An Introduction to Social Psychology

Chapter 8: Behavior Patterns: Their Nature and Development

Luther Lee Bernard

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BEHAVIOR THE CONCERN OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY— Social psychology is interested directly and primarily in human behavior in a social situation. It may concern itself with the inner mechanisms of responses to social stimuli, or it may focus its attention upon collective response to similar or identical or to mutual or supplementary stimuli. In the one case it leans towards psychology and in the other it rests upon sociology. Both interests are legitimate to the field of social psychology and in both cases its theme is human behavior.

THE UNITS OF BEHAVIOR— In either case it is concerned with the individual or neural patterns of response, and in the latter case it must consider the collective patterns of response. In this chapter we shall review the fundamental and general individual or neural (primarily neuro-muscular) patterns of response. In later chapters we will consider the more specific and derivative (primarily neuro-psychic) individual patterns of adjustment.

The units of behavior discussed in this chapter are random movements, reflexes, instincts, and tropisms. It has been the custom of some social psychologists to consider all more complex forms of behavior as constructed rather mechanically from preëxisting instinct patterns by a process of assembling. This atomic conception has been almost as strongly marked with reference to behavior as it has been in regard to matter. As a matter of fact the complex patterns of acquired behavior are integrated originally and in the main from much simpler and in part from less definite units of behavior than the instincts, namely, reflexes and random movements and impulses.

TROPISMS —  There are two views regarding the nature of tropisms.[1] Jennings and others consider the tropism to be "any


(108) reaction in which orientation of the body or of direction of movement with respect to the external factor occurs, whether by trial and error or otherwise." This definition, however, does not distinguish the tropism essentially from habit, or for that matter from any other type of behavior. It is decidedly too broad and to accept it would be essentially to make tropic behavior synonymous with all behavior whatever. Loeb's view of the tropism, that it is a forced movement or orientation of the organism dependent upon its general symmetry or the symmetry of the orientation mechanism, appears to be the better one. Tropisms are also generally regarded as determined by inherited structure and mechanisms. According to the symmetry view of Loeb, animals walk forward in approximately a straight line or the moths fly into the flame because of their bilateral symmetry and the bifocal nature of their vision. Asymmetrical animals also have tropic responses in some variation of the normal curve of behavior from that of the symmetrical ones, according to the kind and degree of variation from symmetry which they possess. The more or less spiral movement of the paramecium serves as an illustration of this variation.

Loeb has isolated a considerable number of types of tropic response. He speaks of heliotropism, or forced orientation due to light; galvanotropism, relating to the influence of an electric current; geotropism, which he thinks has some of its best illustrations in the growth behavior of plants; stereotropism ; chemotropism ; and thermotropism. Animals may of course be negatively as well as positively tropic and certain organic or physico-chemical changes within the organism may so modify the capacity of the organism to respond to stimuli that the negative form may be changed into the positive form of tropism, or vice versa.

Tropisms, according to Loeb, may occur in both plants and animals. Likewise thev are to be found in animals without nervous systems as well as in those possessing differentiated nervous systems. In the former case the tropism must function on the basis of excitation gradients developed in the nonneural protoplasm or on the basis of temporary axes established in the undifferentiated nervous processes. Where reflex


( 109) arcs and patterns have been established in a nervous system these necessarily serve in the process of forced orientation. Responses will of necessity occur on the basis of existing behavior patterns where stimuli can be effective through them. Doubtless most tropisms do occur on the basis of reflexes, and possibly of instincts, which serve as mechanisms of response.

TROPISMS AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR— Whether we conceive of tropisms as playing any considerable part in the behavior of the highest animals and man does not depend on whether we limit them to inherited behavior patterns, as is sometimes supposed. If we conceive of tropisms as including all forced or rigidly determined behavior arising out of the symmetry of the organism, and based on acquired as well as on inherited patterns and structure, tropistic response among human beings would normally cover as wide a range of behavior as among other animals. Man performs acquired as well as instinctive activities according to the general limitations of his structure quite the same as other animals. He moves straight forward towards an object, faces it, hears with both ears, sees with both eyes, and orients himself accordingly. The only difference is that he may learn fairly easily to vary such symmetrical responses when he finds it to his advantage to do so.

