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Instinct is the inherent inclination of a living organism towards a particular complex behaviour, containing innate (inborn) elements.The simplest example of an instinctive behaviour is a fixed action pattern (FAP), in which a very short to medium length sequence of actions, without variation, are carried out in response to a corresponding clearly defined stimulus.
In evolutionary psychology, people often speak of the four Fs which are said to be the four basic and most primal drives (motivations or instincts) that animals (including humans) are evolutionarily adapted to have, follow, and achieve: fighting, fleeing, feeding and fucking (a more polite synonym is the word "mating"). [1]
This is an instinct which was seemingly triggered by the similar action sequence involved in retrieving and depositing coins into a bank. Instinctive behaviour is usually automatic and unplanned and is a natural reaction which often is preferred by the animal over learned and unnatural actions. [ 2 ]
The RPD model is a blend of intuition and analysis. The intuition is the pattern-matching process that quickly suggests feasible courses of action. The analysis is the mental simulation, a conscious and deliberate review of the courses of action. [11] Instinct is often misinterpreted as intuition. Its reliability is dependent on past knowledge ...
Evolutionary psychologists consider Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection to be important to an understanding of psychology. [1] Natural selection occurs because individual organisms who are genetically better suited to the current environment leave more descendants, and their genes spread through the population, thus explaining why organisms fit their environments so closely. [1]
Leda Cosmides and John Tooby noted that William James (1842–1910) argued that humans have more instincts than animals, and that greater freedom of action is the result of having more psychological instincts, not fewer. [19] The question of "innate ideas" or "instincts" was of some importance in the discussion of free will in moral philosophy ...
The history of evolutionary psychology began with Charles Darwin, who said that humans have social instincts that evolved by natural selection.Darwin's work inspired later psychologists such as William James and Sigmund Freud but for most of the 20th century psychologists focused more on behaviorism and proximate explanations for human behavior.
Darwin intended natural selection to explain the presence of design in nature. However, the term "design" has been out of favor since the watchmaker analogy attacks from William Paley . Thompson believes that is a mistake, because without the concept of design, it is easy for evolutionary theory to become a tautology.