TYPES OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND THEIR SOCIAL
SIGNIFICANCE--INSTINCT, HABIT, AND EMOTION
INSTINCTIVE BEHAVIOR. We have already noted the fact that
both men and animals are equipped with a wide variety of
unlearned responses to given stimuli. In the case of human
beings, this original 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 later stage of this discussion we
shall examine the more important of these primary modes of
behavior. At this point our chief concern is with certain
general considerations that apply to them all.
The equipment of instincts with which a human being is at
birth endowed must be considered in two ways. It consists,
in the first place, of definite and unlearned mechanisms of
behavior, fixed original responses to given stimuli. These
are, at 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 reactions, but exhibit inborn drives or desires to make
those reactions. There is thus an identity in man's native
endowment between what he can do and what he wants to do.
Instincts must thus be regarded as both native capacities and
native desires.
Instincts define, therefore, not only what men can do, but
what they want to do. They are at once the primary instruments
and the primary provocatives to action. As we shall
presently see in some detail, human beings may acquire
mechanisms of behavior with which they are not at birth
endowed. 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
behavior are modifications of some original instinctive
response, so all desires, interests, and ideals are derivatives of
such original impulses as fear, curiosity, self-assertion, and
sex. All human motives can be traced back to these primary
inborn impulses to make these primary inborn responses.[1]
[Footnote 1:
The clearest statement of the status of instincts as both mechanisms of
action and "drives" to action has been made by Professor Woodworth in his
_Dynamic Psychology_. No one else, to the best of the author's knowledge,
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 make the response. An instinct is, for him, an inherited
disposition which determines its possessor, in respect to any object,
"to act in regard to it in a particular manner, or at least to
experience an impulse to such action."]
THE NECESSITY FOR THE CONTROL OF INSTINCT. The human
being's original equipment of impulses and needs constitutes
at once an opportunity and a problem. Instincts are the
natural resources of human behavior, the raw materials of
action, feeling, and thought. All behavior, whether it be the
"making of 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 such thing as human purpose or preference;
without their utilization in some form no human purpose
or preference could be fulfilled. But like other natural
resources, men's original tendencies must be controlled and
redirected, if they are to be fruitfully utilized in the interests
of human welfare.
There are a number of conditions that make imperative the
control of native tendencies. The first of these is intrinsic
to the organization of instincts themselves. Human beings
are born with a plurality of desires, and happiness consists in
an equilibrium of satisfactions. But impulses are stimulated
at random and collide with one another. Often one impulse,
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
satisfaction without exhibiting the disease and disorganization
of which these indulgences are so often the direct antecedents.
A life is a long-time enterprise and it contains a diversity
of desires. If all of these are to receive any measure of
fulfillment there must be compromise and adjustment between
them; they must all be subjected to some measure of control.
A second cause for the control of instinct lies in the fact that
people live and have to live together. The close association
which is so characteristic of human life is, as we shall see,
partly attributable to a specific gregarious instinct, partly to
the increasing need for coöperation which marks the increasing
complexity of civilization. But whatever be its causes,
group association makes it necessary that men regulate their
impulses and 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 adult must be checked and
modified in the interests of the group among which the individual
lives. One may take a simple illustration from the
everyday life of a large city. There is, for most individuals,
an intrinsic satisfaction in fast and free movement. But that
desire, exhibited in an automobile on a crowded thoroughfare,
will interfere with just as normal, natural, and inevitable
desires on the part of other motorists and pedestrians.
Still another imperative reason for the control of our instinctive
equipment lies in the fact that instincts as such are inadequate
to adjust either the individual or the group to contemporary
conditions. They were developed in the process
of evolution as useful methods for enabling the human animal
to cope with a radically different and incomparably simpler
environment. While the problems and processes of his life
and environment have grown more complex, man's inborn
equipment for controlling the world he lives in has, through
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 complex trains of
behavior are required than are provided by man's native
equipment. To satisfy the hunger of the contemporary citizens
of New York or London requires the transformation of
capricious instinctive responses into systematic and controlled
processes of habit and thought. The elaborate systems of
agriculture, transportation, and exchange which are necessary
in the satisfaction of the simplest wants of men in civilization
could never be initiated or carried on if we depended on the
instincts with which we are born.