It is impossible to characterize tropisms strictly on the basis of the inheritance or non-inheritance of their constituent behavior mechanisms. The tropism is not a stimulus-response process in the same sense that reflexes and instincts are. It makes use of stimulus-response mechanisms, but the essential fact about it is that it is response in a certain direction, on the basis of whatever neural or other mechanisms are essential to it, determined by the symmetry or specific degrees of asymmetry of the organism and its sensory equipment. In the degree, therefore, to which this structural symmetry is hereditary the tropism will itself be determined by inheritance. But the behavior mechanisms which set the tropism into action may be either inherited or acquired. They are not a part of the tropism proper, but a means to its operation. The essential thing about the tropism is the forced orientation, not the content of the neural mechanism operating within it.

On this basis it seems justifiable to regard tropistic behavior


(110) as being equally as characteristic of man as of other animals. But the opportunity, and perhaps the necessity, for modifying tropistic responses by acquired behavior is doubtless much greater in the case of man, who is primarily a habit-forming animal. A child crawling toward the light or a man taking the shortest path between two points or approaching a fire in cold weather will serve to illustrate the persistence of tropistic response in the human type. On the other hand, man has doubtless lost the capacity to respond tropically to various chemical stimuli. And it is certain that in the present complex world he inhibits many tendencies to spontaneous and direct response to stimuli which in a less sophisticated world would not be inhibited. The tropism is merely the general form of the movement of the organism as a whole as determined by the animal's structure. The random movement, reflex, instinct, and habit are the specific mechanisms by which the animal responds tropically.

RANDOM MOVEMENTS AND IMPULSES may be regarded as raw materials for larger integrated behavior patterns. They are termed random because as movements and impulses they do not appear to be directed to any particular adjustment end. They seem to arise out of the excess general energy of the organism and its specific drives and to be determined structurally more or less by its metabolism on the one hand and by the general conformation of the various protoplasmic systems or organs and tissue structures on the other. For example, the structure of the somatic organization as a whole, the bones, joints, and the placement of muscles, as well as the existence of predetermined neural connections, set the limits of such random movements as kicking, turning the head, wriggling the toes, moving the arms and fingers, and even such vocal acts as crying, sighing, shrieking, and early monosyllabic expressions. These types of behavior are not entirely random, for they are clearly delimited by such structural characteristics of the organism as those mentioned. And yet they are in no sense truly adaptive, because they occur as an expression of the inner forces of metabolism rather than as an effort or predisposition to do some particular thing. Random behavior is,


( 111) of course, a characteristic of early childhood and does not normally appear to any considerable extent in older children or in adults. If it does occur in the latter it is a sign of temporary nervousness or of chronic neural disorganization and is distinctly pathological. Normally random behavior of all kinds, except possibly in part that of the higher cortical processes, should become integrated and transformed into definite and economical patterns as the individual reaches the age when one ordinarily makes an effective adjustment to his environments.

While random behavior is not purposive and is not functional or adaptive in any specific sense, it is not without a general function. It is the raw material out of which habits are to a large extent built. The specific methods by which random behavior is organized into adaptive and purposive habits or acquired behavior will be presented in the discussion of the processes and methods of imitation. But it is possible at the present time to indicate the general method by which the integration of random behavior into definite or purposive behavior occurs. The child in moving his head or hands or in kicking in a random way brings parts of his body into contact with objects and establishes useful stimulus-response processes which thereupon are repeated, at first with little or no awareness of their significance, but later frequently in a highly purposive way. In this manner the child learns to reach out for objects which have given it satisfaction and to appropriate them, or it acquires the definite coördinations of crawling and walking. In a similar way, it develops the random cry or shriek and other random articulations into a more or less rich language content, because it observes that certain types of cries and sounds bring desirable results. The early life of the child is a period of strenuous practice in evolving all sorts of definitely coördinated movements and vocal expressions out of the raw material of random behavior as a means to a favorable adjustment to its environment. The child comes into the world relatively helpless and would be unable to survive without the aid of others, but it is equipped with a random behavior capital which it gradually develops through practice


( 112) until under normal conditions it becomes a well integrated and relatively self-sufficing individual, but always of course in a social world.

REFLEXES— Another behavior unit of a simple character is the reflex which occurs in animals with nervous systems. The reflex arc is a highly specialized mechanism of the stimulus-response type. That is, a definite stimulus such as a pin prick or the dryness of the eyeball produces a definite and predictable response, in these instances in the form of withdrawal or of winking. It is a purely unconscious behavior process and is in no sense purposive, although it is highly adaptive and regulatory in character. We speak of simple reflex arcs, but as a matter of fact such do not ordinarily function in isolation. Nearly always they integrate with other reflexes or with other behavior patterns in the organism.

