Instinct Theory of Motivation in Psychology

Instinct theory holds that survival instincts sit at the core of behavior in humans and other animals, driving actions like eating, forming relationships, and reproducing.

William McDougall’s Instinct Theory of Motivation?

Psychologist William McDougall was one of the foremost to report on the instinct theory of motivation.

He called his approach hormic psychology, from the Greek word for “urge,” and argued that every purposeful action is ultimately driven by instinct. The definition of an “instinct” meant it needed to be:

• Unlearned

• Uniform in expression

• Universal in species

He proposed that instinctive behavior was composed of three fundamental elements:

1. Perception

2. Behavior

3. Emotion

McDougall’s theory was based on much earlier research by Darwin, who presented that animals display behaviors similar to human psychological traits.

Darwin’s (1859) idea was simple: humans and other animals differ only in degree, not in kind.

If a spider spins a web it was never taught to build, the reasoning went, humans must also carry unlearned behavioral tendencies, however disguised by intellect.

The idea was compelling. It gave psychology a research programme: catalogue the instincts, and behavior would be explained.

Animal instincts are observable behaviors passed down through generations, providing an evolutionary edge to survival. Many psychologists propose neurobiological explanations for humans’ evolved instincts, but this basis remains controversial.

McDougall’s list grew over time. It ran to about a dozen instincts in 1908, and to around eighteen by 1932. The 1908 list included:

• Flight (paired with fear)

• Repulsion (disgust)

• Curiosity (wonder)

• Pugnacity (anger)

• Self-abasement (subjection)

• Self-assertion (elation)

• Parental instinct (tenderness)

• Reproduction

• Gregariousness

• Acquisition

• Construction

• Food-seeking

From this list, we can think about why McDougall chose these instincts. We work to satisfy our hunger because, essentially, without food, we would die.

The second instinct is the sexual kind, as it assures the survival of another generation to continue our species. Finally, the third instinct is self-preservation. This includes worry and aggression – fear of bodily harm and attack to defend ourselves or ensure individual survival.

McDougall also introduced the idea of a sentiment: an organised cluster of instinctive tendencies and emotions built around a person, group, or ideal. It let instinct-driven people form varied, learned attachments, such as loyalty to a country or person, without abandoning the instinct framework.

Sigmund Freud’s Drive Theory

Sigmund Freud had his own term for instinct: Trieb. It translates as “instinct,” but means something closer to “drive.” It is a constant pressure from a bodily source, pushing toward release through a specific object or action (Freud, 1915).

A reflex fires once and stops. A drive keeps pressing until it is satisfied.

This made Freud’s drives very different from McDougall’s instincts. McDougall proposed dozens of narrow, specific instincts, each tied to one stimulus and one emotion. Freud proposed only a handful of broad drives that could attach to many different objects, and show up in disguised or symbolic forms.

Freud’s theory says that two powers drive human behavior.

• Eros or Life instincts

• Includes: engaging in sex, eating, and other activities to be alive

• Thanatos or Death instincts

• Includes: engaging in aggressive behaviors like fights, stunts, and not caring about survival

Freud later split these drives into two groups. Eros, the life instincts, cover self-preservation, hunger, and sexuality, all oriented toward pleasure and growth. Thanatos, the death instinct, covers aggression and destruction, and a hypothesized pull toward an inorganic, tension-free state.

All animals, Freud believed, have aggressive instincts. He argued that expressing this aggression in a socially acceptable way discharges that energy, a process he called catharsis.

William James’ Instinct Theory

William James was another American psychologist, known for arguing that humans have not fewer instincts than other animals, but likely more.

He proposed that one could look at human actions as indications of instinctive behavior, similar to the involuntary activities of animals.

James grounds his research in evolutionary theory, arguing that all survival functions of human beings are driven by several instincts that lead to a series of behaviors.

James made one distinctive claim. Humans do not have fewer instincts than animals, as common sense might suggest, but more.

He argued that people have many competing instincts, plus the ability to inhibit one in favor of another and build habits on top of them. An instinct that fires only once, because experience quickly overrides it, can look like reasoned “choice” even though it began as instinct.

In his theory, he outlined some instincts such as:

• Anger

• Fear

• Shame

• Love

• Cleanliness

• And so on…

McDougall’s, Freud’s, and James’ instinct theories were widely influential studies. Many other psychologists developed upon their work in the years that heeded their original findings.

James’s ideas about the multiplicity of instinct, and how experience reshapes it, later influenced Carl Jung‘s thinking. Jung proposed that certain behaviors were inspired by an inner desire to harmonize with one’s environment.

