Psychology Part 18

By "contentment" we mean here a liking for the familiar, {157} which offsets to some extent the fascination of the novel. If you are perfectly contented, you are not inclined to go out exploring; and when you have had your fill of the new and strange, you like to get back to familiar surroundings, where you can rest in content. Just as playful behavior of all sorts decreases with increasing age, so the love for exploring decreases, and the elderly person clings to the familiar. But even children may insist in occupying their own particular chair, on eating from a particular plate, and on being sung to sleep always with the same old song. They are "little creatures of habit", not only in the sense that they readily form habits, but in the sense that they find satisfaction in familiar ways and things.

Here we see the germ of a "conservative" tendency in human nature, which balances, to a greater or less extent, and may decidedly overbalance, the "radical" tendency of exploration.

Laughter.

We certainly must not omit this from our list of instincts, for, though it does not appear till some time after birth, it has all the earmarks of an instinctive response. If it were a learned movement, it could be made at will, whereas, as a matter of fact, few people are able to produce a convincing laugh except when genuinely amused, which means when the instinctive tendency to laugh is aroused by some appropriate stimulus. The emotion that goes with laughing may be called mirth or amus.e.m.e.nt, and it is a strongly impulsive state of mind, the impulse being simply to laugh, with no further end in view.

The most difficult question about laughter is to tell in general psychological terms what is the stimulus that arouses it. We have several ingenious theories of humor, which purport to tell; but they are based on adult humor, and we have as yet no comprehensive genetic study of laughter, tracing it up from its beginnings in the child.

Laughing certainly belongs with the play instincts, and possibly the {158} stimulus is no more definite, at first, than that which arouses other playful activity. The baby seems to smile, at first, just from good spirits (euphoria). The stimuli that, a little later, arouse a burst of laughter have an element of what we may call "expected surprise" (as dropping a rattle and exploding with laughter when it bangs on the floor, and keeping this up time after time), and this element can still be detected in various forms of joke that are effective mirth-provokers in the adult. But why the child should laugh when tickled, at the same time trying to escape, is a poser. Many students of humor have subscribed to the theory that what makes us laugh is a sudden sense of our own superiority, thus attaching laughter to the self-a.s.sertive instinct, soon to be discussed. The laugh of victory, the laugh of defiance, the laugh of mockery, the sly or malicious laugh, support this theory, but can it be stretched to cover the laugh of good humor, the tickle laugh, or the baby's laugh in general? That seems very doubtful, and we must admit that we do not know the essential element in a laughter stimulus. One thing is fairly certain: that, while laughing is a native response, we learn what to laugh at, for the most part, just as we learn what to fear.

Fighting.

Hold the new-born infant's arms tightly against its sides, and you witness a very peculiar reaction: the body stiffens, the breath may be held till the face is "red with anger"; the child begins to cry and then to scream; the legs are moved up and down, and the arms, if they can be got free, make striking or slas.h.i.+ng movements. In somewhat older children, any sort of restraint or interference with free movement may give a similar picture, except that the motor response is more efficient, consisting in struggling, striking, kicking, and biting. It is not so much pain as interference that gives this reaction. You get it if you take away a toy the child is playing with, or if you forbid {159} the child to do something he is bent on doing.

In animals, the fighting response is made to restraint, to being attacked, or to being interfered with in the course of feeding, or mating, or in the instinctive care of the young. The mother lioness, or dog or cat or hen, is proverbially dangerous; any interference with the young leads to an attack by the mother. The human mother is no exception to this rule. In human adults, the tendency to fight is awakened by any interference with one's enterprises, by being insulted or got the better of or in any way set down in one's self-esteem.

In general, the stimulus to fighting is restraint or interference. Let any reaction-tendency be first aroused and then interfered with, and pugnacious behavior is the instinctive result.

The stimulus may be an inanimate object. You may see a child kick the door viciously when unable to open it; and grown-ups will sometimes tear, break or throw down angrily any article which they cannot make do as they wish. A bad workman quarrels with his tools. Undoubtedly, however, interference from other persons is the most effective stimulus.

The impulse so aroused is directed primarily towards getting rid of the restraint or interference, but also towards inflicting damage on the opponent; and with this impulse often goes the stirred-up organic and emotional state of anger. As brought out in the chapter on emotion, the organic state in anger is nearly or quite identical with that in fear of the active type; and the two states of the individual differ in respect to impulse rather than in respect to emotion. In fear, the impulse is to get away from the adversary, in anger to get at him. The emotion of anger is not always aroused in fighting, for sometimes there is a cold-blooded desire to damage the adversary.

