Psychology Part 9

signal), persisting for a time, and predisposing the individual to make the specified reaction whenever a suitable stimulus for it arrives. The preparation may or may not be conscious. It might be named "orientation" or "steer", with the meaning that {76} the individual is headed or directed towards a certain end-result. It is like so setting the rudder of a sailboat that, when a puff of wind arrives, the boat will respond by turning to the one side.

The runner on the mark, "set" for a quick start, is a perfect picture of preparedness. Here the onlookers can see the preparation, since the ready signal has aroused visible muscular response in the shape of a crouching position. It is not simple crouching, but "crouching to spring." But if the onlookers imagine themselves to be seeing the whole preparation--if they suppose the preparation to be simply an affair of the muscles--they overlook the established fact that the muscles are held in action by the nerve centers, and would relax instantly if the nerve centers should stop acting. The preparation is neural more than muscular. The neural apparatus is set to respond to the pistol shot by strong discharge into the leg muscles.

What the animal psychologists have called the _delayed reaction_ is a very instructive example of preparation. An animal is placed before a row of three food boxes, all looking just alike, two of them, however, being locked while the third is unlocked. Sometimes one is unlocked and sometimes another, and the one which at any time is unlocked is designated by an electric bulb lighted above the door. The animal is first trained to go to whichever box shows the light; he always gets food from the lighted box. When he has thoroughly learned to respond in this way, the "delayed reaction" experiment begins. Now the animal is held while the light is burning, and only released a certain time after the light is out, and the question is whether, after this delay, he will still follow the signal and go straight to the right door. It is found that he will do so, provided the delay is not too long--how long depends on the animal. With rats the delay cannot exceed 5 seconds, with cats it can reach 18 {77} seconds, with dogs 1 to 3 minutes, with children (in a similar test) it increased from 20 seconds at the age of fifteen months to 50 seconds at two and a half years, and to 20 minutes or more at the age of five years.

Rats and cats, in this experiment, need to keep their heads or bodies turned towards the designated box during the interval between the signal and the release; or else lose their orientation. Some dogs, however, and children generally, can shift their position and still, through some inner orientation, react correctly when released. The point of the experiment is that the light signal puts the animal or child into a state tending towards a certain result, and that, when that result is not immediately attainable, the state persists for a time and produces results a little later.

Preparatory Reactions

In the delayed reaction, the inner orientation does little during the interval before the final reaction, except to maintain a readiness for making that reaction; but often "preparatory reactions" occur before the final reaction can take place. Suppose you whistle for your dog when he is some distance off and out of sight. You give one loud whistle and wait. Presently the dog swings around the corner and dashes up to you. Now, what kept the dog running towards you after your whistle had ceased and before he caught sight of you? Evidently he was directed towards the end-result of reaching you, and this directing tendency governed his movements during the process. He made many preparatory reactions on the way to his final reaction of jumping up on you; and these preparatory reactions were, of course, responses to the particular trees he had to dodge, and the ditches he had to jump; but they were at the same time governed by the inner state set up in him by your {78 } whistle. This inner state favored certain reactions and excluded others that would have occurred if the dog had not been in a hurry. He pa.s.sed another dog on the way without so much as saying, "How d'ye do?" And he responded to a fence by leaping over it, instead of trotting around through the gate. That is to say, the inner state set up in him by your whistle _facilitated_ reactions that were preparatory to the final reaction, and _inhibited_ reactions that were not in that line.

A hunting dog following the trail furnishes another good example of a directive tendency. Give a bloodhound the scent of a particular man and he will follow that scent persistently, not turning aside to respond to stimuli that would otherwise influence him, nor even to follow the scent of another man. Evidently an inner neural adjustment has been set up in him predisposing him to respond to a certain stimulus and not to others.

The homing of the carrier pigeon is a good instance of activity directed in part by an inner adjustment, since, when released at a distance from home, he is evidently "set" to get back home, and often persists and reaches home after a very long flight. Or, take the parallel case of the terns, birds which nest on a little island not far from Key West. Of ten birds taken from their nests and transported on shipboard out into the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and released 500 miles from home, eight reappeared at their nests after intervals varying from four to eight days. How they found their way over the open sea remains a mystery, but one thing is clear: they persisted in a certain line of activity until a certain end-result was reached, on which this line of activity ceased.

One characteristic of tendencies that has not previously been mentioned comes out in this example. When a tendency has been aroused, the animal (or man) is tense and {79} restless till the goal has been reached, and then quiets down. The animal may or may not be clearly conscious of the goal, but he is restless till the goal has been attained, and his restlessness then ceases. In terms of behavior, what we see is a series of actions which continues till a certain result has been reached and then gives way to rest. Introspectively, what we feel (apart from any clear mental picture of the goal) is a restlessness and tenseness during a series of acts, giving way to relief and satisfaction when a certain result has been reached.

A hungry or thirsty animal is restless; he _seeks_ food or drink, which means that he is making a series of preparatory reactions, which continues till food or drink has been found, and terminates in the end-reaction of eating or drinking.

