instinct The concept of instinct is an attempt to explain why some kinds of behaviour develop consistently in a given species across a wide range of environments. Each species of animal exhibits some characteristic forms of behaviour that have this developmentally robust quality. Bees, for example, dance to indicate the location of pollinating flowers, and they do this with no formal instruction. When a type of behaviour develops in this way, without the need for learning or any other environmental input beyond the bare minimum for physical survival, it is usually attributed to a strong internal force that pushes development in certain directions rather than in others. It is to this idea of a strong internal force that the notion of instinct refers.
Though popular in the nineteenth century, the concept of instinct fell into disrepute during the early decades of the twentieth century. The rise of ethology in the 1940s led to a resurgence of interest in the concept. Led by Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, the ethologists argued that even learning — a paradigmatically non-instinctive kind of development — often required certain predispositions. The search-space of possible hypotheses was just too large to be explored successfully without the aid of some innate guide. The distinction between instinct and learning was not, therefore, an exclusive one: rather, many forms of learning required an instinctual support.
Though relatively uncontroversial for explaining animal behaviour, applying the notion of instinct to human behaviour has had a much more chequered history (see
sociobiology). Nineteenth-century thinkers such as Darwin and Freud were quite happy to explain some human behaviour in terms of instincts, but in the twentieth-century psychologists were much more reluctant to do so. This is because
psychology was dominated for much of the century by the view that the mind is a ‘blank slate’ upon which experience writes what it needs. It was not until cognitive scientists, such as Noam Chomsk, began, in the 1950s, to call attention to the problems with this view, that psychologists again began to take seriously the idea of innate constraints on learning.
Chomsky did for
language what the ethologists had done for learning in animals: he pointed out that learning a language would be impossible without some predispositions to learn certain things. The distinction between learning and instinct was once again shown to be more subtle than the way in which it was often presented. Language is a good example, because, although it has to be learned, the learning is guided by innate rules, unlike, say, learning to play chess. In Darwin's apt phrase, the ability of humans to learn language is ‘an instinctive tendency to acquire an art’. The psychologist Steven Pinker has made this point vividly in his book
The Language Instinct (1994).
The concept of instinct does not, therefore, entail an inflexible notion of development. On the contrary, it is quite compatible with the idea that developmental outcomes are contingent on environmental conditions, and with the idea that learning plays an important part in development. In contemporary cognitive science, developmental outcomes are seen as the result of a complex interplay of innate programs and environmental inputs. The innate programs do not take the form ‘Thou shalt’, but rather specify disjunctive rules such as ‘if … then …’. The environmental inputs determine whether the rules are applied or not. In this model of development, the disjunctive rules correspond to instincts.
Dylan Evans
Bibliography
Lehrman, D. S. (1953). Critique of Konrad Lorenz's theory of instinctive behaviour. Quarterly Review of Biology, 28(4), 337–63.
Tinbergen, N. (1951). The Study of Instinct. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