There are thus seen to be at least three distinct reasons why
our native endowment of capacities and desires needs control
and direction. In the life of the individual, instinctive
desires must be adjusted to one another in order that their
harmonious fulfillment may be made possible. The desires and
native reactions of individuals must be checked and modified
if individuals are to live successfully and amiably in group
association, in which they must, in any case, live. And, finally,
so vastly complicated have become the physical and the
social machinery of 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 these it has been found useful to
allow free play; others, even if moderately indulged, may
bring injury to the individual and the group in which his own
life is involved. Education, public opinion, and law are
more or less deliberate methods society has provided for the
stimulation and repression of specific instinctive tendencies.
Curiosity and sympathy are valued and encouraged because
they contribute, respectively, to science and to coöperation;
pugnacity and acquisitiveness must be kept in check if people
are not simply to live, but to live together happily.
But the substitution of control for caprice in the living-out
of our native possibilities is as difficult as it is imperative. As
already noted, instincts are imperious driving forces as well
as mechanisms. While we can modify and redirect our native
tendencies of fear, curiosity, pugnacity, and the like, they
remain as strong currents of human behavior. They can be
turned into new channels; they cannot simply 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 native sociability and gift for
leadership may make him, for want of a better opportunity, a
gangster. But to cut off those impulses altogether would be
to cut off the sources of good citizenship. The settlement
clubs or the Boy Scout organizations in our large cities are
instances of what may be accomplished in the way of providing
a social environment in which native desires can be freely and
fruitfully fulfilled.
Social conditions can thus be modified so as to give satisfaction
to a larger proportion of natural desires. On the other
hand, civilization in the twentieth century remains so divergent
from the mode of life to which man's inborn nature
adapts him that the thwarting of instincts becomes inevitable.
Impulses, in the first place, arise capriciously, and one
of the conditions of our highly organized 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 impulsive behavior. To facilitate the effectiveness
of certain industries, for example, it may be necessary to
check impulses that commonly receive adequate satisfaction.
Thus it may be essential to enforce silence, as in the case of
telephone operators or motormen, simply because of the demands
of the industry, not because there is anything intrinsically
deserving of repression in the impulse to talk.
Again, the mere fact that a man lives in a group subjects
him to a thousand restraints and restrictions of public opinion
and law. A child may come 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; we
cannot be ruthlessly self-assertive in a group; or gratify our
native acquisitiveness by appropriating anything and everything
within our reach.
But because there are all these social forces making for the
repression of instincts, it does not mean that these latter
therefore disappear. If any one of them is unduly repressed,
it does not simply vanish as a driving force in human behavior.
It will make its enduring presence felt in roundabout
ways, or in sudden extreme and violent outbursts. Or, if it
cannot find even such sporadic or fruitive fulfillments, "a
balked disposition" will leave the individual with an uneasiness
and irritation that may range from mere pique to serious
forms of 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 frustrated sex motive. Assaults and
lynchings, and the whole calendar of crimes of violence with
which our criminal courts are crowded, are frequent evidence
of the incompleteness with which man's strong primary instincts
have been suppressed by the niceties of civilization.
The phenomenal outburst of collective vivacity and exuberance
which marked the reported signing of the armistice at
the close of the Great War was a striking instance of those
immense primitive energies which the control and discipline
of civilization cannot altogether repress.
There has been, furthermore, a great deal of evidence adduced
in recent years by students of abnormal psychology
concerning the results of the frustration of native desires.
When the individual is "balked" in respect to particular
impulses or desires, these may take furtive and obscure
fulfillments; they may play serious though obscure and unnoticed
havoc with a man's 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 baffling of desire may be
compensated by a bitterness against the whole universe or by
a melancholy of whose origin the victim may be quite unconscious.
These maladjustments between an individual's desires
and his satisfactions are certainly responsible for a
considerable degree of that irritation and neurasthenia which are
so frequently observable in normal individuals.[1]
[Footnote 1: While the evidence in this field has been taken
largely from extremely pathological cases, the distortions and
perversions of mental behavior, noticeable in such cases, are
simply extreme forms of the type of distortion that takes place
in the case of normal individuals whose desires are seriously
frustrated. See the very clear statement on the subject of
"repressions" and "conflicts" in R. B. Hart's _Psychology of
Insanity_.]
