William Mcdougall: Problems With Instinct

William McDougall: Problems with Instinct Theory

William McDougall was an experimental psychologist and theorist who believed in a holistic psychology that integrated all of the tools available to help understand the human psyche. "He was the first to formulate a theory of human instinctual behavior," Margaret Alic notes, "and he influenced the development of the new field of social psychology" (p. 1). McDougall was born in Lancashire, England in 1871, and his early pioneering work on the subject of instinct helped to secure him much recognition at the time, more so than did the work of the previous psychologists (Alic, 2001). In his biography of McDougall, Chris Brand reports that McDougall held lectureships in Cambridge (St. John's College) and Oxford (Corpus Christi College) by the close of the 19th century; he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1912 and was Professor of Psychology at Harvard from 1920 to 1928. "As might be expected from a man of such achievement," Brand says, "McDougall was a near-complete polymath" (p. 37). After securing a medical degree, McDougall's interests turned to anthropology and philosophy and his erudition knew no bounds. According to Brand, McDougall's studies ranged from a one-year Cambridge University expedition to Borneo, perceptual and animal studies, to investigations in parapsychology. In fact, "[McDougall's] writing spanned the entire tough-to-tender dimension of psychology, from physiological through to social psychology. He was a fine figure of a man - strongly built, with great dignity, a penetrating gaze and a sensuous mouth that still speaks through photographs of the passions that he experienced, studied and propounded as key features of the human condition" (Brand, p. 37). Given these broad ranges of important contributions, it was not surprising that McDougall enjoyed a degree of popularity during the early 20th century; however, few people outside of psychological circles may have even heard of him today (Brand, 1997). According to Ronald Fletcher (1957), three factors may help to account for McDougall's popularity during the early 20th century:

1) His account of instinct was very largely a psychological account; i.e. framed mainly in experiential terms, which involved more points of controversy than the mere statement of the biological facts of instinct in the lower organisms would have done.

2) His treatment, especially in his book Social Psychology, was directed predominantly to the study of human instincts, and it is, of course, in connection with the question of instinct in man that most of the controversy has arisen; and, 3) His views were presented in a compact conceptual scheme, the very simplicity of which may, on the one hand, have made his work readable and popular with lay readers, and, on the other, may have aroused the ire of professional psychologists who, confronted with the great complexity of human experience and behavior, were rather chary ["discreetly cautious"] of simple answers (Fletcher, 1957, p. 47). Notwithstanding the controversies surrounding McDougall's early observations concerning human nature and instinct, or the criticisms that were directed against them, the theory of instincts has in fact frequently been misunderstood and misrepresented, and many of the criticisms directed against McDougall's work were not only incomplete but some were completely irrelevant (Fletcher, 1957). McDougall simply maintained that, "The human mind has certain innate or inherited tendencies which are the essential springs or motive powers of all thought and action...', and these innate tendencies he termed 'Instincts'" (1923, p. 20). To help develop a better understanding of McDougall's instinct theory and its impact on the school of psychological thought, this paper provides a review of the relevant literature, followed by a summary of the research in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

Background and Overview of Instinct Theory. From a general biological perspective, instincts are regulatory principles that, functioning automatically, help to secure the continued survival of the organism (Arieti, 1974). Cannon (1932) defined instincts as being "coordinators of internal regulatory systems which maintain adaptive stabilization" (p. 14). The instinctual processes that provide for the survival functions of an organism are the vital, primary instincts. "[Instincts] serve the regulation of breathing, water balance, food intake, elimination, and maintenance of tissue substance," Arieti notes, and "This sequence is indicatory of the difference in the urgency of the need that the instinct represents; it shows the physiological time interval between the need and its gratification" (p. 570). In this regard, McDougall (1923) pointed out that every human sensation and every single perception, no matter how primitive or simple in nature, represents a level of cognition and therefore also represents an awareness of "something there" (p. 260). According to McDougall, the term "instincts" represents.".. certain innate specific tendencies of the mind that are common to all members of any one species, racial characters that have been slowly evolved in the process of adaptation of species to their environment and that can be neither eradicated from the mental constitution of which they are innate elements nor acquired by individuals in the course of their lifetime" (1948, p. 20). These are clearly more sophisticated characteristics than, say, a sunflower bending toward the sun; indeed, without these inherited instincts to survive, it is unlikely that any species could. Sentience suggests that an organism is sufficiently aware of its environment to take the requisite steps needed to ensure an appropriate response to a given stimuli. In this regard, McDougall maintained that consciousness stood for and "implied some one who is conscious of some thing" (Bentley, p. 228). Citing the example of a mature wasp, McDougall (1912) pointed out that, "The handling of her prey by each individual in the manner characteristic of her species on her first encounter with it, similarly implies the possession of a corresponding innate conative disposition. And the fact that each wasp reacts in this specific fashion to her specific prey, and to that alone, implies that this conative disposition is innately linked with the cognitive disposition that enables her to recognize her prey" (p. 160). This process is in fact the nature of instinct in all animals in that it is a mental structure that establishes the condition required for instinctive action. The manner in which these nature and nurture factors contribute to the behavior of a given species is the basis for McDougall's explanation of a majority of all animal behavior, including humans. "All those purposive reactions imply perceptual discrimination of the object without previous experience of it. Well-nigh the whole of the behavior of some animals conforms strictly to this type," he says (1912, p. 161). As noted above, as an early member of the psychological community, McDougall's contributions to the schools of thought that have emerged since that time have been profound, despite his relative anonymity today. The research that subsequently emerged in the field based on McDougall's instinct theory is discussed further below.

Research Based on Instinct Theory. Research based on instinct theory has been applied to many fields, including business, education, and religion, showing its usefulness for understanding and predicting patterns of human interaction (Smith, 1993). The early investigations by McDougall and others in the realm of psychology compelled a reformulation of the approach from one focused solely on the mind to one that integrated a behavioral component as well. In his book, Personality Structure and Human Interaction: The Developing Synthesis of Psycho-Dynamic Theory, Harry Guntrip (1961) reported that, "The need for psychology to take account, not only of the individual and his 'mind', but also of his world, was responsible for the discarding of the old definition of psychology as 'the science of the mind' and the adoption of the definition of 'the science of behavior'" (p. 28). Sigmund Freud's explorations into instinct and human behavior, as well as other behaviorists are all related to McDougall's early work on instinct theory (Guntrip, 1961), but Freud remained nebulous on the issue of the "psychic representation" of human instinctual drives ("An instinct can never become an object of consciousness -- only the idea that represents the instinct can") (Lifton, 1979, p. 39). In their essay, "Race-Ethnicity and Measured Intelligence: Educational Implications," Lisa a. Suzuki and Richard R. Valencia report that McDougall was one of the paramount figures in the psychological community who helped to shape the current framework in which the human condition and experience are understood:

The appearance of Galtonian biometrics, close ties between Galton and American psychologists, the development of the correlation coefficient (Galton and Karl Pearson), the eugenics movement, the development of the Binet-Simon intelligence scales in France, the appropriation of the Binet-Simon scales by American psychologists H.H. Goddard and Lewis Terman, individual intelligence testing, mass intelligence testing in World War I, Mendelian genetics, and instinct theory (William McDougall) all combined to help heredity become entrenched as a powerful explanatory base of human behavior in the nature-nurture controversy (p. 1105).

According to "Motivation and Emotion" (2005), though, some of the problems that have emerged with the instinct theory perspective include:

1. Theorists have never been able to agree on a list of instincts; many instincts are NOT universal and seem to be more dependent on individual differences (for example, jealousy. Not all humans exhibit the same jealously levels, behaviors, etc.); and, 2. Today, instinct theory has a more biological emphasis for specific motives and not all (like aggression and sex). but, there is still a strong instinct perspective in the study of animals (ethology) (p. 2).

Notwithstanding this lack of consensus, there have been much attention directed to the relationship between instinct theory and the various dimensions of the human experience, which are discussed further below.

Relationship of Instinct Theory to Dimensions of Human Experience.

A) Paradoxes in Human Experience. Indeed, in their book, Psychologies of 1925: Powell Lectures in Psychological Theory, Madison Bentley (1928) asked early on, "By what theory can it be explained how it comes about that an individual can exhibit so many and such extreme and even seemingly paradoxical phases, or alterations of his character, and such contrasting contradictory traits and behavior?" (p. 259). The duality of the nature of humanity frequently relates to contrasting moral traits; William McDougall suggests that motives are for the most part primarily derived from our inherited primitive instincts or instinctive dispositions with which every child is born or which soon develop within him, or what Bentley et al. describe as "the instincts of pugnacity, and greed, and curiosity, and sex, and fear, and sympathy, and self-abasement, and self-assertion, and the tender parental instinct of love, etc." (p. 259).

B) Differences or Similarities between Culturally Diverse Human Experiences.

