Youth and the open door; the relation of habit and character to success

Front matter

Class.

Book..

Copyright^ .

Preface

Tlie following pages were originally penned in the form of lectures to be delivered to the freshmen of Ohio Wesleyan University, as a part of a course known as Freshman Fundamentals. The purpose of this course was to serve as a general introduction to the various subjects of study and to discuss the ways and means whereby the budding student could hope to obtain as much benefit as possible from the four years of college on which he, or she, was just entering. Certain considerations made it seem possible that the lectures could be re-written so as to be of service to a wider group than that comprised in the college class. The lectures have, therefore, been thoroughly revised and much new material has been added. "While doing so, the author has kept in mind the needs and interests of the different group of auditors, or rather readers, to which it is now offered.

ceived from so large a number of writers on Psychology and cognate subjects that specific reference is quite impossible. But particular acknowledgment must be made to President John W. Hoffman, to Dr. William Of. Hormell, Dean of Men, and to Mrs. G. H. Geyer, Associate Dean of Women, of Ohio Wesleyan University. To these three the author owes sincere thanks, for without their aid the lectures which form the foundation of this volume could not have been delivered.

Contents

I. Instinct

II. Habit

III. Habits op Study ....

Chapter Two

THE second main group of factors which determine the differences between people we are accustomed to speak of under the name of 1 ' habit.' ' Instincts are not permanently rigid. On the contrary, they possess very considerable plasticity. As has been stated, an animal begins life with a tendency to move in a definite way in certain circumstances. As the animal grows older and achieves various degrees of success in these different circumstances the particular form of the instinctive reactions may change. This fact has been named by James the "inhibition of instinct by habit. ' ' A similar fact, very closely related in nature to this he terms the "transitoriness of instinct." This is the fact that if an instinct be not allowed to express itself at the time when the organism is ripe for it, it may be that that instinct will never appear. For instance, consider the hereditary enmity between dogs and cats. It is a very difficult matter indeed to take an old dog and an old cat and keep them peaceably together in the same house, but it is not at all difficult to place a kitten and a puppy together, and bring them up side by side. They may even become good friends. The point is that in the latter case, at the age at which the instinctive aversion of the two animals each for the other should appear, circumstances have prevented the expression of this aversion. That particular instinctive tendency has disappeared, and, in all probability, will never reappear, at least in so far as the attitude of those two animals toward each other is concerned. The instinct has been completely destroyed.

Experiments on the mouse-catching instinct in kittens have shown that if a kitten be kept from all forms of sensory contact with mice until it is about five months old, the instinct to pursue and attack mice on sight seems to vanish. And if kittens are put in the proximity of mice daily from their earliest infancy the instinct to attack and kill them appears at an age varying from six weeks to about two and a half to three months. It is interesting to note that when the instinct does appear it appears all at once, practically full grown. And the kitten killing for the first time will use practically the same repertoire of movements which the old and experienced mouser exhibits. 1

When one speaks of the inhibition of instinct by habit the reference is to the fact that it is simply the general tendency which is common to members of a species, the special operations of that instinct being individual. It is instinctive in all human infants to try to walk at an age varying from eight or nine months to two years, but the particular form of walk which they acquire is a matter of individual habit. It will depend upon the conditions in which they have learned to walk, on the kind of footgear they wear, to some extent upon whether they live on the plains or in mountainous countries. All human beings walk — that is instinct, — but we each have our own idiosyncratic way of getting over the ground — that is habit.

i See Yerkes, K. M., and Bloomfield, D., "Do Kittens Instinctively Kill Mice?" Psychol. Bulletin, Vol. 7. Also Berry, "Experimental Study of Imitation in Cats," Journal of Co-mp. tfeur. and Psychol., Vol. 18, pp. 1-25.

The food-taking instinct is found in all animals, human and other. It appears in mammals as the sucking reaction, in chicks as the pecking reaction, in many other yonng birds in the form of the familiar wide-mouthed gaping when the parent bird is present. In the case of the baby it is a long way from that instinctive activity to the somewhat complicate and accurate handling of knife and fork which is required of the average adult in Western lands. But the method of taking food indulged in by the cultured adult is but the habitual modification of the fundamental food-taking instinct.