The facts enumerated above should make it clear why it is
difficult to modify, much less completely to overcome, these
strong original drives to action. They serve to emphasize
the fact that by control of instinctive responses is not meant
their suppression. For just as instinctive tendencies are our
basic instruments of action, so instinctive desires are our
basic ingredients of happiness. Just as all we can do is
limited by the mechanisms with which we are endowed, so what
we want is ultimately determined by the native desires with
which we are born. The control of action and of desire is
justified in so far as such control will 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
weights rather than motive forces. It means that society is
working against rather than with the grain. Discontent,
ranging from mere pique and irritability to overt violence, is
the penalty that is likely to be paid by a society the majority
of whose members are chronically prevented from satisfying
their normal human desires. No one who has seen whole
lives immeasurably brightened by the satisfaction of a suitable
employment, or melancholy and irritability removed by
companionship and stimulating surroundings, can fail to
realize how important it is to happiness that human instincts
be given generous opportunity for fulfillment.
One may say, indeed, that the evils of too complete repression
of individual impulses are more than that they produce
nervous strain, dissatisfaction, and, not infrequently, crime.
Happiness, as Aristotle long ago pointed out, is a complete
living-out of all a man's possibilities. It is most in evidence
when people are, as we say, doing what they like to do. And
people like to do that which they are prompted to do by the
nature which is their inheritance. Freshness, 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 and the environment in
which alone they can find their satisfaction remains at
best an ideal. But it is an ideal which indicates clearly the function
of control. This is obviously not to crush native desires, but
to organize their harmonious fulfillment. Where men have
an opportunity to utilize their native gifts they will be satisfied
and interested; where native capacities and desires are
continually balked, men will be discontented though
well-regimented machines.
HABITUAL BEHAVIOR. Except for purposes of analysis, life on
the purely instinctive level may be said scarcely to exist in
contemporary society, or for that matter, since the beginnings
of recorded history. As has been already pointed out,
while men are born with an even wider variety of tendencies
to act than animals, these are much more plastic and modifiable,
more susceptible of training, and much more 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 are, when they are not
the result of deliberate reflection, secondary or habitual rather
than genuinely instinctive. That is, few of the simplest actions
of human beings are not in some degree modified by experience.
They may appear just as automatic and immediate
as if they were instinctive, and indeed they are, but they are
learned ways rather than the unlearned ways man has as his
possession at birth.
THE MECHANISM OF HABIT. The implications of habitual behavior
can better be understood after a brief analysis of the
mechanism of such action. An instinct has been defined as a
tendency to act in a given way in response to a given stimulus.
What happens when a stimulus prompts the organism
to respond in a given way, is that some sensory nerve, whether
of taste or touch or sound, sight, smell, or muscular sensitivity,
receives a stimulus which passes through the spinal cord
to a motor nerve through which some muscle is "innervated"
and a response made. In the simplest type of reflex action,
such as the winking of an eye in a blinding light, 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 completely understood chemical
resistance offered to the passage of the nerve current. On
passing through the network of nerves in the brain area, the
current passes back again through a complicated maze of connections
to a motor nerve which insures a muscular response.
The first time a stimulus passes through this network the
resistance offered at the nerve junction or synapse is very high;
at succeeding repetitions of the stimulus the resistance is
reduced, the nerve current passes more rapidly and fluently
over the paths it has already traveled, and the action resulting
becomes as direct and automatic as if it were an original
reflex action.[1]
[Footnote 1: See McDougall: _Physiological Psychology_.]
THE ACQUISITION OF NEW MODES OF RESPONSE. Expressed in
less technical language this means simply that human beings
can learn by experience, and that they tend to repeat actions
they have once learned. Where an animal is perfectly adjusted
to its environment, all stimuli issue in immediate and
nicely adjusted responses. This happens only where the
environment is very simple and stable, and where in
consequence no complexity of structure or action is necessary. In
the clam 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 in a simpler and stabler environment. A human
being in a modern city cannot live by instinct alone; he must
acquire an enormous number of habits to meet the variety of
complex situations he meets in daily life. A monkey exists
with fairly fixed native tendencies to act. But civilization
could never have developed if in man new ways could not be
acquired to meet new situations, and if these new ways could
not be retained and made habitual in the individual and the
race.
