By 2000, instinct had all but vanished from psychology textbooks
Konrad Lorenz once had a gosling imprint on his boots, and it trailed whoever wore them. The bird learned who its mother was, yet following her was pure instinct. Psychologists argued over the word for a century, and by 2000 just one of 12 bestselling textbooks still mentioned it.
An instinct is an inborn leaning toward a complex behaviour, carried out without prior learning. Its simplest form is the fixed action pattern, a short, unvarying sequence set off by a clear trigger. Newly hatched sea turtles head for the ocean, newborn marsupials crawl into the pouch, and courtship, fighting and nest-building often follow innate scripts. Instincts differ from reflexes such as the pupil shrinking in bright light or the knee jerk, which are simple responses to one stimulus. Even so, experience can polish an instinct, and people can sometimes notice a pattern starting and halt it.
The entomologist Jean Henri Fabre, who lived from 1823 to 1915, saw instincts as fixed chains of unconscious actions. When he interrupted hunting wasps, only one species changed tactics, and he concluded most animals cannot reason. Fabre also rejected evolution. Wilhelm Wundt, who opened the first psychology laboratory at Leipzig in 1879, took the opposite line, studying babies' grimaces at sweet, sour and bitter tastes and arguing that natural selection gradually wired useful responses into the nervous system.
Freud cast instincts as biological drives split between Eros, aimed at survival and pleasure, and Thanatos, bound up with aggression. William McDougall linked each instinct to a specific emotion, but by 1932 he suggested reserving the word for animals and calling flexible human tendencies propensities. The behaviourist John B. Watson held in 1924 that most human conduct is learned, and in the 1950s Abraham Maslow argued humans have no true instincts, since anything we can override is really a drive.
Interest revived through Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, who separated innate from learned behaviour and identified sensitive periods like the window when a bird fixes on its mother. A 1960 conference chaired by Frank Beach narrowed the term's use, and the only textbook reference surviving in 2000 concerned Freud's id. In 1972 Richard Herrnstein pointed out surprising parallels between McDougall's instinct theory and Skinner's reinforcement model, nature and nurture in mirror image.
Source: Instinct
