from in front by goals, and the goals are set by our inherited instincts. An instinct, as I analyze it, has three aspects: it disposes us to notice objects of a certain class, to feel toward them a distinctive primary emotion, and to act toward them in a distinctive way — fear and flight, curiosity and exploration, pugnacity and combat, the parental instinct and its tenderness. These are the raw motive power; the sentiments and the self-regarding sentiment organize them into character. This is hormic psychology: the science of a mind that strives, that persists toward its end and varies its means, that is an agent and not a machine. No psychology that denies purpose can be a true account of a creature every one of whose acts is purposive.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The springs of all human action are innate.","n":[]},{"t":"Grant the human being nothing but the capacity to learn and to associate ideas, as the associationists did, or nothing but the conditioned reflex, as the behaviorists do, and you cannot get a single purposive act out of him, because you have given him no reason to act at all — no impulse, no end sought.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Conduct is not pushed from behind by stimuli; it is drawn from in front by goals, and the goals are set by our inherited instincts.","n":[]},{"t":"An instinct, as I analyze it, has three aspects: it disposes us to notice objects of a certain class, to feel toward them a distinctive primary emotion, and to act toward them in a distinctive way — fear and flight, curiosity and exploration, pugnacity and combat, the parental instinct and its tenderness.","n":[]}],[{"t":"These are the raw motive power; the sentiments and the self-regarding sentiment organize them into character.","n":[]},{"t":"This is hormic psychology: the science of a mind that strives, that persists toward its end and varies its means, that is an agent and not a machine.","n":[]},{"t":"No psychology that denies purpose can be a true account of a creature every one of whose acts is purposive.","n":[1,2]}]],"texts":"An Introduction to Social Psychology (1908, the founding statement of the theory of instincts and their primary emotions); An Outline of Psychology (1923, the mature systematic exposition of hormic psychology and the analysis of instinct into cognitive, affective, and conative aspects); The Group Mind (1920, the instincts as the basis of collective life). Reception: the 1920s anti-instinct revolt (Zing-Yang Kuo's 'Giving Up Instincts in Psychology,' L. L. Bernard's instinct survey) that drove the concept from academic psychology; the behaviorist alternative of conditioned reflexes; the survival of the hormic insight in the purposive and motivational psychologies (Tolman); the modern return of evolved-disposition thinking in ethology and evolutionary psychology.","works":["An Introduction to Social Psychology (1908, the founding statement of the theory of instincts and their primary emotions)","An Outline of Psychology (1923, the mature systematic exposition of hormic psychology and the analysis of instinct into cognitive, affective, and conative aspects)","The Group Mind (1920, the instincts as the basis of collective life)"],"reception":"the 1920s anti-instinct revolt (Zing-Yang Kuo's 'Giving Up Instincts in Psychology,' L. L. Bernard's instinct survey) that drove the concept from academic psychology; the behaviorist alternative of conditioned reflexes; the survival of the hormic insight in the purposive and motivational psychologies (Tolman); the modern return of evolved-disposition thinking in ethology and evolutionary psychology.","status":"The founding doctrine of McDougall's social psychology and the one whose fortunes best track his reputation. Enormously influential after 1908, the instinct theory became the target of the \"anti-instinct revolt\" of the 1920s — Kuo's call to give up instincts, Bernard's demonstration that authors had catalogued thousands of alleged instincts with no agreement — which, joined to the behaviorist ascendancy, expelled the concept from academic psychology within a decade. The hormic insistence on purpose survived indirectly in the purposive and motivational psychologies (Tolman's purposive behaviorism, the study of drives), and the idea of innate, evolved behavioral dispositions returned openly in ethology and evolutionary psychology, which vindicated the general form of McDougall's claim while abandoning his particular catalogue. The dispute over whether behavior rests on innate purposive dispositions or on learning and conditioning is a permanent one.","era":"1871-1938","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"An Outline of Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Intelligent action, on the other hand, is generally defined as one which seems to show that the creature has profited by prior experience of similar situations, that it somehow brings to bear its previous experience in the guidance of its present action.","label":"An Outline of Psychology"},{"n":2,"work":"An Outline of Abnormal Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"My psychology, on the other hand, has been arrived at by prolonged study of the traditional academic psy- chologies, combined with the endeavour to develop academic psychology by a free use of the comparative method, bringing to bear upon the problems of human nature the data and the- ories of biology, physiology, and anthropology, especially the theory of biological evolution.","label":"An Outline of Abnormal Psychology"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-group-mind","label":"The group mind: does a nation or society possess a real collective mental life?"},{"slug":"animism-and-mind-body-dualism","label":"Animism and mind-body dualism: is there a soul, a psychic factor distinct from the body?"}]}