A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

There is, however, another kind of action—we may call it volitional action—in which an impulse seems to come into conflict, not with another impulse, but with some idea or group of ideas that has no motor reference. I hear my alarum-clock, and have the impulse to get up; but that impulse is definitely opposed by the idea of another half-hour’s sleep. How can an idea oppose an impulse? When Cæsar crossed the Rubicon his alternative was not another course of action, but the passive resignation of the two Gauls and the disbanding of his army; the choice lay between acting and refraining from action. How can activity and passivity thus come into conflict?

The answer to these questions is given with what we said about the nervous correlates of attention (p. 109). We learned, you remember, that nervous reinforcement and nervous inhibition go hand in hand: neither acts without the other; but we were not able at that time to present the evidence for this belief. The evidence is twofold. We find, in experiments upon abstraction, that reinforcement always implies inhibition. Suppose, for instance, that the observer is shown a series of coloured figures, each one for a fraction of a second only, and that he is asked to report accurately upon the form of these visual stimuli. He can do so: but if he is then asked to report further about the colour, he can say little if anything in reply. Reinforcement of the form has brought with it inhibition of the colour. We find, again, in experiments with what is called negative instruction that inhibition always implies reinforcement. Suppose that a picture is shown, and that the observer is told to utter the first word that occurs to him when he sees it, only that the word uttered is not to be the name of the object pictured. He can do this, too; but the results prove that the ‘negative’ always brings in a ‘positive’; either the throat is held stiff, locked up for the time against any utterance whatever, or the instruction ‘Don’t name the object’ is translated by the observer into ‘Name a property of the object’ or ‘Name a use to which the object might be put’; inhibition of the name has meant reinforcement of throat-kinæsthesis or of some positively suggestive idea.

Apply this evidence, now, to the case in point! The sound of the alarum-clock is, on the face of it, a positive suggestion, bidding me get up; but every suggestion is really two-faced; if it sets off certain of the tendencies natural to the situation, it also checks others. The sound of the bell, therefore, not only reinforces the getting-up tendencies, but also represses the nervous disposition that tends to keep me lying still. In the same way, the idea of further sleep means not only the reinforcement of this disposition to lie still, but also, on the negative side, a blocking of the suggestion from the alarum-clock. The situation offers the alternatives ‘action’ and ‘no action’; but the nerve-forces which the situation calls into play, and which correspond with these alternatives, both alike bear upon ‘action,’ as both alike bear upon ‘no action.’ The conflict is thus, after all, of the same kind as in selective action. Idea does not oppose impulse, nor does activity oppose passivity; but nerve-forces which make for action and against rest oppose nerve-forces which make for rest and against action; the double-faced nature of the nervous mechanism is the key to the riddle. The particular ‘action’ and the particular mode of ‘no action’ are, naturally, determined by the situation itself.

If these selective and volitional actions are often repeated, choice is likely to give way to habit; some one impulse gains predominance over the rest; and then, as if to pay the price of victory, speedily falls to the sensorimotor or ideomotor form, and finally lapses into an artificial reflex. When we are learning to play a musical instrument, our actions are one and all selective; we have to think which dot upon the staff stands for which note upon the keys, and which finger is to be set down where. When we have become adepts, the bare sight of the printed score touches off the appropriate movements; we play ‘instinctively’ in the right key, in the right tempo, with the right emphasis; we may even carry on a conversation, and still play correctly, though we have never seen the score before. The practised speaker does not ‘choose’ his words; his ideas express themselves for him; he may even run ahead in thought, while his larynx is still busy with the present topic. The road to automatism is that with which we are already familiar (p. 245), though the psychological history of the automatic actions is different.

[§ 59]. The Compound Reaction.—The detailed analyses that we felt the need of on p. 249 ought, by rights, to be provided by the reaction experiment; for that, as we said on p. 239, furnishes an outline-plan of experimental work which can be filled in and complicated in all manner of ways. Why, then, should not selective and volitional action be as manageable as impulsive? and why should we not follow, experimentally, the rise of impulse to choice and its later return to impulse?