Criticisms of Instinct Theory

The instinct theory of motivation states that particular behaviors are innately connected to specific drives. All living creatures, on this view, have instinctual drives that push them toward certain goals.

But the theory has real limits. Critics say it cannot be adequately verified.

This is sometimes called the nominal fallacy: naming a behavior’s instinct only redescribes it, without adding evidence. To say “people fight because of a pugnacity instinct” adds nothing beyond the very behavior it was meant to explain.

The reasoning runs in a circle, from behavior to instinct and back to behavior again.

Some psychologists disagree. They believe combining causes can ultimately explain every psychological phenomenon, without any hard evidence for a distinct instinctual basis. Having the drive does not guarantee the act.

One significant criticism is that instincts do not explain all behavior. Is laughing an instinct? Or do we giggle because we learned it from our parents as babies? Also, driving is not an instinct, as people need years of practice before learning to drive.

There is a deeper problem, too. If all human actions were determined by instincts alone, the same behavior should result from the same circumstances every time.

For instance, if we are hungry and see food, we would always eat it. That is not the case. Many people resist eating certain foods even when hungry.

Likewise, certain behaviors, such as seeking new intellectual challenges, can be explained by combining social learning theory with reinforcement principles.

A new challenge, such as starting a job or learning a new skill, can provide positive reinforcement for new behavior. That alone can lead to real success.

There is nothing inherent about it. Seeking new challenges is not, by itself, an instinct. It can be explained by combining two well-known psychological principles.

Instincts are often used as a catch-all term for behavior that seems to happen without much thought. Just because we do not know why we act a certain way does not mean there is no reason.

Bernard (1924) counted the instincts proposed across psychology’s own textbooks. The list ran to well over six thousand separate named instincts, from gregariousness and workmanship to, in one case, an instinct to avoid eating apples from one’s own orchard.

That points to a real problem.

Psychology had no agreed test for ruling an instinct out.

Any theorist could coin a new instinct for any behavior that struck them as inborn, with no shared criterion to settle competing lists. This is a specific case of the wider debate about falsifiability in psychological theorizing, a concern the philosopher of science Karl Popper later made explicit.

Mothers still care for their babies in very different ways. Experience and social expectations shape how she nurtures her child, even if instinct also plays a role.

Another criticism: instincts cannot be readily observed or tested scientifically. The human mind is so intricate that it is nearly impossible to observe someone’s instinctual behavior under controlled, scientific conditions.

It is not easy to gather evidence for all these different factors. Today, psychologists rely on data and research studies to test their theories.

James, McDougall, and Freud did not work this way. It is far easier to write about unconscious intuitions than to verify them through data and controlled studies.

Scientists today tell us about animal instinct, but this is because animals are much easier to observe than humans.

Summarized criticisms:

• Not Observable: Instincts cannot be readily observed or scientifically proven.

• Doesn’t Explain Everything: Instincts do not explain all behaviors.

• No Predictive Power: Just indicating something as instinct does nothing to justify why certain behaviors appear in specific instances but not others.

• Animal-to-Human Extrapolation: The disciplined animal studies of ethologists don’t license McDougall’s and James’s leap to complex human behavior.

Despite these criticisms, modern psychology takes a middle path. Particular human behaviors might be biologically programmed, but personal life experience also plays a meaningful role in our motivation and behavior.

Have you ever laughed at a joke no one else found funny? A distinct life experience may explain why. Life experience shapes our thinking, which in turn shapes our behavior.

Instinct is a powerful concept in psychology. Psychologists have tried to understand its influence on behavior since the time of Darwin.

There are many additional criticisms of instinct theory. Even so, psychologists are now more focused on how these instincts point to an underlying process that helps explain instinctual behavior.

Contemporary Research

Modern evolutionary psychology has revived a narrower, more testable version of instinct theory.

It calls this an evolved psychological mechanism: a mental system, shaped by natural selection, that solves one specific survival problem and produces a predictable response to particular cues. Two research areas illustrate this, though they carry different levels of evidence.

Innate Threat Perception in Children

Six-month-old infants show greater pupil dilation, a sign of physiological arousal, when shown pictures of spiders and snakes than when shown matched control pictures (Hoehl et al., 2017).

These babies have had little chance to learn to fear these animals. The response looks innate.

A larger study backs this up. Souchet and Aubret (2016) tested more than 1,300 children aged three to eleven. The children detected snakes with bold warning colouring faster and more accurately than plain-coloured snakes.

Ethologists call this bold pattern aposematic (warning) colouration. The finding points to a specific, evolutionarily old visual feature, not a generic learned fear of “snake shape,” as the trigger for faster detection.