The fighting instinct is present in man, but it does not express itself as it does in the lower animals, at least, not often. Wild and vigorous animals make use of the tools which nature has given them. This instinct itl man expresses itself in a very complicated management of mechanical agencies in the form of guns, explosive shells and gases, and is very far removed indeed from the elemental form. But all this is, after all, merely a modification of the original instinct. From the theoretic standpoint it is a most interesting thing that confronts us here — the method of habit formation. How does the instinct become transformed? Why does it not maintain its original form ? Or, to put the same question in a slightly more popular form, how does learning take place?

The learning process may best be diseussed under two headings, "unconscious" and " conscious' ' learning. Unconscious learning is frequently referred to as "trial and error" learning. It is the type of learning which modifies very many of our movements, unknown to ourselves. We have been doing a certain familiar act for a long time, and suddenly wake up to find that we are doing it in a totally new way. We do not know at what point we changed the form of reaction. For instance, after we have been playing tennis for some time, we may find that the form of our serve has undergone a change. At first we rather laboriously and consciously aimed the racquet so that it would hit the ball at a certain point in the air. Time and time again we did it, until the conscious aim disappeared. Suddenly one day, months after, we found that we had acquired in serving a sweep and general form of movement which was very different from the clumsy and labored movement with which we began.

Such learning, as has been said, is called "trial and error" learning, and many examples similar to the above might be given. Suppose some one hands you one of those irritatingly attractive little puzzles consisting of a brass disc and a ring, or some comphcated steel wire arrangement. The object is to remove the ring which is threaded through holes in a small brass disc, or to separate the star-shaped bit of metal from the steel loop which confines it. You take the puzzle and you work with it, turning it this way and that, putting the ring through this hole and the other, and finally, more or less to your surprise, the ring comes off the disc. You put it on again and perhaps are patient enough to take it off a second time. Eepeat that process two or three, a dozen times, fifty times, and one finds that the method of removing the ring becomes perfectly automatic and the process extremely easy. But let a friend ask you how to do it and your answer will almost invariably be : "I can't tell you how to do it, but I can show you." A definite motor habit has been formed without there being very much conscious direction in its formation.

Interesting and accurate studies of this method of learning have been made of both animals and man. Perhaps the most interesting of them have come from the field of animal psychology. Animals will learn to make very involved reactions in just about the same way that the man learns to swing a tennis racquet or to handle the little puzzle mentioned above. Set a problem for a dog or a monkey or a white rat. It must be understood, of course, that when you set a problem for any of these animals it must be a dog or monkey or white rat problem. It goes without saying that a dog can't solve human problems. It can, however, solve problems at its own level. Perhaps the most familiar of these types of problems is known as the puzzle box problem.

A box is constructed of a size appropriate to the animal to be examined. The box is made of wire netting so that its interior is open to easy observation. It is closed in the front by a door having spring hinges. The door is fastened by means of a very simple lock, perhaps a peg driven loosely into a hole, or by an ordinary thnnib latch, or by a hook. In the box is placed some food, bread and milk for the rat or cat, banana or apple for a monkey, meat if it be a dog. The animal, moderately hungry, is placed in the room where this box is situated. The problem for the animal is to get the food. It is true that the conditions are artificial, but the problem is not, for it is exactly the kind of problem which faces all wild animals in the course of every-day life, and which becomes especially acute in any period of food scarcity. What does the animal do under these circumstances f He simply applies all the forms of instinctive activity which he has at his command to the box. The monkey swarms all over it, forces or tries to force his paw between the wires, bites at the corners, gnaws, pulls, twists. The dog does much the same thing, but is less richly equipped with various movements and less resourceful in his methods of attack than the monkey. The white rat in turn uses all the white rat methods of attacking the problem.

