Editing Personality psychology (section)

=== Drive theories===

In the 1930s, [[John Dollard]] and [[Neal Elgar Miller]] met at [[Yale University]], and began an attempt to integrate drives (see [[Drive theory]]), into a theory of personality, basing themselves on the work of [[Clark Hull]]. They began with the premise that personality could be equated with the habitual responses exhibited by an individual – their habits. From there, they determined that these habitual responses were built on secondary, or acquired drives.

Secondary drives are internal needs directing the behavior of an individual that results from learning.<ref name="Dollard, Smith, 1941">{{cite book|last1=Dollard|first1=John|last2=Miller|first2=Neil|title=Social Learning and Imitation|url=https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.17786|date=1941|publisher=Yale University Press|location=New Haven, London|edition=Tenth}}</ref>  Acquired drives are learned, by and large in the manner described by [[classical conditioning]]. When we are in a certain environment and experience a strong response to a stimulus, we internalize cues from the said environment.<ref name="Dollard, Smith, 1941" /> When we find ourselves in an environment with similar cues, we begin to act in anticipation of a similar stimulus.<ref name="Dollard, Smith, 1941" /> Thus, we are likely to experience anxiety in an environment with cues similar to one where we have experienced pain or fear – such as the dentist's office.

Secondary drives are built on primary drives, which are biologically driven, and motivate us to act with no prior learning process – such as hunger, thirst or the need for sexual activity. However, secondary drives are thought to represent more specific elaborations of primary drives, behind which the functions of the original primary drive continue to exist.<ref name="Dollard, Smith, 1941" /> Thus, the primary drives of fear and pain exist behind the acquired drive of anxiety. Secondary drives can be based on multiple primary drives and even in other secondary drives. This is said to give them strength and persistence.<ref name="Dollard, Smith, 1941" /> Examples include the need for money, which was conceptualized as arising from multiple primary drives such as the drive for food and warmth, as well as from secondary drives such as imitativeness (the drive to do as others do) and anxiety.<ref name="Dollard, Smith, 1941" />

Secondary drives vary based on the social conditions under which they were learned – such as culture. Dollard and Miller used the example of food, stating that the primary drive of hunger manifested itself behind the learned secondary drive of an appetite for a specific type of food, which was dependent on the culture of the individual.<ref name="Dollard, Smith, 1941" />

Secondary drives are also explicitly social, representing a manner in which we convey our primary drives to others.<ref name="Friedman and Schustack, 2015">{{cite book|last1=Friedman|first1=Howard.S.|last2=Schustack|first2=Miriam.W.|title=Personality: Classic Theories and Modern Research|date=2015|publisher=Pearson|isbn=978-0205997930|edition=Sixth}}</ref> Indeed, many primary drives are actively repressed by society (such as the sexual drive).<ref name="Dollard, Smith, 1941" /> Dollard and Miller believed that the acquisition of secondary drives was essential to childhood development.<ref name="Friedman and Schustack, 2015" /> As children develop, they learn not to act on their primary drives, such as hunger but acquire secondary drives through reinforcement.<ref name="Dollard, Smith, 1941" /> Friedman and Schustack describe an example of such developmental changes, stating that if an infant engaging in an active orientation towards others brings about the fulfillment of primary drives, such as being fed or having their diaper changed, they will develop a secondary drive to pursue similar interactions with others – perhaps leading to an individual being more gregarious.<ref name="Dollard, Smith, 1941" /><ref name="Friedman and Schustack, 2015" /> Dollard and Miller's belief in the importance of acquired drives led them to reconceive [[Sigmund Freud]]'s theory of psychosexual development.<ref name="Friedman and Schustack, 2015" /> They found themselves to be in agreement with the timing Freud used but believed that these periods corresponded to the successful learning of certain secondary drives.<ref name="Friedman and Schustack, 2015" />

Dollard and Miller gave many examples of how secondary drives impact our habitual responses – and by extension our personalities, including anger, social conformity, imitativeness or anxiety, to name a few. In the case of anxiety, Dollard and Miller note that people who generalize the situation in which they experience the anxiety drive will experience anxiety far more than they should.<ref name="Dollard, Smith, 1941" /> These people are often anxious all the time, and anxiety becomes part of their personality.<ref name="Dollard, Smith, 1941" /> This example shows how drive theory can have ties with other theories of personality – many of them look at the trait of neuroticism or emotional stability in people, which is strongly linked to anxiety.