TRIAL AND ERROR AND DELIBERATE LEARNING. Whenever, as
happens a large number of times daily in the life of the average
man, old ways of response, inborn or formerly acquired,
are inadequate to meet a new situation, there are two methods
of acquiring a 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 situation recurs. The other is a delay in
response, during which delay reflection, a consideration of
possible alternatives, and a conscious decision, take place.
The technique of this latter process will be discussed more
specifically in the next chapter.
Whether acquired by trial and error, or through reflection,
learned acts are, the first time they are performed, frequently
imperfect, only partly effective, and performed 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 become more
familiar responses to familiar stimuli they cease to be
conscious at all. They are performed with almost as little
difficulty or attention as normal breathing.
SOME CONDITIONS OF HABIT-FORMATION. The acquisition of
habits is so important in the education of human beings that
the conditions under which they can be acquired and made
permanently effective have been closely studied. From
experiments certain fundamental conclusions stand out. A
habit is acquired by repetition, and the "curves of learning"
show certain recurrent features. In the first few repetitions
of an acquired activity, there is progress in the rapidity,
effectiveness, and accuracy with which the response is made.
There is, up to a certain point, an almost vertical rise in the
learning curve. After varying numbers of repetitions, depending
somewhat on the 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 muscular fatigue.
Frequently there is actual progress in learning during these
apparent intervals of marking time. Some of the less observable
features of skill in performance which only later become
overt in speed and accuracy are being attained during these
seemingly profitless and discouraging intervals. Not infrequently
in the acquisition of skill in the playing of tennis or
the piano, or in the solution of mathematical problems, a
decided gain in skill and speed comes after what seems to
be not only lack of progress but decided backsliding.[1] It is
this which led William James to quote with approval the
aphorism that one learns to skate in summer and swim in
winter.
DRILL _VERSUS_ ATTENTIVE REPETITION IN LEARNING. The rapidity
with which habits may be acquired and the permanency with
which they may be retained depend on other factors than
simply that of repetition. Mere mechanical drill is effective
in the acquisition of simple mechanical 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
the nervous system may be made, and may become habitual.
A habit is physiologically nothing but a certain set or direction
given to paths in the nervous system. These paths become
fixed, embedded, and ingrained only when nerve currents
pass over them time and time again.
[Footnote 1: See Ladd and Woodworth: _Physiological Psychology_, pp. 542-92.]
Mere repetition, on the other hand, will not suffice in the
acquisition of complex habits of action. The learning of
these requires a deliberate noting and appreciation of the
significant factors in the performance of an activity, and the
consciously chosen repetition of these in succeeding instances
until the habit is well fixed. One reason why animals cannot
be taught so wide a variety of complex habits as can the human
being is that they cannot keep their attention fixed on
successive repetitions, and that in learning they literally do
not know what they are doing. They cannot, as can humans,
break up the activity which they are in process of learning
into its 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 call the "capacity to learn" is evident in
marked degree where there is alert attention to the steps of
the process in successive repetitions. The truth in the assertion
that an intelligent man will shortly outclass the merely
automatically skillful in any occupation or profession requiring
training, lies not in any mysterious faculty, but in the
peculiarly valuable habit of attending with discriminating
interest to any process, and learning it thereby with vastly more
economical rapidity. Genius may be more than what one
writer described it, "a painstaking attention to detail"; but a
painstaking attention to the meaning and bearing of details it
most decidedly is.
LEARNING AFFECTED BY AGE, FATIGUE, AND HEALTH. There are
certain conditions not altogether within the control of the
individual which affect the rapidity with which habits are
acquired. One of the most important of these is fatigue.
Connections among the fibers that go to make up the nervous
system cannot be made with ease 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
or the memorizing of information, in which the process is
much the same, the rate of learning is much slower and the
degree of accuracy much less. The length of time through
which habits are retained when acquired during a state of
fatigue is also much less than under a more healthy and
resilient condition of the organism.
The point of fatigue varies among different individuals and
in consequence the conditions of habit-formation vary. But
some conditions remain constant. For instance, in experiments
with memory tests (memory being a form of habit in
the nervous system), material memorized in the morning
seems to be most rapidly acquired and most permanently
retained.
The age and health of the individual also are important
factors in the capacity to learn, or habit-formation.
Conditions during disease are similar to those obtaining during
fatigue, only 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 (nerve junctions) may offer high resistance
to the passage of a new stimulus, they will lend themselves
more and more readily to the passage of stimuli by which
they have already been traversed.
That the age of the individual should make a vast difference
in the capacity to acquire new habits and to modify old ones
is obvious from the physiology of habit already described.
When the brain and nervous system are both young, there are
few neural connections established, and the organism is plastic
to all stimuli. As the individual grows older, connections
once made tend to be repeated and to be, as it 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 stimulated, and the
more frequently it repeats them the more frequently it will
tend to. So that, as William James pointed out, by twenty-five
we are almost literally bundles of habits. When the
majority of acts of life have become routine and fixed, it is
almost impossible to acquire new ways of acting, since the
acquisition of new habits seriously interferes with the old, and
old habits physiologically stay put.
HABIT AS A TIME-SAVER. This fact, that habits can be
acquired most easily early in life, and that those early acquired
become so fixed that they are almost inescapable, is of supreme
importance to the individual and society. It is in one
sense a great advantage; it is an enormous saver of time. In
the famous words of James:[1]
The great thing, then, in all education, is to _make our nervous system
our ally instead of our enemy_. It is to fund and capitalize our
acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. _For this
we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many
useful actions as we can_, and guard against the growing into ways
that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we would guard
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 every
day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express
volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the
deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in
him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there
be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let
him begin this very hour to set the matter right.[1]
[Footnote 1: James: _Psychology_, vol. I, p. 122.]
The ideal of efficiency is the ideal of having the effective
thing habitually done with as little effort and difficulty as
possible. This in the case of human beings is, as James points
out, attained when good habits are early acquired and when
as large a proportion as possible of purely routine activity is
made effortless and below the level of consciousness. To do
as many things 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 undress, to find our way about our own house
or city, to spell and to pronounce correctly, it is clear how
little variety and diversity we should ever attain in our lives.
By the time we are twenty these fundamental habits are so
firmly fixed in us that, for better or for worse, they are ours
for life, and we are free to give our attention to other things.
Again in the words of James:
We all of us have a definite routine manner of performing certain
daily offices connected with the toilet, with the opening and shutting
of familiar cupboards, and the like. Our lower centers know the
order of these movements, and show their knowledge by their "surprise"
if the objects are altered so as 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 _performed_. So of the questions, Which valve of my
double door opens first? Which way does my door swing? etc. I
cannot _tell_ the answer; yet my _hand_ never makes a mistake. No
one can _describe_ the order in which he brushes his hair or teeth; yet
it is likely that the order is a pretty fixed one in all of us.[1]
[Footnote 1: James: _loc. cit._, vol. I, p. 115.]
HABIT AS A STABILIZER OF ACTION. Habit not only thus saves
time, but stabilizes action, and where the habits acquired are
effective ones, this is invaluable. Habits of prompt performance
of certain daily duties on the part of the individual are a
distinct benefit both to him and to others, as certain customary
efficient office practices, when they are really habitual,
immensely facilitate the operation of a business. On a larger
scale habit is "society's most precious conservative agent."
Individuals not only develop 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
the police, but it is even better protected by the fact that living
together peacefully and coöperatively is for most adults
habitual. In a positive sense the multifarious occupations
and professions of a great modern city are carried on from
day to day in all their accustomed detail, not because the
lawyers, the business men, the teachers, who practice them
continuously reason them out, nor from continuous instinctive
promptings. They are striking testimony to the influence
of habit. As a recent English writer puts it:
The population of London would be starved in a week if the flywheel
of habit were removed, if no signalman or clerk or policeman
ever did anything 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 conscious love, on that particular day, for his master
or for his work, or by his religion, or by a conviction of danger from
the criminal law.[1]
[Footnote 1: Graham Wallas: _Great Society_, p. 74.]