What happens 1 In the course of time, limited by chance or accident, the animal stumbles upon the peg which closes the door, pulls it, nozzles it, bites it, in some way or other removes it and the door opens. The animal immediately enters and gets the food. The next day the experiment is repeated, but from the standpoint of the animal there is an important modification of the situation, which essentially alters the reactions of the animal. The dog or rat naturally pays far more attention to that part of the box through which it entered the day before than it does to the rest of the box. And since its activity is so largely confined to the region of the door, it, of course, gets the door open much sooner than on the previous occasion. Day after day for six, eight or ten days the procedure is repeated, and a very marked decrease in the length of time required to open the door is noticed. This decrease of time stands in pretty direct proportion to the concentration of the activities of the animal upon the area immediately surrounding the lock. At the end of the training period whatever it may be — ten or fifteen days — the animal is capable of entering the room, going at once to the door, pulling the peg or lifting the latch and getting its food without wasting any time whatsoever. The complexity of the lock which an animal may learn to open in this manner is surprising.

Now observe that the animal has not been taught tricks. It has simply been placed in the face of a certain situation and told, as it were, to solve its problem or starve. Animals must face just such situations in wild life, and there the choice between solution and starvation is a real one. There is reason for believing that the qualities of activity and persistence which enable one animal to solve the artificial problem in a time shorter than others of the same species would also enable that animal in wild life to obtain food when another had failed and died.

Conscious effort in learning does not introduce any really new methods. It speeds up the process described above. Instead of groping blindly for the methods of solving a problem, one obtains them by a systematic survey of the field of possibilities and a choice of that method which seems most available, or appears nearest at hand. That one method may be chosen rather than another is to be attributed to one's past experience. In the latter case the experience may have been acquired in the course of events, by reading, by conversation or in some more formally didactic way. The variety of choice possible to man as compared with the lower animals is the result of the richness of his experience, and of his superior power of retaining and imaging these.

It might ne possible to state all education in terms of habit acquisition. It is necessary to consider expertness in this way. The expert is the person who has acquired a large group of habitual adjustments in his field. He differs from the tyro in regard to the proportion of the field which he can cover habitually. The fact of being able to handle operations in an habitual manner has certain definite and very valuable advantages. The practical effects of habit include the following.

First: the possession of habitual methods of adjustment decreases fatigue. Operations which are performed habitually are performed easily. The act which we are doing for the first time is difficult, other things being equal, it is less difficult the thousandth time. In any adjustment which is performed under habitual conditions, the amount of energy expended is immensely less than in the case of the same operation performed for the first time.

In the second place, the habitual manner of performing an operation is more accurate than any other. It is much more accurate than the first non-habitual reaction of the same kind. In other words, if you wish to do a thing well you must do it habitually. Accuracy is to be found where there is a high degree of habit formation. This statement may seen novel and possibly untrue to many readers, but it does not require much reflection to discover its truth. Very many things which we do well we do habitually. Very many things which we do badly we do with a high degree of care. Take, for instance, such an ordinary motor activity as walking. Any adult, unless he be crippled, is capable of walking with ease and for long periods of time without thinking of it at all, even though it be necessary to alter the rate or the method of walking. One may walk around obstacles, climb steps, descend inclines and all with a small amount of conscious direction, or even with no such direction at all. But the same process of walking becomes clumsy and difficult if for any reason whatever our attentive care is exercised toward it. Let the reader for the first time walk across a stage or platform in front of five or six hundred people, arid he will realize that there is more to walking than he had thought. The exerting of care in taking up and putting down the feet becomes for the first time a task, and the whole reaction is performed rather badly. In the same way, a person may fail to perform satisfactorily in public an involved series of movements, even though they have been thoroughly learned in private. A person who can play the piano or recite the verses of a poem perfectly if no one is listening, may find it extremely difficult to do so if a crowd of people observe his effort. Or if for any extraordinary reason a particular reaction suddenly assumes unusual importance it may at the same time assume unusual difficulty. In such cases what happens is that the performer has taken a group of movements which by the expenditure of great labor have been placed upon the habitual level, and has given them conscious direction. The result is disastrous and it necessarily follows that such operations meet with a very small degree of success, and are done inaccurately.

Another example of the statement just made, is to be found in the control of certain movements. Practically all movements are made by two muscles, a flexor and an extensor, working on opposite sides of a bone lever. When a movement is made with careful attention, both the muscles concerned are more or less contracted, the lever being, as it were, swung between them as between two tensed cables. Such a method of moving requires the contraction of two muscles throughout the whole extent of the movement. When that same movement becomes habitual, it seems to be controlled by one muscle throughout the first third or so of its course, it swings freely throughout the middle third of the movement and is controlled by the opposing muscle throughout the last third of its course. Instead of there being two muscles tensed throughout the entire movement, as is the case when attention is present, there is one muscle tensed for two-thirds of the movement. That fatigue is decreased in this way, is obvious.

Accuracy also is increased, because when the bone lever in question is handled by the two sets of muscles on the opposing sides the method of maintaining accuracy really consists in swinging the lever a little too far in one direction and then bringing it back too far in the other. For instance, a straight line drawn under conditions of attentive control, if with a hard pencil on a smooth surface, shows zigzags under a reading glass, while a straight line drawn with the same pencil, on the same surface under habitual conditions is made with a free swing and does not show zigzags under the glass.

The former type of movements are known as controlled movements, and the latter as ballistic. Because of the conditions mentioned, it is extremely difficult to forge successfully the signature of a man accustomed to writing his signature. The lines of the signature, when forged, must be drawn under conditions of attentive control, which means that they contain slight zigzags or irregularities, while the actual signature, being produced by ballistic movements, has no such zigzags. The forgery will, therefore, be easily detected. It is more easy to forge the signature of the illiterate man who seldom writes his name. The reason for this is that when such a man does write his signature, he does it under conditions of attentive control, and it therefore presents the typical peculiarities of controlled movements.

The third practical value of habit is that the habitual movement may be successfully accomplished and at the same time the higher centers of the brain may be kept active along other lines, or kept free for such activity, if necessity for it should arise. In other words, habitual movements do not require all one's conscious intelligence. The habitual movements may be performed accurately and easily and at the same time the higher centers may be free to work upon other problems. The statement is sometimes made that a person cannot do two things at once. The statement is really untrue. A person may do two things at once if one of them is of an habitual nature

The conditions of expertness have been stated in the preceding statement of the practical effects of habit. The man who can make a great variety of movements habitually, makes them easily and with accuracy and without becoming incapable of thinking along other lines while he is performing the habitual acts. Put in the positive instead of the negative, it is, for example, perfectly possible for a person to learn to read in public, and, while reading with expression, to think about something other than his reading. The ball player may make all the necessary muscular movements of catching or picking up a hall and throwing it, and be thinking of something else all the time, for instance the arrangement of the opposing players on the bases. In fact, it is the very sine qua non of expertness that he shall do this. If it takes a man's whole attentive consciousness to pick up a baseball, or to throw it after it is picked up, he will not be able to decide where to throw it until after it is picked up. The great expert is capable of making complicated and vigorous adjustments which a situation calls for, and while doing so to calmly decide what shall be his next movement. The writer quite clearly remembers the first major operation he observed. His ideas of major operations had prepared him for a scene somewhat different from that which presented itself.

An operation had always seemed an extremely serious, not to say solemn, occasion, and he had expected to find an air of extreme exertion, of tense endeavor hanging over it. Instead the situation actually appeared rather carefree and easy. The operator was one of the really great surgeons of the United States. He went at his work (an abdominal section) with an almost offhand ease and an enthusiasm which seemed careless. Now and then he even appeared to take his eyes away from his work to address the students who were gathered in the amphitheater about. The impression upon the mind of the unsophisticated young observer who was watching him was that he was being a little careless. But the apparent carelessness was certainly not that, it came from the fact that the work was being done in an habitual manner, that is, mechanically. As a matter of fact, the operation which the surgeon was performing was an operation which had probably been performed by him hundreds of times. His hands were making the most beautiful mechanical job of it. The effect of the habitual handling of the situation was that it was being done with a high degree of accuracy.

From the operator's standpoint the work was requiring only a small amount of energy, hence fatigue was absent, and most important of all, the higher intellectual centers of the surgeon were comparatively free. Thus in case of the occurrence of a catastrophe of any kind, the surgeon would have opportunity and thought to handle the new situation even though it were imperative that the routine movement of the operation continue. In sharp and significant distinction from the easy habitual movements of the surgeon was the strained attention, the overwhelming care exercised by an interne who stood at his elbow and assisted him in some trifling details. To the interne the situation was still novel.