Both findings point to an early, biological bias toward ancestrally dangerous animals. Neither shows the response is fixed. Everyday learning can still reshape it.

Evolved Sex Differences in Jealousy

The best-tested case for instinct-like reasoning today concerns jealousy.

The jealousy finding rests on far more replication than the threat-perception studies, so it currently carries more weight. Together, though, they represent a narrower, testable descendant of instinct theory, not a return to McDougall’s unfalsifiable catalogue of thousands of instincts.

Applications of Instinct Theory

Instinct theory failed as a general account of human motivation, but instinct-related thinking still has real uses today.

These applications work only when they borrow the discipline ethologists brought to the concept, not McDougall’s habit of naming an instinct for anything.

Animal Welfare and Captive-Animal Management

Fixed action patterns respond to one specific sign stimulus, the exact cue that triggers them, not to an animal’s overall needs.

Zoos, farms, and conservation programmes use this fact directly. They design enrichment, such as nesting or foraging materials, that lets an animal perform its full natural behaviour.

The same knowledge also flags a risk. An artificial stimulus can hijack an instinctive response and harm the animal.

Ethologists call this a supernormal stimulus: an exaggerated cue that pulls a stronger response than the real one it copies.

Geese show the same pattern. One will push an oversized volleyball just as readily as its own real egg.

Tinbergen’s (1951) experiments found that geese and other birds would even abandon a real egg to sit on an oversized decoy instead.

Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioural Design

Evolved psychological mechanisms, the modern, more careful descendant of McDougall’s instincts, now inform applied fields beyond the lab.

Researchers use the concept to study recurring patterns in mate choice, parenting investment, and food preference.

It also shapes how people judge threat from an in-group or out-group. This shapes real products.

Public-health campaigns use it to choose threat cues that reliably grab attention.

Interface designers use it too, building visual and social cues that trigger fast, low-effort responses from users.

Understanding Compulsive Behaviour

Freud proposed the death instinct partly to explain repetition compulsion: a pattern of unconsciously repeating distressing or self-defeating experiences.

His own psychoanalytic explanation was never empirically confirmed. But the observation itself proved useful.

It fed into later clinical thinking about why harmful patterns persist, in addiction, self-harm, and anxiety-related rituals, despite their real costs to the person caught in them.

This observation helped build later, more testable models of compulsive behaviour in clinical psychology.

Comparison with Rival Theories of Motivation

Instinct theory sits at the start of a line of motivational theories. Each later theory fixed one specific weakness in the theory before it.

Drive-Reduction and Arousal Theories

Psychologists in the 1920s replaced the instinct with drive-reduction theory, built on Woodworth’s (1918) concept of drive. A drive is an internal state of physiological tension, such as hunger or thirst, that the organism is motivated to reduce.

Clark Hull took this further. He built it into a full learning theory: reinforcement through drive reduction, meaning behavior that reduces the tension gets strengthened.

This solved instinct theory’s circularity problem.

A drive can be defined and measured independently of the behavior it produces, for example by hours of food deprivation. It struggled, though, to explain behavior with no clear tissue need, such as curiosity, exploration, or sensation-seeking, which still looked more instinct-like than drive-like.

Arousal theory shifted the focus again. Instead of a single deficit state, it looks at the organism’s overall level of physiological activation.

The idea itself is simple.

People are motivated, on this view, to maintain an optimal level of arousal, neither too low and understimulating nor too high and overwhelming.

This is a more flexible account than drive-reduction theory, since it can explain both deficit-driven and stimulation-seeking behavior within one framework. It is less precise, though, about what actually counts as “optimal” for a given person or situation.

Incentive and Self-Determination Theories

Incentive theory locates motivation outside the person, in external rewards that pull behavior toward them because of their learned or expected value. A paycheck or a compliment both work this way.

It explains why the mere sight of a reward can start behavior even without any internal deficit.

It says comparatively little, though, about why a particular stimulus becomes rewarding in the first place, a gap instinct and evolutionary accounts are well placed to fill.

Self-determination theory moves furthest from instinct theory’s biological focus. It separates autonomous, intrinsically motivated behavior, pursued for its own interest, from controlled, extrinsically motivated behavior.

It grounds motivation in three psychological needs instead: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Of the theories here, it is the most concerned with the quality of motivation, not just its strength or presence.

Instinct theory is their common ancestor, not their rival. Drive-reduction theory fixed the circularity problem, and arousal theory fixed the rigidity about stimulation-seeking. Incentive theory fixed the purely internal focus, and self-determination theory fixed the silence on motivation’s quality.