Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [317]
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s a good deal of such experimentation explored other primary drives, including those originating in the needs for fluids, oxygen, sex, a comfortable temperature, and the avoidance of pain. In 1943 these physiological aspects of motivation were merged in an elegantly simple theory by Clark Hull, the mathematical behaviorist, who asserted that all drives seek the same fundamental satisfaction—relief from the unpleasant tension created by a biological need—and that the ideal state sought by all creatures is the tranquillity that comes from the satisfaction of all drives.13 Nearly half a century later, ethological research would indeed show that many animals are torpid for a while when they have filled their bodily needs; a lion, after a big meal, may lie in the same spot for twelve hours at a stretch.14
But many forms of behavior do not fit within the borders of Hull’s theory. A dog will obey commands not to allay a biological need but to please its master; a hamster will run inside an exercise wheel for no apparent reason; a rat will learn to press a bar for a drop of saccharine-flavored water that has no nutritive value. To account for such behavior in accord with drive-reduction theory, behaviorists decided there were such things as “acquired” or “secondary” drives and motives. These arise from nonphysiological needs but gain their motive power by association with primary drives.15 The dog, for instance, learns to obey its master because at first it is rewarded by food and approval; eventually it develops a drive for approval, and approval becomes the reward.
Yet this jerry-built repair of drive theory could not account for some other kinds of behavior. It could not explain the hamster’s running or the rat’s working to get saccharine water. And unless “secondary drive” was defined so broadly as to include behavior not linked by conditioning to a physiological need, it could not explain why monkeys in one experiment pushed open a window again and again (it remained open only for thirty seconds) in order to watch a toy electric train running, or why monkeys in another experiment repeatedly unlatched a battery of hooks and latches even after they learned that doing so opened no doors and yielded no reward.16 Or why a music lover goes to a concert, a reformer labors to change the political system, a theologian strives to justify the ways of God to man, a penitent lashes his back with chains, a mountain climber scales the Matterhorn, or a psychologist investigates the phenomenon of motivation.
Hull’s idea that drive reduction is the goal of all motivated behavior was further challenged by a much-publicized experiment in sensory deprivation conducted at McGill University in 1957. Volunteers, wearing padded mitts and translucent goggles that admitted light but no images, spent several days lying on a soft foam-rubber pad in a small chamber where the monotonous hum of an air conditioner masked all other sounds. (They were allowed out briefly from time to time to eat, relieve themselves, and be tested.) Most of them had looked forward to a long, pleasant rest but soon found the absence of almost all sensory stimulation disagreeable and disorienting. They had difficulty thinking coherently, their moods fluctuated between hilarity and irritability, their performance on standard tests of mental ability