What the Preparatory Reactions Accomplish

The behavior of a hungry or thirsty individual is worth some further attention--for it is the business of psychology to interest itself in the most commonplace happenings, to wonder about things that usually pa.s.s for matters of course, and, if not to find "sermons in stones", to derive high instruction from very lowly forms of animal behavior.

Now, what is hunger? Fundamentally an organic state; next, a sensation produced by this organic state acting on the internal sensory nerves, and through them arousing in the nerve centers an adjustment or tendency towards a certain end-reaction, namely, eating. Now, I ask you, if hunger is a stimulus to the eating movements, why does not the hungry individual eat at once? Why, at least, does he not go through the motions of eating? You say, because he has nothing to eat. But he could still make the movements; there is no physical impossibility in his making chewing and swallowing movements without the presence of food. {80} Speaking rationally, you perhaps say that he does not make these movements because he sees they would be of no use without food to chew; but this explanation would scarcely apply to the lower sorts of animal, and besides, you do not have to check your jaws by any such rational considerations. They simply do not start to chew except when food is in the mouth. Well, then, you say, chewing is a response to the presence of food in the mouth; and taking food into the mouth is a response to the stimulus of actually present food. The response does not occur unless the stimulus is present; that is simple.

Not quite so simple, either. Unless one is hungry, the presence of food does not arouse the feeding reaction; and even food actually present in the mouth will be spewed out instead of chewed and swallowed, if one is already satiated. Try to get a baby to take more from his bottle than he wants! Eating only occurs when one is _both_ hungry and in the presence of food. Two conditions must be met: the internal state of hunger and the external stimulus of food; then, and then only, will the eating reaction take place.

Hunger, though a tendency to eat, does not arouse the eating movements while the stimulus of present food is lacking; but, for all that, hunger does arouse immediate action. It typically arouses the preparatory reactions of seeking food. Any such reaction is at the same time a response to some actually present stimulus. Just as the dog coming at your whistle was responding every instant of his progress to some particular object--leaping fences, dodging trees--so the dog aroused to action by the pangs of hunger begins at once to respond to present objects. He does not start to eat them, because they are not the sort of stimuli that produce this response, but he responds by dodging them or finding his way by them in his quest for food. The responses that the hungry dog makes to other objects than {81} food are preparatory reactions, and these, if successful, put the dog in the presence of food. That is to say, the _preparatory reactions provide the stimulus that is necessary to arouse the end-reaction_. They bring the individual to the stimulus, or the stimulus to the individual.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 23.--A stimulus arouses the tendency towards the end-reaction, R, but (as indicated by the dotted line), T is not by itself sufficient to arouse R; but T can and does arouse P, a preparatory reaction, and P (or some external result directly produced by P), cooperating with T, gives rise to R.]

What we can say about the modus operandi of hunger, then, amounts to this: Hunger is an inner state and adjustment predisposing the individual to make eating movements in response to the stimulus of present food; in the absence of food, hunger predisposes to such other responses to various stimuli as will bring the food stimulus into play, and thus complete the conditions necessary for the eating reaction. In general, _an aroused reaction-tendency predisposes the individual to make a certain end-reaction when the proper stimulus for that reaction is present; otherwise, it predisposes him to respond to other stimuli, which are present, by preparatory reactions that eventually bring to bear on the individual the stimulus required to arouse the end-reaction_.

Let us apply our formula to one more simple case. While reading in the late afternoon, I find the daylight growing dim, rise and turn on the electric light. The stimulus that sets this series of acts going is the dim light; the first, inner response is a _need_ for light. This need tends, by force of habit, to make me turn the b.u.t.ton, but it does not make me execute this movement in the air. I only make this movement when the b.u.t.ton is in reaching distance. My first {82} reaction, rising from my chair, is preparatory and brings the b.u.t.ton close enough to act as a stimulus for the hand reaction. The b.u.t.ton within reach is not by itself sufficient to arouse the turning reaction, nor is the need for light alone sufficient. The two conditions must be present together, and the preparatory reaction is such that, given the need, the other condition will be met and the reaction then aroused.

What a Tendency Is, in Terms of Nerve Action

Very little need be added to our neural conception of a reaction in order to get a satisfactory conception of a tendency to reaction.

Princ.i.p.ally, we must add this fact, that a nerve center aroused to activity does not always discharge instantly and completely into the muscles, or into some other center, and come to rest itself. It does so, usually, in the case of a reflex, and in other momentary reactions; as when A makes you think of B, and B at once of C, and so on, each thought occupying you but a moment. But a tendency means the arousing of a nerve center under conditions which do not allow that center to discharge at once. The center remains in a condition of tension; energy is dammed up there, unable to find an outlet.

We have already seen what the conditions are that cause this damming up of energy. The center that is aroused tends to arouse in turn some lower motor center, but by itself does not have complete control over that lower center, since the lower center also requires a certain external stimulus in order to arouse it to the discharging point.

Until the proper external stimulus arrives to complete the arousal of the lower center, the higher center cannot discharge its energy.