The origin of reflexes in the organism has been most clearly described by Child.[2] The reflex arc and integrations of reflex behavior in an organism are products of the trend of development of that organism. "They are consequences and expressions of all that has gone before. The receptor and effector connections of each reflex arc, the interrelations of different arcs, whatever their adaptive evolutionary significance, must all have a physiological basis in the developmental processes and are evidently outgrowths of the general organismic pattern. In fact, the physiological continuity in the individual between the physiological or metabolic gradient and the reflex arc is evident. The physiological gradient is the general physiological foundation on which the reflex arc develops. If we consider development in its functional, rather than in its structural aspects, it appears that the gradient is the primitive and generalized excitation arc out of which the various reflex arcs develop by specialization of function and differentiation of structure. In short, the physiology of development of the reflex arc has its starting point in the excitability of protoplasm, the differential action of environmental factors upon it and the resulting physiological gradient or gradients . . . . From the physiological viewpoint, then, the reflex arcs and the reflex behavior of any particular organism, like other character-


(113) -istics of the individual, are determined by this primary behavior and from the viewpoint of heredity, by the hereditary constitution of the protoplasm. Here, as elsewhere, heredity determines the possibilities in each case and behavior in the broad sense determines the realization of possibilities in each individual."

THE FUNCTION OF THE REFLEX would therefore appear to be to give some sort of stability to the behavior of the organism in a standardized environmental situation. This is the function also of the axial gradient which arises within the protoplasmic systems of the organism and which precedes the organization of the more definite and fixed reflex arcs and their combinations. Organisms must be able to respond repeatedly in the same way to the same or similar environments, or they will suffer disintegration and destruction. Continuity of life is, at least in the lower and simpler forms, dependent upon continuity of behavior patterns. Consequently permanent gradients and reflex arcs and behavior systems arise to insure this integrity and continuity of the organism and of its type.

But variability in behavior is also necessary to survival, particularly in the higher and more complex organisms which are compelled to make rapid and frequent changes in their adjustments to changing and complex environments. This flexibility is sometimes secured, at least in the less specialized lower organisms, by modifying the protoplasmic gradient, but in complex types it can also be secured by building up new integrations of acquired reflex arcs and systems. In this way the reflexes are merged into acquired or habit behavior mechanisms often of a more complex constitution. Where, as in the case of man, the requisite modifiability of behavior mechanisms cannot be obtained on the basis of acquired combinations of reflex arcs, a greater degree of flexibility of neural organization appears in the cerebral cortex in the form of unconnected and modifiable synapses out of which new and highly diverse and variable control patterns or habits are integrated to supplement the modified and reintegrated reflex patterns on a lower level. Such possibilities of modification of behavior are especially necessary in the highly complex and changing social environments of man. The human animal could not possibly respond


(114) to all of the necessary stimuli arising out of his social environments on a purely reflex basis or on the basis of recombinations of his reflexes. His reflexes are valuable to him mainly in that they give him economical and unconscious mechanisms for taking care of the routine and simpler affairs of adjustment, chiefly the physiological ones, while he handles the more complex and pressing adjustment problems through the organization of acquired patterns in the cortical neurons. Even these cortical patterns may be reduced to routine uniformity and relegated to the unconscious. There they mediate adjustments in much the same manner as the original reflexes, when they can be sufficiently standardized and stereotyped, that is, where the adjustment to the environment which they mediate can remain sufficiently constant to make this fixity of type and unconscious functioning possible.

THE RELATION OF REFLEXES TO RANDOM MOVEMENTS—  A question may be raised as to the relationship between random behavior and reflexes. It is not always easy to distinguish the two categories, but in general we may say that random behavior is less specific and less adaptive than reflexes, which are both highly specific and adaptive. However, random behavior often includes or makes use of reflexes, and in some cases perhaps it approaches pretty closely to the reflex in character. No random movement is entirely random or uncontrolled. Nor, perhaps, is any reflex absolutely invariable. Both random movements and reflexes serve as raw materials for the building of habit mechanisms, but the acquired behavior built out of reflexes is necessarily more limited in scope and more predetermined than that arising out of the raw materials of the random movements, because the latter are themselves less fixed and more freely modified in the habit building process.

