Psychology

3S59

Psychology

that comes in learning separately the parts; the animal may learn to cease responding

of a long poem or speech is more than offset! or, when a strong stimulus acts asrain and

by the final difficulty of so welding the sepa- j asain. it may learn to avoid it completely bj

rately^ learned parts together as to give the a heightened reaction. At higher levels learn-

rnatenal as a whole the familiarity of the \ ine; is said to be associative. In this form of

several parts. Forgetting takes place rapidly

at first and then more and more slowly until

finally the change is so slow as to be dis-

cernible^ only over long periods of time. In

one typical experiment over half the material

was forgotten in the first twenty minutes and

one-fifth of it was remembered after a

month. Things that can not be recalled at all

can not, nevertheless, be said to be entirely

forgotten, for they can be relearned with a

saving over the initial effort. In this sense a

thing once thoroughly learned may be said

never to be entirely forgotten, for the span

of life is probably too short for the effort of

the learning to become inappreciable. The

childhood memories of the aged, of drowning

people, and those that occur in dreams, attest

this fact.

Behavior Psychology.—Opposed to the de-
finition of psychology as the science of im-
mediate experience is the view that psychol-
ogy is the science of behavior. Behaviorism
as a recognized field of scientific endeavor is
an outgrowth of animal psychology, and it
has achieved a following only since 1910.
Behaviorists, from the first, were interested
in the behavior per se—the animal's responses
to stimulation and its adjustment to situa-
tions within its environments. Thus, with-
out refuting the earlier points of view, be-
haviorism, an experimental or observational
biology, has supplanted them. The scientific
accord effected thereby has been offset, how-
ever, by a disagreement in terminology. In
addition to animal psychology, behaviorism
was strengthened from two other directions:
from psychopathology and from applied psy-
chology.

Animal Psychology.—Most of the investi-
gations of animal behavior have dealt either
with the capacity for sensory discrimination
of different animals or with their ability for
learning. The former studies show the funda-
mental capabilities of an animal for respond-
ing to various aspects of its environment; the

latter evaluate its capacity for modification
of behavior over against new environmental
situations. Learning is thus a measure of the
intelligence of the animal.

Learning, a modification of behavior as the
result of repetition of a situation, occurs at
all levels of the animal scale. When a weak
stimulus acts repeatedly on a simple animal,

learning a second stimulus, associated with
the one that initial!) sets on the reaction,
comes as a result of its repeated association
to touch off, by it-self, the reaction. The sa-
liva flows in the cat's mouth at the sound of
the dinner bell and the cat is said to be
conditioned to the sound of bell; the earth-
worm, that has been repeatedly given elec-
tric shocks when it crawlec^ on a piece of
sandpaper, now draws back, as soon as it
feels the sandpaper. The numerous experi-
mental studies in which animals learn to
open puzzle boxes or to find their way
through mazes are complicated forms of this
kind of learning that are susceptible to quan-
titative measurement.

Instincts are inherited forms of behavior.
All behavior must be either instinctive or
learned. Among the lower animals learning
plays but a small part and most behavior is
instinctive. In the higher forms learning is
increasingly important, but complicated in-
stincts also exist. Generally the two kinds of
behavior are intricately interwoven, as, for
example, in the sexual behavior of man. The
most complex forms of instinctive behavior,
with the smallest admixture of learned be-
havior, are to be found in the insects, es-
pecially in ants and bees.

Freudian Psychology.—The Freudian psy-
chology of human nature looks upon the be-
havior of an individual as the resultant of
many interacting trends called 'wishes.' It
recognizes that the conduct of a human being
is not singly motivated, but that a person
acts very frequently upon conflicting wishes.
If I meet someone whom I intensely dislike
I am beset by two opposing motives: I wish
to tell this man my opinion of him, and I
wish also to observe the polite conventions,
The wish that is stronger at the time wins.
If the wishes are nearly equal in strength, I
may start politely and end in anger, or I
may begin rudely and conclude with an
apology. If one wish is much stronger than
the other, it may suppress the other almost
entirely. Nevertheless the suppressed wish
generally has some effect on behavior. If I
am polite, my tongue may stumble and spoil
the suavity of my assurances. If I arn angry,
I may cloak my rudeness in the courteous
phraseology of sarcasm. Wishes are biological
trends of the organism for response and are