The motor response, instinctively consisting of struggling, kicking, etc., as already described, becomes modified {160} by learning, and may take the form of scientific fistwork, or the form of angry talk, favored by adults. Or, the adversary may be damaged in his business, in his possessions, in his reputation, or in other indirect ways. The fighting spirit, the most stimulating of the emotions, gives energy to many human enterprises, good as well as bad. The successful reformer must needs be something of a fighter.

Thus far we have said nothing to justify our placing fighting here among the play instincts. Fighting against attack has survival value, fighting to protect the young has survival value, and, in general, the defensive sort of fighting has survival value, even though interference with play activity is just as apt to give this response as interference with more serious activities.

But there is more than this to the fighting instinct. The stimulus of interference is not always required. Consider dogs. The mere presence of another dog is often enough to start a sc.r.a.p, and a good fighting dog will sally forth in search of a fight, and return considerably mauled up, which does not improve his chances for survival, to say the least. Fighting of this aggressive sort is a luxury rather than a necessity. It has play value rather than survival value. There can be no manner of doubt that pugnacious individuals, dogs or men, get more solid satisfaction from a good fight than from any other amus.e.m.e.nt.

You see people "itching for a fight", and actually "trying to pick a quarrel", by provoking some other person who is strictly minding his own business and not interfering in the least. A battle of words usually starts in some such way, with no real reason, and a battle of words often develops into a battle of tooth and nail. Two women were brought before the judge for fighting, and the judge asked Mrs. Smith to tell how it started. "Well, it was this way, your honor. I met Mrs.

Brown carrying a basket on her arm, and I says {161} to her, 'What have ye got in that basket?' says I. 'Eggs', says she. 'No!' says I.

'Yes!' says she. 'Ye lie!' says I. 'Ye lie!' says she. And a 'Whoop!'

says I, and a 'Whoop!' says she; and that's the way it began, sir."

We have, then, to recognize aggressive fighting, in addition to defensive, and the aggressive sort certainly belongs among the play instincts.

The instincts that by acting counter to fighting hold it in check are several: laughter--a good laugh together allays hostility; or the parental instinct--a parent will stand treatment from his child that he would quickly resent from any one else; or self-a.s.sertion--"Too proud to fight!" But the most direct checks are afforded by inertia--"What's the use?"--and especially by fear and caution.

Fighting, both defensive and aggressive, has so close a connection with the more generalized self-a.s.sertive tendency that it might be included under that instinct. It may be regarded as a special form of self-a.s.sertive behavior, often complicated with the emotion of anger.

Self-a.s.sertion.

What then is this wonderful instinct of self-a.s.sertion, to which fighting and much of laughing are subordinate? "a.s.sertiveness", "masterfulness", and the "mastery impulse" are alternative names. Of all the native tendencies, this is the one most frequently aroused, since there is scarcely a moment of waking (or dreaming) life when it is not more or less in action. It is so much a matter of course that we do not notice it in ourselves, and often not in other persons; and even clever psychological observers have seemed entirely blind to it, and given it no place in their list of instincts.

Self-a.s.sertion, like fighting, has two forms, the defensive and the aggressive, and in either case it may be a response to either people or things. That gives four varieties of self-a.s.sertive behavior, which may be labeled as follows:

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1. Defensive reaction to things, overcoming obstruction, putting through what has been undertaken--the success motive.

2. Defensive reaction to persons, resisting domination by them--the independence motive.

3. Aggressive reaction to things--seeking for power.

4. Aggressive reaction to persons--seeking to dominate. We will take these up in order, beginning with the most elemental.

1. Overcoming obstruction. The stimulus here is much the same as that which induces fighting, but the response is simpler, without anger and without the impulse to do damage. Take hold of a baby's foot and move it this way or that, and you will find that the muscles of the leg are offering resistance to this extraneous movement. Obstruct a movement that the baby is making, and additional force is put into the movement to overcome the obstruction. An adult behaves in a similar way. Let him be pus.h.i.+ng a lawn-mower and encounter unexpected resistance from a stretch of tough gra.s.s; involuntarily he pushes harder and keeps on going--unless the obstruction is too great. Let him start to lift something that is heavier than he thinks; involuntarily he "strains"

at the weight, which means that a complex instinctive response occurs, involving a rigid setting of the chest with holding of the breath, and increased muscular effort. This instinctive reaction may be powerful enough to cause rupture.

Other than purely physical resistance is overcome by other self-a.s.sertive responses. When the child's toy will not do what he wants it to do, he does not give up at once, but tries again and puts more effort into his manipulation. When, in school, he is learning to write, and finds difficulty in producing the desired marks, he bends over the desk, twists his foot round the leg of his chair, screws up his face, {163} and in other ways reveals the great effort he is making. An adult, engaged in some piece of mental work, and encountering a distraction, such as the sound of the phonograph downstairs, may, of course, give up and listen to the music, but, if he is very intent on what he is doing, he puts more energy into his work and overcomes the distraction. When he encounters a baffling problem of any sort, he does not like to give it up, even if it is as unimportant as a conundrum, but cudgels his brains for the solution.

