Instinct

Instinct, in zoology and psychology, the innate programming characteristic of a particular animal species that organizes complex patterns of behavior, enabling members of a species to respond appropriately to a wide range of situations in the natural world. Such behaviors are usually fairly involved patterns of responses to particular stimuli and are often characteristic patterns of feeding, mating, parenting, and expression of aggression. In each species these behavior patterns are developed and refined by the forces of natural selection in the process of evolution. Instinctive behaviors are vitally important in helping an animal adapt to its particular ecological environment.

Some scholars make careful distinctions between learned behaviors and instinctive behaviors. In recent years, however, researchers have generally agreed that such distinctions are not particularly useful and that learning and instinct interact to direct an animal’s behavior in appropriate ways (see Animal Behavior).

Instinctive behaviors can be extremely complex even in relatively simple animals, for example, the remarkable navigational and communication skills possessed by honey bees. A worker bee may fly a quarter of a mile or more from the hive in search of flowers that are a good source of food. The sun usually serves as an indicator of direction, but the bee can navigate accurately, even in a moderate breeze, when the sun is hidden by a cloud. When it finds a good source of food, the bee has the capacity to calculate a true course back to the hive, allowing for wind and for apparent movement of the sun. Upon returning to the hive, it communicates the location of the food through a “dance” that conveys information about distance and direction. Other bees use this information to go directly to the food. In this example, learning and genetically coded patterns of behavior each play an important role. Instincts permit an animal to show highly adaptive and often very complex behaviors without the necessity of learning those responses through trial and error.

The role that instinct plays in human behavior is not yet clear. Some researchers feel that human behaviors such as aggression and territoriality may have instinctive components. Others feel that such a conclusion is not warranted by the available data and that human behavior is qualitatively different from that of other animals. There is some danger of overgeneralizing to human behavior from animal research; however, many of the same forces that direct the behavior of other animals are likely to influence human behavior.

The term instinct can also be applied to several constructs developed by Sigmund Freud and other personality theorists (see Psychoanalysis). Freud theorized that there are instincts for life and for death, and that the sexual drive is essentially instinctive. This specific application of the term instinct is unrelated to the way in which the term is used by behavioral scientists.