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Roles of implicit processes: instinct, intuition, and personality

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Abstract

The goal of this research is to explore implicit and explicit processes in shaping an individual’s characteristic behavioral patterns, that is, personality. The questions addressed are how psychological processes may be separated into implicit and explicit types, and how such a separation figures into personality. In particular, it focuses on the role of instinct and intuition (two kinds of mostly implicit processes) in determining personality. This paper argues that personality may be fundamentally based on instincts resulting from basic human motivation, along with related processes, within a comprehensive cognitive architecture. This approach is implemented as a computational model. Various tests and simulations show that this model captures major personality traits and accounts for empirical data. The work shows how a cognitive architecture with the implicit–explicit distinction may capture instinct, intuition, and personality.

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Notes

  1. Note that a generalized notion of “drive” is adopted in CLARION, different from the stricter interpretations of drives. As discussed before, it is a generalized notion that transcends controversies surrounding the stricter notions of drive (Sun 2009).

  2. Briefly, this set of primary drives is essentially the same as Murray’s (1938), with only a few differences. Similarly, comparing this set of drives with Reiss’s (2010) set, one can see that they are highly similar (but with some differences). So, the prior work by these and other researchers in justifying their frameworks may be applied, to a significant extent, to this set of drives as well (McDougall 1936; Murray 1938; Maslow 1943; Reiss 2010; Sun 2009).

  3. Note that drive strengths actually could be a function of the equation above; in the simplest case, an identity function may be assumed, as shown above.

  4. Personality is, in part, the result of interaction among different drives, among other things. There may not necessarily be a direct relationship between the characteristics of a single drive (or a single group of drives) and a hypothesized corresponding trait (as consistent with the view of Smillie et al. 2006).

  5. This is because new goals created may be in effect cultural artifacts. Different cultures may lead to different goals for individuals to pursue, some of which are culturally created (such as the pursuit of money in itself).

  6. Alternatively, in case of Q-learning being used in the ACS, r may be replaced by ΔQ(s, a) in the equation above (where s and a are the state and the action performed).

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported in part by the ONR Grants N00014-08-1-0068 and N00014-13-1-0342. Thanks are due to Paul Bello for his support. Thanks are also due to Riccardo Viale and David Over for their comments.

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Sun, R., Wilson, N. Roles of implicit processes: instinct, intuition, and personality. Mind Soc 13, 109–134 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-013-0134-4

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