From etiquette and social distinction, from formalities of
conversation and correspondence, of greeting and farewell, of
condolence and congratulation to the most important "customs
of the country," with respect to marriage, property, and
the like, ways of acting are maintained by the mechanism of
habit rather than by arbitrary law or equally arbitrary
instinctive caprice.
DISSERVICEABLE HABITS IN THE INDIVIDUAL. Habitual behavior
which can become so completely controlling in the lives of so
many people is not without its dangers. The nervous system
is originally neutral, and can be involved on the side either of
good or evil. A human born with a plastic brain and nervous
system must acquire habits, but 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 in speech, in dress and in demeanor, are, once they
are acquired, permanent assets. But if these fail to be
developed, dishonesty or superficiality, slovenliness in dress and
speech, and surliness in manner, may and do become equally
habitual. The significance of this has been eloquently stated
at the close of James's famous discussion:
The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no
worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually
fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but
realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits,
they would give more heed to their conduct while 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 not count it, and a kind Heaven may not
count it, but it is being counted none the less. Down among his
nerve cells and fibres, the molecules are counting it, registering and
storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.
Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.[1]
[Footnote 1: James: _loc. cit._, vol. I, p. 127.]
SOCIAL INERTIA. If the acquisition of bad, that is, disserviceable
habits, is disastrous to the individual, it is in some respects
even worse in the group. The inertia of the nervous
system, the tendency to go on repeating connections that
have once been made is one of the strongest obstacles to
change, however desirable. It is not only that habits of
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 drunkards.
It is true in the case of social habits which have become
established in a large group. Any Utopian that dreams of revolutionizing
society overnight fails to take into account the
enormous control of habits over groups which have acquired
them, and the powerful emotions, amounting sometimes to
passion, which are aroused by their frustration.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE LEARNING HABIT. That habit is at
once the conserver and the petrifier of society has long been
recognized by social philosophers. There is one habit, however,
the acquisition of which is itself a preventive of the
complete domination of the individual or the group by hard and
fast routine. This is the habit of learning, which is necessary
to the acquisition 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 which are prized and rewarded by the group. A sedulous
cultivation on the part of the individual of the habit of
open-minded inquiry, of the habit of learning, and the
encouragement of this tendency by the group are the only antidotes
that can be provided against this marked physiological
tendency to fossilization and the frequent social tendencies in
the same direction.
Whether habits shall master us, or whether we shall be
their masters, depends also on the method by which they
were acquired. If they were learned merely through mechanical
drill, they will be fixed and rigid. If they were learned
deliberately to meet new situations, they will not be retained
when the conditions they were acquired to meet are utterly
changed.
THE SPECIFICITY OF HABITS. One important consideration,
finally, that must be brought to consideration is that habits
are, like instincts, specific. They are not general "open sesames"
which, learned in one situation, will apply with indiscriminate
miraculousness to a variety of others. Just as an
instinct is a definite response to a definite stimulus, so is a
habit. The chief and almost only observable difference is
that the former is unlearned, while the latter is learned or
acquired.
But while habits are specific, they are within limits transferable.
Such is the case when a situation which calls out a
certain habitual response is paralleled in significant points by
another. Thus the situation,
one's-room-at-home-cluttered-up-with-a-miscellany-of-books-papers-tennis-apparatus-and-clothing,
has sufficiently similar significant points to the situation,
one's-office-littered-with-documents-old-letters-manuscripts-blueprints-and-proofs,
to call forth, 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 works hard at his chemistry will work equally hard at his
English, or that one who is careful about his manners and
pronunciation in school will display the slightest heed to them
among his companions on the ball-field. One of the most
cogent arguments against the stereotyped teaching of Latin
and Greek has been the serious doubt psychologists have held
as to whether four years' training in Latin syntax will develop
in the student general mental habits which will be applicable
or useful outside the Latin classroom.