To sum up this portion of the discussion: if a person would become an expert in his field it is necessary that he reduce large parts of it to habitual performance. The expert differs from the tyro in regard to the amount he does by habit. The expert does by habit what the tyro or amateur does with a great deal of care, and the expert will do with care things which the amateur cannot dream even of attempting.

There is another side to the fact of habit which must not be neglected. Habit is the result of impressions produced by a certain situation, often repeated. But an impression, and a permanent one, is produced by even one experience of any kind. Hence, learning. We learn because we have to face puzzling situations or problems. Now the circumstances which affect us, the situations in which we are placed, even the books we read, the persons we meet and converse with, the schools we attend, the cities we live in — all leave impressions upon us, and it is vitally true, as said above, that these impressions are permanent. We can neither disregard nor destroy our past; that which has come into life cannot be forced out ; that which we have seen has registered itself upon us ; the words we have heard have engraved themselves upon permanent tablets of habit and memory. It is psychologically true that

"The moving finger writes, and having writ Moves on, nor all your piety nor wit Can lure it back to cancel half a line Nor all your tears wipe out a word of it."

Character is not constructed in a moment, but is the product or the result of one's experience, one 's past. This statement must be understood in the light of what has been said in this and the preceding chapter, and also in connection with the chapter on Character Formation. The personality of John Smith differs from that of Thomas Jones because of two facts — first, because John Smith and Thomas Jones started life with different mechanisms, with different neural muscular equipments, and, second, because these two have lived in different environments, met different problems and experiences, and, because of their uneven equipments, have handled in different ways whatever similar situations have confronted them. Thereby they have of necessity acquired different opinions, different ambitions, different habits, and different sets of values.

Chapter Three

A STUDENT is a person who studies. He may or may not be registered in a school or college. Very many people who are not pupils of any teacher or school are yet students in every proper sense of the word. That is to say, they have an interest in certain material, and are attempting to obtain a thorough understanding and appreciation of that material. Much of what follows in this chapter and in the chapter immediately succeeding may seem to be applicable only to young people in school or college, but, as a matter of fact, it applies with equal truth to the efforts of anyone who is trying to master or comprehend any serious material in any field. All men and women working seriously with any subject which requires any effort at all, other than manual, must be students to some extent. Such people must know something of the principles involved in the work being done. Nine times out of ten there is considerable memorization to be accomplished. Only the rare person who entirely lacks ambition for advancement can get along without any study whatsoever. What is true of the methods of studying in one field is also true, with certain obvious changes, of the methods of studying in all others. What follows applies as truly to the young lawyer, stenographer, artisan or housekeeper as it does to the pupil in school or college.

For the person who has ambition along studious lines it is first of all necessary that he possess some habits of regular study. If you are really serious in your attitude toward the opportunities which school, college or your profession can furnish you, it is absolutely necessary, if you would work with effect and economy, to have some perfectly definite ways and methods of studying. The advantages of having habits of study are precisely the advantages of habit formation which we find anywhere else.

These advantages consist in the acquisition of ease in studying and in economy; of effort. Studying may actually be made easy by habit. The person who studies regularly over a long period of time discovers that the same amount of painstaking effort will accomplish more and more as the time goes on. He acquires facility in study. The rewards of his studious efforts increase out of all proportion to the labor expended as the process becomes habitual.

Further, accuracy in study is increased by habitual regularity. That is to say, if one has the habit of studying in a certain definite way, in a certain definite place, at certain definite times, more will be gotten out of the material under investigation in a stated time than if one studies in desultory methods and at accidentally chosen times and places. If one has formed a pretty persistent habit of application at certain times the act of applying one's self becomes easier and more productive the longer that regularity is maintained, and the result will be that the student who works regularly and according to some schedule will obtain more from his books in the same time and with the same expenditure of energy than the one who works sporadically.

Perhaps the hardest thing about studying is in beginning the period. It is never absolutely easy to break off some pleasant conversation or reading and settle down to a period of hard study, but I think that this fact of commencing is made easier if there be a certain definite time at which one habitually starts studying. When that time comes one will find that the organism is already in the study attitude, as it were, has already started to work.

The importance of routine and regularity in study hours cannot be overestimated. It is of more significance than the amount of time put in. With the sole exception of the possession of unusual ability it is the most important factor in determining whether or not a certain person will be eminently successful in his student or professional life.