INSTINCTS differ from reflexes primarily in their greater degree of complexity. Like reflexes they are definite and apparently inherited stimulus-response or neural behavior mechanisms, by means of which a specific stimulus produces a specific and definite response. They also normally operate without the exercise of consciousness. If consciousness appears in the behavior processes it is because the original or inherited behavior pattern has been modified or is being interfered with in the


(115) adjustment situation. The fact that we find a consciousness of the end or of the process involved in the operation of most so-called instinct mechanisms is not to be regarded as proof that instincts, unlike reflexes, have a conscious element in their constitution, but that in our human and complex social world adjustment to a rapidly changing environmental complex is not possible on the rigid basis of unmodified instinct. Very few instincts remain intact in the human adult. The modifying pressures of environment are too insistent. The simpler reflexes may keep their original form, but even they are constantly reorganized into new acquired combination patterns or habits, as was pointed out above. The instinct is itself just such a combination or organization of reflexes. But this organization has been determined by biological selection and is therefore fixed in the inheritance instead of being determined directly by environment, and therefore acquired.

Such inherited organizations of reflexes into instincts are in the form either of complexes and sets or of chains. An instinct composed of a chain of reflexes may be illustrated by the swallowing instinct, where the completion of one reflex sets in operation another, until the total act of swallowing is completed. An instinct composed of a complex or constellation of reflexes may be illustrated by digestion, where the presence of food in the viscera sets up a number of reflexes more or less simultaneously rather than in series. Instincts composed of chains of reflexes and of constellations of reflexes differ essentially only in the relative degree of consecutiveness with which the reflexes come into operation.

INSTINCTS ARE NOT PURPOSIVE, but like reflexes they are adaptive. They serve a definite function in the adjustment process. Like the reflexes they constitute a method of standardizing and economizing the behavior of organisms in adjusting to fairly permanent and constant environmental conditions. In this way they aid in preserving the integrity of the organism under stable environmental conditions, and prevent its destruction by random responses to stimuli. They also render adjustments more economical of energy and of time. But even less able are the instincts to withstand the rapidity and irregularity of change which modern complex and highly differentiated so-


(116) -cial environments bring to bear upon the human organism as the result of its intellectual development and the consequent accumulation of culture which it has created and symbolized and objectified. Since instincts are larger and more complex units of fixed behavior the necessity for breaking them up into constituent units is all the greater under these conditions. As a result not many complex animal instincts survive in the human type. Those that remain relatively intact control the comparatively fixed physiological functions connected with eating, breathing, digestion, circulation, excretion, reproduction, and other vegetative processes. Even these functions are subjected to increasing degrees of acquired control under modern environmental conditions. We modify our tastes and our foods, we injure our digestions and "doctor" them up again, we acquire diseases of the circulatory system, our food and lack of exercise induce constipation and other kindred disorders, and so on indefinitely. In the sphere of the somatic adjustments of the organism as a whole to its environments, the original processes have been even more extensively modified, with the result that few instincts appear as units in our somatic behavior. Habits and acquired behavior of the sort described under the discussion of reflexes have taken their place.

AN ERRONEOUS VIEW OF INSTINCT— Some writers persist in speaking of these modified behavior processes as instinctive or inherited. Such usage, as is shown elsewhere, is of course untenable. Instincts must be defined in terms of their structure, since it is the biological structure only which is inherited. We cannot inherit ideas, values, or the ends of adjustment behavior processes, because these are conceptual and not structural facts. Yet those who speak of the modified behavior patterns as instinctive frequently do so because they define the instinct in terms of its function rather than of its structure. This is a metaphysical rather than a scientific usage and has no basis in fact. To speak of instincts as teleological or purposive is unwarranted. If the instinct is not a conscious behavior pattern, neither can it involve within its own organization any foresight of ends. Nor can it control its own organization and functioning in the interest of these ends. If the teleological concept of instinct also involves a moral or a


(117) prudential judgment regarding the worth or value of the behavior, by the same token it is impossible to attribute this moral or prudential quality to the instincts. Such judgments are based on acquired knowledge regarding consequences and relationships and thus grow out of the experience of the individual or the collective experience of mankind which is transmitted culturally to the individual. Such complex forms of consciousness, arising out of relatively modern situations which have not had an opportunity to select attitudes and responses into the individual organism, cannot be a part of man's instinctive equipment. The metaphysical and unscientific character of the teleological view of instinct becomes easily apparent once we analyze it.

