It has become a fairly established opinion that human beings possess no instinctive behavior. Sometimes, even the instincts of highly developed animals (especially primates) are subject to partial doubt. Priority is given to the crude satisfaction of immediate needs, while all other behavior, it is claimed, is purely social in nature. Based on this position, the idea that humans have innate predispositions regarding social behavior—for example, a tendency toward either violent or non-violent behavior—is also criticized. Thus, human behavior is seen as purely a product of upbringing and environment, unless it concerns certain pathologies already described by medicine. Or even if an individual does have some innate predispositions, they can be easily “overwritten” by upbringing.
To understand whether humans have instincts or not, it is necessary to define the concept of instinct itself, as well as another similar concept—the reflex. An instinct is defined as a set of complex hereditary and preset behavioral acts, whereas a reflex is a standard reaction to a stimulus. It is immediately apparent that the difference between an instinct and a reflex comes down to the complexity of the structure of these phenomena, without a clear boundary being drawn. This can lead to some confusion in the study of innate behavioral predispositions. However, while instincts are generally considered not to be present in humans, no one doubts the existence of reflexes.
Perhaps the most criticized is the maternal instinct. However, it is an indisputable fact that an attachment between mother and child usually does arise. Research clearly shows that during pregnancy and breastfeeding, oxytocin—a hormone that plays an important role in this process—is produced in the mother. However, researchers agree that this cannot be called an instinct.
At the same time, for some reason, the innate human fear of certain threats encountered during evolution is explicitly called an instinct. For example, research has shown that the fear of snakes and spiders is present in 6-month-old infants. In general, the concept of the threat superiority effect, which explains the human ability to react quickly to threats in the environment, suggests a protective reaction to both innate and experience-acquired stimuli, not just the latter.
Let us now turn to the topic of aggression. As ethologists claim, the restraint of intraspecific aggression in animals, expressed, among other things, through the ritualization of battles, is instinctive in nature. However, the model of the violence inhibition mechanism in humans calls the rejection reaction—which arises in a normally developing individual from childhood when observing distress signals (expressions of sadness, fear, pain) from victims of violence—merely an unconditioned reflex. It should also be noted that this mechanism is important in the development of empathy, and children as early as 2-3 days after birth show an empathic response by reacting to the crying of other children with reactive crying, which is more intense than their reaction to other irritating stimuli.
We know that it is primarily the correct functioning of such a mechanism—which causes a feeling of rejection toward violence, plays an important role in the development of empathy, and leads to the development of a number of important conditioned reflexes—that makes a person non-violent, and only after that comes upbringing. Is such behavior instinctive, or is it simply a reflex? It is impossible to say for sure until a clear boundary is drawn between these concepts. However, if researchers nonetheless call the innate fear of threat, which influences the regulation of aggressive behavior, instinctive, then why can the violence inhibition mechanism not also be called instinctive? Especially since in many people it is so strongly expressed that it absolutely prevents the commission of violence, at least in its serious forms.