As a general proposition, and one of the most general propositions that psychology has to present, we may say that obstruction of any sort, encountered in carrying out any intention whatever, acts as a stimulus to the putting of additional energy into the action.

Anger is often aroused by obstruction, but anger does not develop a tenth as often, in the course of the day, as the plain overcoming reaction. The impulse is not to do damage, but to overcome the obstruction and do what we have set out to do. The emotional state might sometimes be called "determination", sometimes "zeal"; but the most elementary state belonging here is _effort_. The feeling of effort is, partly at least, a sensation complex resulting from stiffening the trunk and neck, knitting the brows, and other muscular strains that have practical utility in overcoming physical resistance and that are carried over to the overcoming of other sorts of resistance, where they have no obvious utility. Effort is a simpler emotion than anger, and occurs much more frequently.

2. Resisting domination by other persons. The child shows from an early age that he "has a will of his own", and "wants his own way" in opposition to the commands of other persons. There is an independent spirit in man that is native rather than acquired. The strength of this impulse differs, to be sure, in different individuals, some {164} children being more "contrary" and others more docile; but there probably never was a child without a good dose of disobedience in his make-up. In order to have a nice, obedient child, you have to "break"

him like a colt, though you can use reason as well as force in breaking a child. This process of "breaking" gives a habit of obedience to certain persons and along certain lines; but, outside of these limits, the child's independence is still there and ready to be awakened by any attempt to dominate him. In youth, with the sense of power that comes from attaining adult stature and muscular strength, the independent spirit is strengthened, with the result that you seldom see a youth, or an adult, who can take orders without at least some inner opposition and resentment.

3. Seeking for power over things. The self-a.s.sertive response to things is not limited to overcoming the obstructions offered by things to the accomplishment of our purposes; but we derive so much positive satisfaction from overcoming obstruction and mastering things that we go out in search of things to master. The child's manipulation has an element of masterfulness in it, for he not only likes to see things perform, but he likes to be the one that makes them perform. If he has a horn, he is not satisfied till he can sound it himself. The man with his automobile is in the same case. When it balks, he is stimulated to overcome it; but when it runs smoothly for him, he has a sense of mastery and power that is highly gratifying. Chopping down a big tree, or moving a big rock with a crowbar, affords the same kind of gratification; and so does cutting with a sharp knife, or shooting with a good bow or gun, or operating any tool or machine that increases one's power. Quite apart from the utility of the result accomplished, any big achievement is a source of satisfaction to the one who has done it, because it gives play to aggressive self-a.s.sertion. Many {165} great achievements are motived as much by the zest for achievement as by calculation of the advantages to be secured.

4. Seeking to dominate other people. The individual not simply resists domination by other people, but he seeks to dominate them himself.

Even the baby gives orders and demands obedience. Get a number of children together, and you will see more than one of them attempt to be the leader in their play. Some must necessarily be followers just now, but they will attempt to take the lead on another occasion. The "born leader" is perhaps one who has an exceptionally strong dose of masterfulness in his make-up, but he is, still more, one who has abilities, physical or mental, that give him the advantage in the universal struggle for leaders.h.i.+p.

Besides giving orders and taking the lead, there are other ways in which the child finds satisfaction for his instinct to dominate.

Showing off is one, bragging is one, doing all the talking is one; and, though in growing older and mixing with people the child becomes less naive in his manner of bragging and showing off, he continues even as an adult to reach the same end in more subtle ways. Going about to win applause or social recognition is a seeking for domination. Anything in which one can surpa.s.s another becomes a means of self-a.s.sertion. One may demonstrate his superiority in size, strength, beauty, skill, cleverness, virtue, good humor, cooperativeness, or even humility, and derive satisfaction from any such demonstration. The impulse to dominate a.s.sumes literally a thousand disguises, more rather than less.

_Rivalry_ and _emulation_, sometimes accorded a separate place in a list of the instincts, seem well enough provided for under the general head of self-a.s.sertion. They belong on the social side of a.s.sertive behavior, i.e., they are responses to other people and aim at the domination of other {166} people or against being dominated by them.

But the struggle for mastery, in rivalry, does not take the form of a direct personal encounter. Compare wrestling with a contest in throwing the hammer. In wrestling the mastery impulse finds a direct outlet in subduing the opponent, while in throwing the hammer each contestant tries to beat the other indirectly, by surpa.s.sing him in a certain performance. This you would call rivalry, but wrestling is scarcely rivalry, because the struggle for mastery is so direct.