The older "faculty" psychologists presumed that different
subjects trained various so-called "faculties" of "memory,"
"imagination," and "intellect." It has now become clear on
experimental evidence that in education we are training no
isolated faculties, but are training the individual to certain
specific habits. The more widely applicable the habits are,
obviously the more valuable or dangerous will they be in the
conduct of life. But when habits do become general, such as
a habit of promptness, honesty, and regularity, not in one
situation but "in general," it is because they are something
more than habits in the strict physiological sense. 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 useful in this new
situation despite the slightly changed accompanying circumstances.
The man who can drive an automobile with reflective
appreciation of the processes involved, who knows, as
we say, what he is doing, will not long be baffled by a car
with a slightly different arrangement of levers and steering-gear,
nor be completely frustrated when the car for some
reason fails to move. As happened in many notable instances
during the World War, trained executives were not long at a
loss when they shifted from the management of a steel plant
to a shipyard, or from large-scale mining operations in Montana
to large-scale relief work in Belgium.
THE CONSCIOUS TRANSFERENCE OF HABITS. When habits are
consciously acquired, they may be consciously transferred
with modifications to situations slightly different from those
in which they were first learned. Merely mechanical habits
are a hindrance in any save the most mechanical work. An
alert and conscious method of learning, 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 certain grooves, to respond like an animal trained to
certain tricks. It means, moreover, a loss of richness in
experience. When a profession becomes routinated it becomes
meaningless; a mere making of the wheels go round.
The spirit of alert and conscious inquiry must be maintained
if life is not to become a mere repeated monotony.
An alert and conscious adjustment of habits to a changing
environment constitutes intelligence. The technique of this
adjustment is the technique of thinking or of reflective
behavior, which we shall examine in more detail in the following
chapter.
EMOTION. All human action, whether on the plane of
instinct, habit, or reflection, is, to a lesser or greater degree,
accompanied by emotion. While there is considerable controversy
among psychologists as to the precise nature of emotion,
and the precise conditions of its causation, its general
features and significance are fairly clear. Emotion may be
most generally defined as an awareness or consciousness on
the part of the individual of his experiences, both those in
which he is the actor and 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 outward bodily manifestations
and certain inner organic disturbances. Fear, rage,
pity, and the like are not unimpassioned judgments, but
highly charged physical changes. So close, indeed, is the
connection between specific bodily conditions and the subjective
or inner consciousness that we call emotion, that James and
Lange simultaneously came to the conclusion that emotions
are nothing more nor less than the blending of the complex
organic changes that occur in any given emotional state.
Thus James:
What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither
of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling
lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral
stirrings, were present, it is impossible for me to think. Can
anyone fancy the state of rage, and picture no ebullition in the chest,
no flushing of the face, no dilation 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
dispassionate judicial sentence, confined entirely to the intellectual realm,
to the effect that a certain person or persons merit chastisement for
their sins. In like manner of grief; what would it be without its
tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breast-bone?
A feelingless cognition that certain circumstances are deplorable, and
nothing more.[1]
[Footnote 1: James: _Psychology_, vol. II, p. 452.]
Indeed, so completely did James think the emotions were
explicable as the inner feeling of the complex organic sensations
which 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 strike, afraid because we tremble; we do not cry,
strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as
the case may be."
Whether or not emotions are completely to be explained
as the inner or subjective aspect of the complex of organic
disturbances which accompany fear, rage, and the like, and
which are caused immediately by the perception of the appropriate
objects of these emotions, it is certainly true that
emotional awareness and bodily disturbances are very closely
connected.[1]
[Footnote 1: Recent experiments by Dr. Cannon at Harvard have shown the specific
bodily disturbances which accompany anger, fear, etc. In particular, Dr.
Cannon, and others, have noted that in the emotional conditions of fear and
anger the glands, located near the kidneys, discharge a fluid into the blood
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 for the
activities connected with the emotion, whether flight in the case of fear,
attack as in the case of anger. This has led Professor Woodworth to define
emotion as, at least in part, "the way the body feels when it is prepared for a
certain reaction." See the latter's _Dynamic Psychology_, pp. 51-59.]
Various attempts have been made to classify the emotions
which are, in ordinary experience, infinitely subtle and complex.