There are two main reasons, the one internal and the other external, why the reaction experiment has not developed along the lines of our psychological classification of action. The internal reason is that the reactor is extremely sensitive to slight changes in instruction, in the rules laid down for the experiment. We have already had an instance: the sensory reaction is a skeleton impulsive action; but the motor reaction, which results from a shift of emphasis in the instruction, is not sensorimotor; it is an abbreviated or telescoped impulsive action. Psychologists have naturally been interested in this side of the experiment, and so have tried the effect of varying instructions, instead of duplicating in the laboratory the gross types of action that our classification distinguishes. The second, external reason is that the reaction, largely on account of its outside origin, was for some time treated in a chapter apart; not until the nineties of the last century did psychologists realise that it gave them experimental control of action; and so the technique has been complicated and the outline filled in without special reference to the psychology of action. We need not here go into details; it is enough to say that experimenters have tried the effect of increasing the number of stimuli, and thus of leaving the reactor more or less uncertain of what he shall expect; of increasing the number of possible responsive movements; and of varying the instruction given beforehand to the reactor, in such wise that a particular responsive movement is assigned to a particular stimulus, or that response is made to certain stimuli but not to certain others. All these forms of compound reaction have an interest of their own, which makes their analysis desirable; they enable us to trace the establishment and course of determining tendencies, the tendencies set up by the instructions; and some of them throw light upon the psychology of negative instruction (p. 250). Only, as we have said, they do not represent the different types of action. Things are now changing; but a great deal of work must be done before we obtain typical analyses of the actions discussed in the preceding paragraphs.

In one respect, this historical severance of the reaction experiment from the special psychology of action has been of scientific advantage; it has left experimenters free to employ the reaction method in any connection in which it promised to be of service. The technique of the reaction experiment has, in fact, proved useful in many investigations, in which the psychology of action is not involved. Thus, we may measure the time required for response at different levels of attention, the time required (under various circumstances) for recognition, the time required for the discrimination of sensations whose stimuli are more or less alike, and so on. There are a great many experiments into which this feature of time-measurement may be introduced; and when they have been often repeated, and standard times have been determined, the times themselves and the numerical statement of their constancy become psychologically significant (p. 242); they indicate, in a sort of short-hand way, what the observer has done and how uniformly he has done it. One of the most valuable extensions of the reaction experiment, from the practical point of view, is the association reaction; words are shown or called out to the observer, who replies in every case by the first word that comes into his mind. This experiment may be performed with abnormal as well as with normal reactors, and the results are of importance to the alienist. It has also been employed with a view to the detection of crime: a series of words, some of which bear upon the circumstances of the crime, is presented to the supposedly guilty person, and the time of his response to the critical words is taken as an indication of his guilt or innocence. Under laboratory conditions, with ‘crimes’ invented for the sake of the experiment, some rather surprising results have been obtained; but there have also been flat failures; and no one can yet say positively whether the association reaction will have its place in the legal procedure of the future.

All these word-reactions move in the realm of meanings, which are the practically important things; there is no reason, however, why experiments of the kind described on p. 161 should not be accompanied by time-measurements. We have already suggested that moods might be timed (p. 227); and it is possible to measure the time required for the arousal of a sense-feeling, as well as to note its duration. On the whole, therefore, the reaction experiment or, as we may now term it, the reaction method should play an even larger part in the experimental psychology of the future than it has played in the past.

[§ 60]. Will, Wish and Desire.—The compound reactions have led us into a digression. But, if the traditional forms—the discriminative, cognitive and choice reactions—are off the main track of the psychology of action, they still throw light on the establishment of determining tendencies to action, and in so far contribute to the psychology of will. For will, taken in a psychological and not in a moral sense, is simply the general name for the sum total of tendencies, inherited and acquired, that determine our actions; and we distinguish different types of will, according as these tendencies to action manifest themselves, characteristically, in different ways. The man of strong will is one whose tendencies are so deep-seated and persistent that he attains his end, or at any rate continues to strive towards it, however remote it may be and however numerous the counter-suggestions that oppose it; and the man of weak will is one whose tendencies are so instable that he is at the mercy of every fresh suggestion that comes. James remarks that, when the will is healthy, action follows, neither too slowly nor too rapidly, as the resultant of all the forces engaged; whereas, when it is unhealthy, action is either explosive or obstructed: the mercurial or dare-devil temperament shows an explosive will, “discharging so promptly into movements that inhibitions get no time to arise”; and the limp characters, the failures, sentimentalists, drunkards, schemers, show the obstructed will, in which “impulsion is insufficient or inhibition in excess,” Divisions of this sort might be pushed much further; but here, as in the parallel case of temperament (p. 227), it is enough to indicate the lines along which classification may proceed.