4. How do instinct and culture/learning interrelate in human behavior?

Question

4. How do instinct and culture/learning interrelate in human behavior?

Answer 1

Instinct is a hugely over-rated, intellectually lazy category.  Not all learning is cultural, but a good part of it is a matter of adaptation via experience in the world.  Cognitive and motor skills are shaped by interactions with the shape of the world, Most of what is tossed into the category of instinct can be accounted for otherwise.  

___There are some innate tendencies, though.  There is also a domain of the acquired unconscious that includes acquired skills from riding a bike to the mountains of cumulative cognitive skills from which and by which a consciously aware adult ego is formed.  And then there are the operations of choice performed by the conscious ego, including attentional choices, the constructing of options, and purposefully-carried-out activities.  Since often-performed conscious acts become habitual and unconscious, the acquired unconscious is by far the biggest part of behavior, with the conscious ego exerting a directive influence on which habitual activities will be performed.  This directive function isn't all-powerful, and can be impaired by extremes of pain, emotion, pleasure, illness, blows to the head, fatigue, etc.  

___If you pay attention to even those activities you perceive as consciously attended to, you'll see that it's only the tip of the iceberg that gets attended to.  The motor skills, the turning of the screwdriver, the grasping of the parts, etc. are performed accorcing to unconscious, habitual skills, while the conscious attention is on the most-relevant peculiarity in the task.  

___The greatest part of what we respond with when we respond with our "gut" is acquired, not instinctual.  Or perhaps this would be better put in terms of relative primitivism and vagueness.  We may have some vague, primitive instincts, like sociability in general, but the way it manifests itself is determined primarily by acquired habits and cognitive skills.  Otherwise we'd be running around sniffing one another like dogs.

Answer 2

i've met people with b.a. degrees with no common sense whatsoever.  i've met people struggling with everyday life that had more sense in their left pinkie.  we are privileged and we are not