The subtlety and variety of emotion James explains
as the result of the subtle and imperceptible differences in the
complex of sensations which occur in any given situation. In
general, it has been recognized that the emotions are very
closely connected 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 is the instinctive mechanism for recognizing
objects of danger, the impulsive aspect is the tendency
toward flight, and the affective aspect is the inner feeling or
awareness of fear. Thus, for McDougall, the tender emotion
is the emotional aspect of the instinct of pity, anger of the
instinct of pugnacity, which is, as an impulse, the tendency
to strike and destroy.
As a matter of fact, as McDougall himself admits, emotions
are seldom experienced in unmixed forms, and it is very
difficult to reduce the infinite variety of emotional experiences
to any primary forms. One may well agree with James that
"subdivisions [in the psychological demarcation of the emotions]
are to a great extent either fictitious or unimportant,
and ... pretenses to accuracy, a sham." In general, one
may say that emotions are closely connected with the native
tendencies of human beings and are aroused 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 are unpleasantly toned which accompany their frustration
or conflict. The depth and intensity of the emotional
disturbance seem to depend on the degree and extent to which
strong instinctive or habitual impulses have become involved.
For as habits of action may be acquired, so also may emotions
become associated habitually with them. The emotional
disturbances connected with the fulfillment, frustration, and
conflict of habits may be just as intense as those connected
with similar phenomena in the case of instincts.
In one sense these emotional disturbances impede action,
certainly action on the reflective level. It is the capacity
and function of reflection to solve and adjust precisely those
conflicts of competing impulses during which emotional disturbances
occur. But the reflective process is confused and
distorted in conflicts of native or habitual desires 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. Stimuli become
loaded with emotional associations. They are glaring and
conspicuous on the basis of their emotional urgency rather
than on the ground of their logical significance. The paralysis
or complete disorganization of action which occurs in
extreme cases of hysteria takes place to some extent in all less
extreme instances of emotional disturbances.
Emotions, on the other hand, serve to sustain, and, in their
less violent form, to facilitate action. It has already been
noted that the organic disturbances which are so conspicuous
a feature of emotion are extremely important in preparing the
body for the overt actions in which these emotions always
tend to issue. And it is unquestionable that emotions,
though in more or less obscure ways, call up reserves of energy
in the service of the activity in connection with which the
emotion has been aroused. While very violent emotions, as
in the case of extreme anger or fear or pity, confuse,
disorganize, and even paralyze action, in more moderate form
they rather 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 removed. The soldier does not fight persistently
and well wholly, or often even in part, because he has
thought out the situation and found the cause of his country
to be just. He is stirred and sustained by the energies which
the emotional complex called "patriotism" has roused and
concentrated toward action. A scientist performing long and
difficult researches, a father sacrificing rest and comfort that
his children may be well provided for, a boy working to pay
his way through college, are all persisting in courses of action,
because of the driving power which the emotions, more
or less mixed, of curiosity, or tenderness, or self-assertion
have released.
But just as the original nature with which man is born is
modifiable, so are his emotional reactions. Each individual's
emotional reactions are peculiar and specific, because of the
particular contacts to which they have been exposed, and the
organization of instincts and habits which have come to be
their more or less fixed character. Any emotional experience
consists of an intermingling 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 very
different objects, among different men and different groups.
In the sixteenth century pious persons could watch heretics
being burned in oil with a sense of deep religious exaltation.
Certain Fijian tribes slaughter their aged parents with the
most tender filial devotion. In certain savage communities,
to eat in public arouses on the part of the individual a sense
of acute shame.
Since those emotions are, on the whole, pleasantly toned
which accompany the fulfillment of instinctive and habitual
impulses, and those unpleasantly toned which accompany
their frustration, it becomes, as Aristotle pointed out, of the
most "serious importance" early to habituate men to the
performance of socially useful actions. If good or useful
actions are early 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, they will only do it consistently if the opposite
arouses in them more or less abhorrence. People learn to
modify their actions on the basis of the pleasure or pain they
find in their performance, and the pleasure or pain they will
experience depends on the actions to which they are habituated
and the emotions which have come to be their characteristic
accompaniments.