Dictionary:

instinct

  (ĭn'stĭngkt')

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1. An inborn pattern of behavior that is characteristic of a species and is often a response to specific environmental stimuli: the spawning instinct in salmon; altruistic instincts in social animals.
2. A powerful motivation or impulse.
3. An innate capability or aptitude: an instinct for tact and diplomacy.

1. Deeply filled or imbued: words instinct with love.
2. Obsolete. Impelled from within.

[Middle English, from Latin īnstīnctus, impulse, from past participle of īnstinguere, to incite : in-, intensive pref.; see in–² + stinguere, to prick.]

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

noun

1. An innate capability: aptitude, aptness, bent, faculty, flair, genius, gift, head, knack, talent, turn. See ability/inability, approach/retreat.
2. The power to discern the true nature of a person or situation: insight, intuition, intuitiveness, penetration, sixth sense. See thoughts.

Definition: gut feeling, idea
Antonyms: knowledge, reason

For more information on instinct, visit Britannica.com.

(Latin, instinctus, impulse or urge) The term implies innately determined behaviour, inflexible to change in circumstance and outside the control of deliberation and reason. The view that animals accomplish even complex tasks by nature and not by reason was common to Aristotle and the Stoics, and the inflexibility of their routines was used in defence of this position as early as Avicenna. A continuity between animal and human reason was proposed by Hume, and followed by sensationalists such as the naturalist Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). The theory of evolution prompted various views of the emergence of stereotypical behaviour, and the idea that innate determinants of behaviour are fostered by specific environments is a guiding principle of ethology. In this sense it may be instinctive in human beings to be social, and for that matter to reason. See also animal thought.

A complex, inborn adaptive response; an unlearned, fixed pattern of reflexes. If the responses are learned, the behaviour pattern is called a habit.

The notion of instinct is usually linked to the field of ethology or the psychology of animal behavior. It corresponds to a specific program of action for a species that is genetically transmitted and theoretically independent of individual experience. Given a particular situation, this programming activates a specific set of neurophysiological and endocrine responses. Modern research in ethology tends to limit the exclusive role of heredity in the determination of instinct and focus instead on the role of epigenesis.

In Sigmund Freud's work, and thus in psychoanalysis, the notion of instinct must be discussed on the one hand in terms of its differentiation from the notion of the drive and on the other hand in its own, animal acceptation.

Instinct falls under the category of what is inherited, that is, within the history of a species. By contrast, the drive belongs to the subject's individual history. In fact, it is the fundamental vector of that history. In mental life, it is experienced through representatives, which in the course of psychical processes are differentiated into ideational representatives of objects and words, on the one hand, and representatives of affects on the other. Anchored in the somatic, the drive becomes psychical in its trajectory from its source to its aim. Among its characteristics, its capacity to trace a progressive course towards a real satisfaction or a regressive course towards a hallucinatory satisfaction offers the subject a flexibility of functioning that contrasts with the relative rigidity of instinct.

On several occasions, Freud hypothesized the existence in human beings of a collection of instincts analogous to those of animals. These instincts would form the kernel of the unconscious; and primal fantasies, as the inherited representative images of phylogenesis, would flow from them. For Freud, the instinct exists as a preliminary phase, before that of the drive, and during a process of psychical disturbance, the drive could revert to the level of instinct. Current studies of psychosomatic disorders emphasize just such a "regressive" return to instinct.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1915c). Instincts and their vicissitudes. SE, 14: 109-140.

——. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159-204.

——. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile neurosis. SE, 17: 1-122.

—CLAUDE SMADJA

Behavior that is not learned but passed between generations by heredity.

A complex of unlearned responses characteristic of a species.

• herd i. — the instinct or urge to be one of a group and to conform to its patterns of behavior.

Quotes:

"Instinct is untaught ability." - Alexander Bain

"The active part of man consists of powerful instincts, some of which are gentle and continuous; others violent and short; some baser, some nobler, and all necessary." - Francis W. Newman

"It is the rooted instinct in men to admire what is better and more beautiful than themselves." - James Russell Lowell

"A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Instinct is the nose of the mind." - Madame de Girardin

"What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life." - Henry David Thoreau

See more famous quotes about Instinct

Instinct is the inherent disposition of a living organism toward a particular behavior. Instincts are unlearned, inherited fixed action patterns of responses or reactions to certain kinds of stimuli. Innate emotions, which can be expressed in more flexible ways and learned patterns of responses, not instincts, form a basis for majority of responses to external stimuli in evolutionary higher species, while in case of highest evolved species both of them are overridden by actions based on cognitive processes with more or less intelligence and creativity or even trans-intellectual intuition.