DISINTEGRATION AND ADAPTATION OF INSTINCTS IN MAN— Some of the instincts themselves have apparently disintegrated in man under the pressures of the new environments and man's heredity has correspondingly changed. Or, perhaps we should say, following the general line of argument of Child, that certain of the behavior patterns which seem to be congenital and have therefore commonly been called instincts have failed to develop in the human protoplasms in the course of the growth of the organism because the environments no longer call them into existence. Whether we speak from the standpoint of the disintegration of instinctive behavior patterns in the inheritance or from that of the failure of specific behavior patterns to develop in the protoplasm under the influence of environmental pressures, it is quite clear that the human infant is helpless in a world where the young of the lower types of organisms are able to survive of their own initiative. The "instincts" which would enable it to go in search of food and to appropriate it and to escape from danger are lacking. The explanation of this fact is that the human infant is born into and is adjusted to a human and social environment, while the offspring of the lower animals are born into and adjust themselves to the natural environments. The human mother and the various social agencies and institutions through their ministrations to the child take the place of the "instincts" which it lacks or has failed to develop because its environment did not offer it the proper stimulus. If we take


(118) the view that the heredity of the child has been changed, we have here a clear case of the disintegration or breaking down of instinctive behavior patterns into their constituent reflexes under the pressures of a changed environment. This environment no longer calls for such behavior patterns, but builds its own patterns out of the constituent elements of the now vestigial instincts as a means of securing a more efficient and economical adjustment of the organism to its environment.

We find a similar marked change in the method of adaptation to environment in connection with what we call the delayed instincts, such as those of sex. These behavior patterns are riot matured until the human offspring approaches maturity in the remainder of his structures and behavior mechanisms. In the meantime his social environments, especially the psychosocial, have built up in him those habitual and acquired attitudes regarding sex which are conventional in his social milieu. The result is that the maturing of the sex instincts comes after his behavior patterns in this field are already relatively fixed, with the consequence that the sex activity of the lower animal type is largely inhibited or diverted into substitute channels as sublimations or perversions. In this case environment has been beforehand with nature and has already built up its own system of behavior which the tardily maturing instincts ordinarily are not able to overturn or set aside.

ACQUIRED BEHAVIOR PATTERNS— The conclusion which apparently we are compelled to draw from these facts is that the significance of instinctive behavior for man has been vastly overestimated. Instincts, like reflexes, undoubtedly have served a useful function in the adjustment processes of lower animal types, especially in the case of the simpler responses under relatively constant environmental conditions. But as environment became more complex and fluid or flexible for higher types of animals, and as the complexity of both organism and environment grew up and changed together, instincts no longer served adequately the higher functions of adjustment. They hindered rather than aided the coördinated and concomitant changes in environment and organism. It became necessary to discard them, or to reduce them to their constituent reflexes, or to inhibit their development and functioning, as was the


( 119) case with the delayed instincts. The reflexes could, in large measure, still remain, because their greater simplicity made it possible for them to be organized into new and acquired composite patterns by environmental pressures or selection. Thus habits have largely supplanted the instincts and the independent or isolated reflexes as human behavior patterns. Modern culture and civilization are built primarily, if not wholly, out of acquired behavior patterns. Civilization itself has sometimes rightly been termed a complex of acquired characteristics.

THE SOURCE OF ACQUIRED BEHAVIOR PATTERNS— The acquired behavior patterns, which are dominant in modern human behavior, do not arise out of nothing. They are developed from underlying behavior patterns which can be organized into habits and habit complexes by the environmental pressures. These underlying patterns, as we have seen, are random movements, reflexes, instincts, and other simpler antecedent habits. How the inherited behavior patterns are organized into acquired patterns was shown in a general way in connection with the antecedent discussion of each of the underlying types of behavior patterns. The modern derivative control environments, especially the formative institutions which are organized within these composite or derivative control environments, are vast social mechanisms with the specific function of seizing upon the inherited behavior patterns through the selective stimuli which they offer the organism and of organizing these patterns of behavior into more inclusive derivative acquired behavior complexes or sets to dominate the behavior of individual organisms in social situations. It is always the organism which acts, or reacts, but this behavior is always on the basis of a stimulus or a set of stimuli which is to the organism the environment. This is true even when one part of the organism or its behavior is stimulus to the behavior of another part or the whole of the organism. Thus acquired behavior complexes are integrated within the individual organism and are, properly speaking, individual habits. But they also function in collective situations and are therefore a part of the data of sociology and social psychology. Because they are organized in individuals by the pressures of a social environment they occur in essentially the same form or in similar


( 120) forms in the various members of groups, with the result that in the aggregate they constitute collective or social behavior. Habits, acquired under the pressures of social environments, especially under the dominance of the psycho-social environment, are preeminently social, not only in their origin, but also in their collective modes of expression and in the social effects which they produce when themselves operating in the rôle of environment.

