William McDougall

Paper Summary:

This paper reviews and critiques the theories of William McDougall, a 19th century British experimental psychologist and theorist who formulated the first theory of human instinctual behavior. The paper explains that McDougall believed that behavior patters are unlearned, uniform in expression and universal in a species. In order to better understand McDougall's instinct theory and its impact on the school of psychological thought, this paper reviews and summarizes the relevant research literature. The paper concludes that McDougall's contribution to the growing body of psychological knowledge was profound, and many of his early observations have subsequently been reaffirmed.

Outline:
Introduction
Review and Discussion
Conclusion

From the Paper:

"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."

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