Rivalry may seek to demonstrate superiority in some performance, or to win the favor of some person or social group, as in the case of rivals in love.

When we speak of "emulation", we have in mind the sort of behavior observed when one child says, "See what I can do!" and the other counters with, "Pooh! I can do that, too". Or, the first child wins applause by some performance, and we then notice the second child attempting the same. It is a case of resisting the indirect domination of another, by not letting him surpa.s.s us in performance or in social recognition.

_Thwarted self-a.s.sertion_ deserves special mention, as the basis for quite a number of queer emotional states. Shame, sulkiness, sullenness, peevishness, stubbornness, defiance, all go with wounded self-a.s.sertion under different conditions. Envy and jealousy belong here, too. Shyness and embarra.s.sment go with self-a.s.sertion that is doubtful of winning recognition. Opposed to all these are self-confidence, the cheerful state of mind of one who seeks to master some person or thing and fully expects to do so, and elation, the joyful state of one who has mastered.

Submission.

Is there any counter-tendency that limits self-a.s.sertion and holds it in check? Inertia and fear of course have this effect, but is there any specific instinct precisely opposite to self-a.s.sertion? A difficult question, not {167} yet to be answered with any a.s.surance; but there is some evidence of a native submissive or yielding tendency. Two forms may be distinguished: yielding to obstruction, and yielding to the domination of other persons.

Giving up, in the face of obstacles, is certainly common enough, but at first thought we should say that the individual was pa.s.sive in the matter, and simply forced to yield, as a stone is brought to a stop when it strikes a wall. In reality, giving up is not quite so pa.s.sive as this. There is no external force that can absolutely force us to give up, unless by clubbing us on the head or somehow putting our reactive mechanism out of commission. As long as our brain, nerves and muscles are able to act, no external force can absolutely compel us to cease struggling. Since, then, we do cease struggling before we are absolutely out of commission, our giving up is not a purely pa.s.sive affair, but our own act, a kind of reaction; and no doubt a native reaction. Further, when struggling against a stubborn obstacle, we sometimes feel an _impulse to give up_, and giving up brings relief.

The ability to give up is not a mere element of weakness in our nature, but is a valuable a.s.set in adapting ourselves to the environment. Adaptation is called for when the reaction first and most naturally made to a given situation does not meet the requirements of the situation. A too stubborn a.s.sertiveness means persistence in this unsuitable reaction, and no progress towards a successful issue; whereas giving up the first plan of attack, and trying something else instead, is the way towards success. Some people are too stubborn to be adaptable.

The docility of the child, who believes whatever is told him, has in it an element of submissiveness. There is submissiveness also in the receptive att.i.tude appropriate in observation and forming opinions--the att.i.tude of looking for the facts and accepting them as they are rather than seeking {168} to confirm one's own prepossessions. Bias is self-a.s.sertive, impartiality is submissive to some degree.

Yielding to the domination of other persons often occurs unwillingly, and then comes under the head of "thwarted self-a.s.sertion"; but the question is whether it ever occurs willingly and affords satisfaction to the individual who yields. We certainly yield with good grace to one who so far outcla.s.ses us that compet.i.tion with him is unthinkable.

An adult may arouse the submissive response in a child; and the social group, by virtue of its superior power and permanence, may arouse it in the individual adult. Hero wors.h.i.+p seems a good example of willing submission, agreeable to the one who submits. There are persons who are "lost" without a hero, without some one to lean on, some one to tell them what to do and even what to believe. This looks much like the "filial" or "infantile" instinct that was mentioned before as a possibility, and the dependent spirit in an adult possibly represents a continuation of the infantile att.i.tude into adult life.

Some behavior that looks submissive is really self-a.s.sertion in disguise. There are two forms of self-a.s.sertion that are specially likely to be taken for submission. Wounded or thwarted self-a.s.sertion is one. Shame and envy are like submission in this respect, that they involve an absence of self-confidence or self-a.s.surance, but they do not afford the satisfaction of willing submission, nor the relief of giving up the struggle against obstacles. So far from being genuinely submissive, they are states in which the self is making a violent and insistent demand for justification or social recognition. The other form of self-a.s.sertion which looks like submission occurs when a person identifies himself with a superior individual or with a social group. He will then boast of the prowess of his hero or of the prestige of his group, whether it be his family, his school, {169} his town or his country. Now, boasting cannot by any stretch of the imagination be regarded as a sign of submissiveness; it is a sign of a.s.sertiveness, and nothing else. What has happened here is that the individual, having identified himself with his hero or his group, finds in their greatness a means of a.s.serting himself as against other individuals who have not the good fortune to be so identified. This transferred self-a.s.sertion is a strong element in loyalty and public spirit, and plays a large and useful part in public affairs.

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