When there is an "organic state" present, such as hunger or thirst, this may act as a persistent stimulus to the sensory nerves and through them to the higher center in {83} question; and then we can readily understand how it is that the center remains active until the organic state is relieved. But where there is no such persistent organic stimulus, as there can scarcely be in the case of the bloodhound or of the man hurrying to a train or seeking in the crowd for a friend, there we have to suppose that a center, once aroused to activity and prevented from complete discharge, remains active by virtue of energy dammed up in itself. There is pretty good physiological evidence that this sort of thing is a fundamental fact; for there are certain rhythmical reflexes, like scratching or stepping, that, when started going by a momentary sensory stimulus, keep it up for a time after the stimulus has ceased. There seems to be no doubt that a nerve center, once aroused, may stay aroused for a time.

The "dammed-up energy" here is not to be confused with the "stored energy" spoken of under the head of reactions. We said, in that connection, that a stimulus released energy stored in the organism.

That, however, was _potential_ energy, dormant within the organism till aroused; but what we have here in mind is active or _kinetic_ energy. Stored energy is like that of coal in the bin; dammed-up energy is like that of steam in the boiler.

Dammed-up energy in the nerve centers accounts for the persistence of a tendency to reaction after the stimulus has ceased. It accounts for the "delayed reaction" and similar cases. But how shall we account for preparatory reactions? We have a nerve center in an active state, tending to discharge into a certain lower motor center, but unable to do so because a peripheral stimulus is necessary, in addition, in order to arouse this lower center. Then we find the higher center discharging into _other_ lower centers, and so giving rise to preparatory reactions. More precisely, what we find is that the higher center facilitates the response {84} of certain lower centers to their proper peripheral stimuli, while inhibiting the response of other lower centers to their appropriate stimuli. This is the same sort of thing that we observe in all control exerted by a higher center over a lower. It means that the higher center, besides its main line of connection with the lower center that will give the end-reaction, has minor lines of connection with certain other lower centers; some of these centers it facilitates and others it inhibits. These connections between the main and the subordinate centers may have been established by inborn nature, or by previous training, as will be explained in later chapters.

The action of the main center on the subordinate centers concerned in executing preparatory reactions does not relieve the tension in the main center. The dammed-up energy stays there till the proper stimulus is procured for arousing the end-reaction, and then escapes through its main channel of discharge, and the main center then finally comes to rest.

It may fairly be urged that no violence has been done to the general conception of a reaction by these additions, and also that with the additions the notion of a reaction has room for tendencies or inner adjustments. So that we conclude that stimulus-response psychology is adequate to the job, and will do justice to all forms of human behavior. It has a place for sensations, perceptions and thoughts, as we saw in the preceding chapter, and it has a place also for purposes, desires and motives generally.

Motives

In the present chapter, desirous of "keeping close to the ground", we have said little of distinctively human motives. That will come later.

In general, a motive is a tendency towards a certain end-result or end-reaction, a tendency which is itself aroused by some stimulus, and which {85} persists for a time because its end-reaction is not at once made. The end-reaction is not made at once because it can only be aroused by an appropriate stimulus, acting in conjunction with the motive. But the motive, persisting in its inner activity, facilitates reactions to certain stimuli and inhibits others. The reactions it facilitates are preparatory to the end-reaction, in that they provide the necessary conditions for that reaction to occur, which means that they bring to bear on the individual the necessary stimulus which can arouse the end-reaction. The restlessness that characterizes an individual driven by an inner motive gives way to rest and satisfaction when the end-result is reached.

Motives range from the primitive or primal, like hunger, to the very advanced, such as zeal for a cause. They range from the momentary, ill.u.s.trated by the need for more light in reading, to the great permanent forces of life, like _amour propre_ and _esprit de corps_.

But the permanent motives are not always active; they sleep and are awakened again by appropriate stimuli.

In everyday speech we are apt to use the words "motive" and "reason"

interchangeably, as in asking some one what his "motive", or what his "reason" is for doing so and so. A motive, however, is not necessarily a reason, nor a reason a motive. A reason is thought-out and conscious, which a motive need not be. On the other hand, a reason does not become a motive unless it takes hold of us and arouses a genuine tendency towards the planned result. You may prove to me, logically, the desirability of a course of action, but your reasons do not necessarily make me desire it. You can give a child excellent reasons for studying his lessons, but you have to stir some real motive of child life in order to get action. In the highest type of conduct, to be sure, motive and reason pull together, reason showing the way to the goal at which motive is aimed.

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EXERCISES

1. Complete the following outline of the chapter, by filling in main headings to fit the subordinate headings that are given below:

A. _________

(1) It keeps close to the facts.

(2) It has room for introspective as well as behavior study.

(3) It can be applied practically.

B. _________

(1) A stimulus is typically external, a purpose internal.

(2) A stimulus typically acts for a moment, a purpose persists for some time.

(3) A stimulus is not directed towards a result, a purpose is so directed.

C. _________

(1) Organic or physiological states that predispose towards certain forms of behavior.

(2) Inner adjustments towards certain results, without foresight of the results.