Examples of instinctual fixed action patterns can be observed in the behavior of animals, which perform various activities (sometimes complex) that are not based upon prior experience and do not depend on emotion or learning, such as reproduction, and feeding among insects. Other examples include animal fighting, animal courtship behavior, internal escape functions, and building of nests.

Instinctual actions - in contrast to actions based on learning which is served by memory and which provides individually stored successful reactions built upon experience - have no learning curve, they are hard-wired and ready to use without learning, but do depend on maturational processes to appear.

Overview

Technically speaking, any event that initiates an instinctive behavior is termed a key stimulus (KS). Key stimuli in turn lead to innate releasing mechanisms (IRM), which in turn produce fixed action patterns (FAP). More than one key stimulus may be needed to trigger an FAP. Sensory receptor cells are critical in determining the type of FAP which is initiated. For instance, the reception of pheromones through nasal sensory receptor cells may trigger a sexual response, while the reception of a "frightening sound" through auditory sensory receptor cells may trigger a fight or flight response. The neural networks of these different sensory cells assist in integrating the signal from many receptors to determine the degree of the KS and therefore produce an appropriate degree of response. Several of these responses are determined by carefully regulated chemical messengers called hormones. The endocrine system, which is responsible for the production and transport of hormones throughout the body, is made up of many secretory glands that produce hormones and release them for transport to target organs. Specifically in vertebrates, neural control of this system is funneled through the hypothalamus to the anterior and posterior pituitary gland. Whether or not the behavioral response to a given key stimuli is either learned, genetic, or both is the center of study in the field of behavioural genetics. Researchers use techniques such as inbreeding and knockout studies to separate learning and environment from genetic determination of behavioral traits. And humans as a matter of speaking have no instincts past the early stages of infancy^{[citation needed]}. Instinct should not be confused with responses that an organism is born with such as breathing, hunger, sex drive etc. These are no different than sight, aural ability, tactility or taste perception^{[citation needed]}.

In a situation when two instincts contradict each other, an animal may resort to a displacement activity.

Evolution

Konrad Z. Lorenz being followed by his imprinted geese

Instinctive behavior can be demonstrated across much of the broad spectrum of animal life, down to bacteria that propel themselves toward beneficial substances, and away from repellent substances. According to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, a favorable trait, such as an instinct, will be selected for through competition and improved survival rate of life forms possessing the instinct. Thus, for evolutionary biology, instincts can be explained in terms of behaviors that favor survival.

A good example of an immediate instinct for certain types of bird is imprinting. This is the behaviour that causes geese to follow around the first moving object that they encounter, as it tends to be their mother. Much work was done on this concept by the psychologist Konrad Lorenz. Evolution however encourages multiple instincts, exampled by the recent case of birds in England flying east for the winter, the result being that because of global warming these birds are now surviving at very high rates, further encouraging this behavior.^{[citation needed]} They return home earlier after winter, get the best breeding grounds, encouraging more breeding by them than other birds, even further encouraging this instinct.^{[citation needed]}

The Baldwin Effect

In 1896, James Mark Baldwin offered up "a new factor in evolution" through which acquired characteristics could be indirectly inherited. This "new factor" was termed phenotypic plasticity: the ability of an organism to adjust to its environment during the course of its lifetime. An ability to learn is the most obvious example of phenotypic plasticity, though other examples are the ability to tan with exposure to the sun, to form a callus with exposure to abrasion, or to increase muscle strength with exercise. In addition, Baldwin pointed out that, among other things, the new factor could explain punctuated equilibria. Over time, this theory became known as the Baldwin effect.

The Baldwin effect functions in two steps. First, phenotypic plasticity allows an individual to adjust to a partially successful mutation, which might otherwise be utterly useless to the individual. If this mutation adds to inclusive fitness, it will succeed and proliferate in the population. Phenotypic plasticity is typically very costly for an individual; learning requires time and energy, and on occasion involves dangerous mistakes. Therefore there is a second step: provided enough time, evolution may find an inexorable mechanism to replace the plastic mechanism. Thus a behavior that was once learned (the first step) may in time become instinctive (the second step). At first glance, this looks identical to Lamarckian evolution, but there is no direct alteration of the genotype, based on the experience of the phenotype.

