Everybody responds and behaves differently to events based on their own personalities. Some people are morning people, god knows why, but they are. Whereas other people like to stay up later because they get more done at night. That behavior is one that is programed to you from birth. If you don’t like mornings, you cannot make yourself like mornings, it’s not going to happen. But other behaviors are learned, based on our upbringing and environment. Our personalities and attitudes and behaviors are built from everything around us along with the things set in us from the day we’re born. But what is it really that drives us, that motivates us?
Since the beginning of time, people have always been fascinated with the mind and why we do what we do. Most seventeenth and eighteenth century psychologists believed our behaviors were based on “mechanistic”. The mechanistic view is basically the theory of instincts. An instinct is defined as a biological force that commands the organism to act a particular way. The main influence on the instincts theory was McDougall. He figured that instincts are fixed from birth, but they can be adjusted by experiences and training your mind. McDougall tried to reduce all ramifications of human behavior to a list of twelve instinctive drives like fear and curiosity. But soon it was realized that instincts could be the cause of mostly all behavior. Which meant instincts were pretty much describing the behavior, but not giving a clear explanation. But in today 's psychology there are two main focuses of psychology and behavior. As Ezine Articles online explains, “There are two main areas of concentration. The first is the study of the diverse subtopics - such as personality and social development - which is referred to as Academic Psychology. The second is known as Applied Psychology, which puts varies principles into practice to resolve real world problems.” (Article Source: