Economic motives; by Dickinson Zenas Clark

Author:Dickinson, Zenas Clark. [from old catalog]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Economics, Psychology
Publisher: Cambridge, Harvard university press; [etc., etc.]
Published: 1922-03-25T05:00:00+00:00

the third to less than a minute. The same animal in the miniature maze requires thirty minutes for the first solution, while after a few trials he makes the trip in half a minute, ignoring all the false turns.^

These lower animals, like ourselves, in many cases never learn to eUminate all the unnecessary acts, for a useless link is strengthened by frequency just as much as a useful one. The fact that the necessary acts always have to be performed before the appetite is stilled, whereas the unnecessary do not, gives to the former a general preponderating frequency. We find in substantially all organisms, then, a multipUcity of reaction possibiUties to the same (large) situation to which as a whole, no instinctive response is adequate. If any combination of its ready-made reactions can succeed in appeasing the appetite, then the creature may learn through trial and error to make that successful response whenever the situation is presented to him.

To consider these multiple reaction possibilities as different responses to a single stimulus, however, would be the mark of a primitive psychology. We must believe that every stimulation-current passes through predetermined channels to produce definite muscular or glandular tensions, which channels (synapses of least resistance) are fixed by heredity or by previous learning. As Thorndike says, the vague theories of general nervous overflow are no-wise in line with the other facts of psychology. The multiplicity of reactions to the same general situation, then, depends on two sets of factors,—the differing physiological states of the organism, and the number of separate stimuli which the external situation as a whole contains. We may find varying responses to an identical particular stimulus, as Jennings did with protozoa, due presumably to varying degrees of fatigue in the response mechanisms. After the instinctive response which is determined by the most open neural path has been given, if the same stimulus is repeated, the resistance at the synapses in this circuit is increased, so that the impulse breaks into a path which was less open than the first when the first was fresh.^

1 Watson, Behavior, pp. 191, 211.

2 This is an oversimplified version; the facts of fatigue and adaptation in the nervous system and sense-organs are quite obscure. But depletion of stored energy

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