Definitions

Scientific definition

The term "instincts" has had a long and varied use in psychology. In the 1870's, W. Wundt established the first psychology laboratory. At that time, psychology was primarily a branch of philosophy, but behavior became increasingly examined within the framework of the scientific method. This method has come to dominate all branches of science. While use of the scientific method led to increasingly rigorous definition of terms, by the close of the 19th century most repeated behavior was considered instinctual. In a survey of the literature at that time, one researcher chronicled 4000 human instincts, meaning someone applied the label to any behavior that was repetitive. As research became more rigorous and terms better defined, instinct as an explanation for human behavior became less common. In a conference in 1960, chaired by Frank Beach, a pioneer in comparative psychology and attended by luminaries in the field, the term was restricted in its application. During the 60's and 70's, textbooks still contained some discussion of instincts in reference to human behavior. By the year 2000, a survey of the 12 best selling textbooks in Introductory Psychology revealed only one reference to instincts, and that was in regard to Freud's referral to the "id instincts."

Any repeated behavior can be called "instinctual." As can any behavior for which there is a strong innate component. However, to distinguish behavior beyond the control of the organism from behavior that has a repetitive component we can turn to the book Instinct (1961) stemming from the 1960 conference. A number of criteria were established which distinguishes instinctual from other kinds of behavior. To be considered instinctual a behavior must a) be automatic, b) be irresistible, c) occur at some point in development, d) be triggered by some event in the environment, e) occur in every member of the species, f) be unmodifiable, and g) govern behavior for which the organism needs no training (although the organism may profit from experience and to that degree the behavior is modifiable). The absence of one or more of these criteria indicates that the behavior is not fully instinctual.

If these criteria are used in a rigorous scientific manner, application of the term "instinct" cannot be used in reference to human behavior. When terms, such as mothering, territoriality, eating, mating, and so on, are used to denote human behavior they are seen to not meet the criteria listed above. In comparison to animal behavior such as hibernation, migration, nest building, mating and so on that are clearly instinctual, no human behavior meets the necessary criteria. In other words, under this definition, there are no human instincts.

In humans

Some sociobiologists and ethologists have attempted to comprehend human and animal social behavior in terms of instincts. Psychoanalysts have stated that instinct refers to human motivational forces (such as sex and aggression), sometimes represented as life instinct and death instinct. This use of the term motivational forces has mainly been replaced by the term instinctual drives.

Instincts in humans can also be seen in what are called instinctive reflexes. Reflexes, such as the Babinski Reflex (fanning of the toes when foot is stroked), are seen in babies and are indicative of stages of development. These reflexes can truly be considered instinctive because they are generally free of environmental influences or conditioning.

Additional human traits that have been looked at as instincts are: altruism, disgust, face perception, language acquisitions, "fight or flight" and "subjugate or be subjugated". Some experiments in human and primate societies have also come to the conclusion that a sense of fairness could be considered instinctual, with humans and apes willing to harm their own interests in protesting unfair treatment of self or others.^[1][2]

Other sociologists argue that humans have no instincts, defining them as a "complex pattern of behavior present in every specimen of a particular species, that is innate, and that cannot be overridden." Said sociologists argue that drives such as sex and hunger cannot be considered instincts, as they can be overridden. This definitory argument is present in many introductory sociology and biology textbooks,^[3] but is still hotly debated.

See also

• Maladaptivity
• Biological Imperative
• Organism
• Nature
• Psychological nativism

References

1. ^ Researchers wonder if fairness instinct has been bred into the human race (summary of a Philadelphia Inquirer article of 2000)
2. ^ Programme 4 - Natural Born Heroes - BBC, Wednesday 13 November 2002
3. ^ Sociology: An Introduction - Robertson, Ian; Worth Publishers, 1989

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - instinkt, intuition
adj. - instinktiv

Nederlands (Dutch)
instinct, gevoel voor, intuïtie

Français (French)
n. - (lit) instinct, intuition, (Psych) pulsion, (fig) combativité
adj. - instinctif

Deutsch (German)
n. - (Biol.) Instinkt, Neigung, intuitive Fähigkeit
adj. - erfüllt, belebt

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ένστικτο, ορμέμφυτο

Italiano (Italian)
impulso, istinto

Português (Portuguese)
n. - instinto (m)

Русский (Russian)
инстинкт

Español (Spanish)
n. - instinto, impulso, intuición
adj. - animado, movido, lleno, rebosante

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - instinkt

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
本能, 直觉, 充满的

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 本能, 直覺
adj. - 充滿的

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 본능, 천성, 직관
adj. - 차서 넘치는, 배어든

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 本能, 才能, 天性, 直感
adj. - 満ちた

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) موهبه, غريزة‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮אינסטינקט, דחף פנימי תת-הכרתי, אינטואיציה, יכולת לא-מודעת‬
adj. - ‮מלא חיים, יופי, כוח וכו'‬

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