EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 



In recent years there has been a strong, not to say violent, 

 reaction against the older doctrines of instinct, especially 

 against that of McDougall. This reaction has taken the form 

 of gross reduction in the number of instincts posited, and 

 has even gone to the extreme of denying that any instincts, 

 either human or animal, exist at all. The denial of instincts 

 to animals need not, of course, be taken seriously. To 

 believe that all the myriad behavior patterns of animals 

 are learned rather than innate is obviously absurd. The 

 arguments against the existence of human instincts, how- 

 ever, are more plausible. If we follow the behaviorists 

 in defining instinct as a specific response to a given stimu- 

 lus, then it must be admitted that, with the exception of a 

 small number of reflex responses in the young infant, there 

 are no human instincts. Apart from these, the child's 

 behavior is soon modified to such an extent by learning 

 that few well-defined, persistent, and universal pattern 

 reactions are discoverable. 



According to the extreme behaviorists, practically all 

 of a child's reactions are the result of "conditioning," 

 in Pavlov's sense. Human beings seem to have instincts of 

 the sort designated by such terms as pugnacity, fear, sex, 

 maternal love, gregariousness, ascendency, submission, 

 etc., only because of the conditioning effects of social 

 environment. It is argued that, given appropriate environ- 

 mental stimuli, a child could be caused to grow up without 

 evincing any of the modes of behavior we are accus- 

 tomed to designate as instinctive. From this point of view, 

 the newborn infant, if not exactly a blank tablet, is at 

 most a wriggling mass of random activity plus a few 

 minor reflexes. On this almost formless foundation, it is 

 argued, any kind of structure can be raised by the simple 

 method of conditioning. Watson promises to take any 

 normal healthy infant and to mould him to any pattern 

 whatever — that of musician, artist, scientist, fool, hermit, 



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