Differences or Similarities between Human and Other Animal Species. Mankind has always sought out explanations of the human condition that reinforced the notion that people are "special" by virtue of their divine heritage, in other words, people have always been looking for something that helps set them apart from the apes. Unfortunately, by applying an inaccurate concept of instinctual behavior to the entire animal kingdom while separating mankind into a separate Petri dish ran the serious risk of completely misunderstanding the human condition in the first place. In this regard, "The actions of men were said to be governed by the faculty of reason," McDougall says, "those of animals by the faculty of instinct; and this attribution of the actions of animals to instinct seems to have disguised from most of those who used the word the need for further study or explanation of them" (p. 139). In his book, Psychology, the Study of Behavior McDougall (1912) points out that early perspectives of instinct were largely theological in nature rather than based on scientific observations, with this distinction representing both the most profound sort of fallacy in reasoning, but again relating to the power of semantics to cloak the reality of the world from the psychological community. "It was a striking example of the power of a word to cloak our ignorance and to hide it even from ourselves," he says. "Those who tried to go behind the word, to seek some further explanation of animal behavior, usually represented the instinctive acts of animals as directly guided by the hand of God" (McDougall, 1912, p. 139). In their book, Psychologies of 1930, Alfred Adler, Madison Bentley, McDougall and others debate the prominent psychological theories of the day. To help establish the theoretical framework for how views, McDougall noted that empirical observations clearly indicated that virtually all animal species shared certain commonalities as they related to survival; for example, all members of a species tend to seek and strive toward a limited number of goals of certain types, certain kinds of food and of shelter, their mates, the company of their fellows, certain geographical areas at certain seasons, escape to cover in presence of certain definable circumstances, dominance over others, the welfare of their young, and so forth.

According to McDougall, "For any one species the kinds of goals sought are characteristic and specific; and all members of the species seek these goals independently of example and of prior experience of attainment of them, though the course of action pursued in the course of striving towards the goal may vary much and may be profoundly modified by experience" (p. 13). These powerful natural forces help to shape the way that existing generations of an animal species tend to behave, but more importantly, McDougall suggests that these tendencies are also communicated to future generations. "We are justified, then, in inferring that each member of the species inherits the tendencies of the species to seek goals of these several types" (p. 13). In reality, it would seem that many of the controversies and problems associated with McDougall's assertions concerning how and why animals - including humans - act they way they do centered on semantics and the enormous egos of the psychological community of the day. For example, in his introductory chapter to Psychologies of 1930, McDougall writes that:

Man also is a member of an animal species. And this species also has its natural goals, or its inborn tendencies to seek goals of certain types. This fact is not only indicated very clearly by any comparison of human with animal behavior, but it is so obvious a fact that no psychologist of the least intelligence fails to recognize it, however inadequately, not even if he obstinately reduces their number to a minimum of three and dubs them the 'prepotent reflexes' of sex, fear, and rage. Others write of 'primary desires,' or of 'dominant urges,' or of 'unconditioned reflexes,' or of appetites, or of cravings, or of congenital drives, or of motor sets, or of inherited tendencies or propensities; lastly, some, bolder than the rest, write of 'so-called instincts.' For instincts are out of fashion just now with American psychologists; and to write of instincts without some such qualification as 'so-called' betrays a reckless indifference to fashion amounting almost to indecency. Yet the word 'instinct' is too good to be lost to our science. Better than any other word it points to the facts and the problems with which I am here concerned (emphasis added). (McDougall, 1930, p. 13).

Despite the controversy that has followed these early arguments, McDougall was absolutely correct in his observations concerning the usefulness of the term "instinct," and it has not been lost science in the decades that followed; the manner in which the historical perspectives concerning instinct have changed since McDougall's time are discussed further below.

D) Historical Perspectives or Views that Have Changed. In 1912, McDougall wrote that: "Modern science is no longer content to use [instinct] as a cloak for ignorance, and to regard such actions as explained by attributing them to a faculty of instinct: it uses the word rather to mark the need for a theory" (p. 160). The need for a theory has resulted in some profound reaffirmations of McDougall's original propositions that have managed to weather the semantic and scientific debate over what he meant in his early psychological works concerning instinct theory. According to Brand (1997):

McDougall's belief in instinct (rather than in the master role of conditioning) and in what he himself called "evolutionary psychology" have lately been well within the psychological pale. In 1972, a Nobel Prize was awarded to the three ethologists (Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen and Kurt Von Frisch) who had detailed innate systems of motivation and communication in birds, fish and bees. Today, evolutionary psychology is one of the few really thriving research programs within psychology.

Quite a few intellectuals around 1930 still entertained Lamarckian sympathies, as had Darwin himself; and McDougall's work (for all that he himself had lived in hope of 'positive' results) furnished a crucial nail for the Lamarckian coffin. Few psychologists have had the honor of participating in the falsification of such an important theoretical possibility.

As to McDougall's interest in the possibly radical distinctness of mind from matter, parapsychology has been a growth area in university psychology departments since 1980 - particularly attracting students who want to turn the highest methodological sophistication and rigor on problems of greater importance than those which keep most postgraduate psychologists in receipt of their funding from the taxpayer (Brand, 1997, p. 37).