Historic Misinterpretations

Modern science reaches conclusions based, to the greatest extent possible,
on evidence gathered and interpreted along lines suggested by theories.
Traditional instinct theory is especially weak in suggesting such lines; usually
it put early psychologists in the position of trying to support the idea
that instinct had caused a behavior by demonstrating that nothing else had
caused it. Rather than supporting one possibility, they were attempting to
deny dozens of others. Even worse, they were forcing thought into an
“either-or” pattern rather than allowing for the possibility that a behavior
may be based on inherited influences interacting with learned ones.
For example, to try to evaluate the possibility that people are instinctively
afraid of snakes, one could begin by finding a number of people afraid of
snakes, followed by an attempt to discount all the ways in which those individuals
might have learned their fear—that they had never been harmed by
a snake, never been startled, never been told that snakes are dangerous, and
so on. The task is all but impossible, almost guaranteeing that a researcher
will conclude that there are several ways that the fear could have been
learned, so there is no need for an instinct explanation. The fact that people
who fear snakes can learn not to fear them can be offered as further evidence
that they had learned their original fear—not a particularly compelling
argument.

When behaviorism became the predominant theoretical stance of psychology
in the 1920’s, the problems with instinct as an explanation of motivation
were “resolved” simply by sidestepping them. Instincts were discarded
as unscientific, and other concepts—such as needs, drives, and
motives—were substituted for them. Psychology’s dropping of the term “instinct”
from its jargon did not eliminate, either for lower animals or for people, the behaviors it had originally labeled. Dropping the termdid, however,
separate even further the popular views of instinct from the scientific ones.