Some Neglected Variables in Contemporary Conceptions of Decision and Performance

Abstract

Contemporary conceptions of the determinants of a tendency to perform a particular response are reviewed and found to be stimulus bound. They tend to attribute instigation to act in a certain way to the occurrence of a stimulus (external or internal) which serves to excite an otherwise latent associative mechanism like Habit or Expectancy in an organism implicitly assumed to be at rest. It is proposed that activity already in progress (initial activity) and the persistent effect of previously aroused but unsatisfied behavioral tendencies (inertial tendencies) be included in formal conceptions of the contemporaneous determinants of decision and performance. These suggestions follow from the premise that a living organism is constantly active and the assumption of inertia applied to behavioral tendencies.