THE METHOD OF ACQUIRING HABITS is that known as the conditioning of responses. It has long been known that old responses may be adjusted to new stimuli and that new responses may be integrated and adapted to old stimuli. Pavlow demonstrated the mechanism experimentally. He showed that by ringing a bell at the same time that meat was shown to a dog, the dog would come in time to respond with a flow of saliva to the sound of the bell even when the meat was not present. Here was an old instinctive response occurring through association upon the presentation of a stimulus not originally biologically adequate. This is the simplest or positive method of conditioning a response. It is also a simple form of habit acquisition. A simple negative method of conditioning responses is to modify the response by a process of substitution of one response for another, as in the case of a rat learning the maze. Protopathic stimuli or blind alleys cause the rat to modify its responses, either by selecting a substitute response pattern for the one already in use, or by making a combination of old response patterns. These combination responses are made up of the original and acquired behavior patterns referred to in the previous section. Both positive and negative conditioning of responses may become highly complex and result in the acquisition of compound habits or responses. This may be called the abbreviated or abstract and symbolic method of conditioning responses. But always the acquired response is a conditioned response. It is never made out of nothing, but is always a modification or a combination of sonie behavior pattern or set which existed before.

The process of conditioning responses or the integration of new habits begins in the earliest days of infancy, probably even before birth, and continues throughout life. But it is especially


( 121) active for most people in the earliest years of their lives, that is, before they get their adjustment to their worlds. It apparently begins postnatally in the act of nursing and of crying and develops from one movement and vocalization to another. Random movements and vocalizations are especially valuable material out of which to integrate new composite or variational responses, but reflexes, and even instincts, must not be neglected in an account of the formation of habits. The fact that the original behavior patterns of man are so simple and rudimentary facilitates greatly the process by which he acquires new habits by means of the mechanism of the conditioned response. This simplicity of his inherited patterns is closely correlated with his neural flexibility or synaptic incompleteness. Animals with greater fixity of neural connections and with correspondingly more complete response patterns are relatively less capable of learning new habits, that is, of conditioning new responses to their environmental stimuli.

ACQUIRED NON-OVERT BEHAVIOR PATTERNS— Acquired behavior patterns are not merely overt, or neuro-muscular, response systems. Behavior is also psychic, or neuro-psychic, in character. Perhaps we should say that the behavior merges at one extreme into the almost purely cortical, with a minimum of overt or symbolical activity, just as at the other extreme it is almost wholly muscular and glandular with a minimum of cortical and conscious direction. Or, perhaps it is wholly automatic, mediated entirely through the lower neural centers. Those acquired behavior patterns which have a large and visible element of overt or striated muscular adjustment in them and which are integrated clearly with reference to the overt adjustments of the organism to its environment we ordinarily call habitual. This is the popular understanding of the term habit. But there are also neuro-psychic habits or organizations and integrations of symbolic behavior or inner adjustment patterns which have not yet been realized in complete overt expression. They are preliminary to the complete overt or neuro-muscular adaptation of the organism to its environment. In their conscious aspects they consist of a survey, perhaps in terms of words, of the possibilities of such adjust-


( 122) -ment and a weighing or evaluation of the significance of various contemplated or projected behavior patterns for adjustment purposes. These are attitudinal or neuro-psychic behavior patterns and involve a minimum of muscular activity. When speaking in terms of consciousness they might perhaps better be called value complexes instead of merely habit complexes, although they are as truly acquired as any overt behavior patterns. Merely for purposes of distinction this term value complex will be used frequently in this book.

The term habit itself is here employed, not to indicate an acquired behavior pattern which has become so fixed by repeated functioning as to be relatively automatic, although this appears to be the popular usage. It is used rather in the technical sense of an acquired behavior pattern, regardless of whether it has functioned only once or many times.

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Notes

  1. See C. J. Herrick, Neurological Foundations of Animal Behavior.
  2. See his Physiological Foundations of Behavior.

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