MacDougall Instinct Catalog

The Keys Are Already on the Ring

Before the PR counsel walks into a room, the audience has already been wound up. Not by anyone in particular — by evolution, culture, and the long social training of the species. There are a finite number of emotional keys, and the audience responds to whichever one you insert.

William MacDougall, the psychologist, identified seven of these keys. Bernays imported the catalog into PR practice in Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), listing each instinct with its attendant emotion and working through specific tactics for how the PR counsel engages each one. The catalog has since been questioned as a scientific framework — "instinct" fell out of favor in behavioral psychology after the 1920s — but as a practitioner's map of emotional entry points, it has remained influential.

The catalog is not a theory about why people respond to these stimuli. It's a description of what they reliably respond to, built from observation rather than mechanism. That's both its strength and its limitation.

The Seven Instincts

1. Flight-Fear The flight instinct with its attendant emotion of fear. The oldest and most hardwired. In PR work, health campaigns are the primary application: epidemics, cancer statistics, accident rates. When public health officials stress "the possibility of a plague or epidemic," Bernays notes, they are appealing directly to flight-fear. The "flight" in a mediated context is not physical movement — it is the desire to escape danger, which translates into receptivity to whatever action reduces the threat.¹

Application pattern: Name the threat → make it specific and proximate → present an action that reduces it. The action becomes charged with urgency that has nothing to do with its own merits; the fear transferred from the threat to the remedy.

2. Repulsion-Disgust The least used of the seven in conventional PR practice, according to Bernays. "The instinct of repulsion with its attendant emotion of disgust is not often called upon by the public relations counsel in his work."² This is instructive: disgust is powerful but hard to direct, it tends to spread to the source as well as the target, and it is difficult to associate with constructive action. Negative political advertising and anti-product campaigns (smoking kills, obesity) use it more than positive campaigns.

3. Curiosity-Wonder Suspense. The instinct of curiosity with wonder as its emotion is "continually employed" particularly in advance of major announcements. "Feelers are often sent out to the public to help create curiosity." Book publishers use it explicitly — the O. Henry advertising format ("What is wrong with this picture?"). Government agencies use advance notice of major announcements to pre-prime public interest.³

Application pattern: Withhold the conclusion → release fragments → wait for the audience to demand the whole. Wonder is cheaper than persuasion.

4. Pugnacity-Anger The instinct of pugnacity with its attendant emotion of anger. Bernays calls this "a human constant" — it is always available, does not fatigue, and is more reliably triggered than almost any other response. "The public relations counsel uses this continually in constructing all kinds of events that will call it into play."⁴

The mechanism: frame the issue as a contest. New York City's tuberculosis campaigns explicitly use the language of warfare ("kill the germs," "swat the fly") because the public responds to a fight in a way it will not respond to a civic duty. Martin's observation at the Cooper Union Forum: mass meetings that succeed are almost always about a controversial issue; non-controversial subjects draw handfuls even with heavy advertising. Bernays cites the Lucy Stone League staging a debate at their annual banquet, the Consumer's Committee framing itself as fighting the tariff, contests and prize fights for charity.⁵

Application pattern: Identify (or manufacture) an antagonist → personify it → enlist the audience against it. The audience's energy, which would otherwise be inert, is now mobilized on your side — not because they evaluated your position but because they're already angry.

The danger: Pugnacity can be enlisted on the side of decency and progress, or on the side of oppression. The technique is value-neutral. "From the point of view of the public relations counsel, who is interested from day to day in accomplishing definite results on specific issues, the dangers of the method are only the ordinary dangers of every weapon, physical or psychological."⁶ Bernays does not linger on this.

5. Self-Display-Elation The instinct of self-display with its attendant emotion of elation — the desire to be seen, recognized, and valued by the group. The PR counsel "draws public attention to particular people in groups, in order to give them a greater interest in the work they are espousing." The mechanism: publicly praise someone for their adherence to a cause, and they become a forceful advocate for it. Hospital boards naming rooms after donors. Elaborate philanthropic organization letterheads with distinguished names in large type. Recognition as a tool for deepening commitment — not just thanks but public visibility.⁷

6. Self-Abasement-Subjection The instinct of self-abasement with subjection as its emotion — deference, submission, following. "Self-abasement and subjection, its attendant emotion, are seldom called upon" directly. But this instinct is the passive side of the leader-follower relationship: the reason group members defer to group leaders. It operates in the background of most group-leader targeting strategies rather than being directly activated.⁸

7. Parental Love-Tenderness The instinct of parental love with tenderness as its emotion — the protective instinct extended beyond offspring to the vulnerable generally. Post-war charity campaigns ran almost entirely on this lever: the starving Belgian orphan, the Armenian child, the Austrian and German orphans after the war. "Even issues where the child was not the predominant factor used this appeal." Baby-kissing politicians; silk flags presented by a child to a war veteran.⁹

Application pattern: Personify the vulnerable → make them specific and visible → present the action as protection. The action acquires the emotional charge of protection-of-child even when the policy case is complex.

The Four Additional Instincts

Beyond the seven primary, Bernays lists four more:

Gregariousness: The foundation of the group leader multiplier. The desire to belong to and be identified with a social group. "Man is never so much at home as when he is on the bandwagon." The most potent instinct for PR work because it underlies the entire group leader cascade mechanism.

Individualism: A concomitant of gregariousness — the desire for individual expression within the group. Goes hand-in-hand with self-display; appeals to being special while belonging.

Acquisition: The desire to own and accumulate. "Own your own home" and "Build your own home" campaigns.

Construction: The desire to build and make. Less used but available.

The Innate Tendencies

Four innate tendencies supplement the instincts:

Susceptibility to suggestion: Related to gregariousness — receptivity to ideas that come pre-endorsed by the group
Imitation: The copying impulse; fashion and trend adoption operate primarily through this
Habit: The stereotype mechanism — mental habits create the "reflex images" (stereotypes) that the PR counsel must work with, through, or against
Play: The impulse toward games, contests, spectacle. Street fairs for charities, marble contests by newspapers, horseshoe competitions. Play draws participants without requiring them to be persuaded of the cause

Tensions

The science problem: MacDougall's instinct framework was a product of early 20th-century psychology. The instinct paradigm was systematically criticized by John B. Watson and behaviorists after the 1920s on the grounds that "instincts" were either inborn reflexes (too narrow) or anything humans reliably did (circular). Contemporary behavioral science uses different frameworks (cognitive appraisal theory, evolutionary psychology, dual-process theory) that roughly cover the same phenomena but without the instinct vocabulary. The catalog may be practically useful even if theoretically problematic.

The value-neutrality trap: The entire catalog is presented as available for any cause. Pugnacity can be used to fight tuberculosis or to persecute minorities. Parental love can be used to protect children or to manipulate parents into supporting wars. Fear can be used to promote genuine public health or to manufacture false panics. Bernays acknowledges this neutrality explicitly — the dangers "are only the ordinary dangers of every weapon." This is a sophisticated dodge: it treats technique as value-neutral while acknowledging that deployment determines whether the technique serves good or ill — without specifying who determines the good.

The overlap problem: The seven categories are not cleanly separable. A contest that invokes pugnacity also appeals to self-display (the winner is publicly recognized) and gregariousness (fans identify with their side). Most effective campaigns activate multiple instincts simultaneously rather than one at a time.

Cross-Domain Handshakes

The plain version: MacDougall's instinct catalog is a motivational map. It predicts which emotional doors are unlocked in any given audience. Its structural parallel in the behavioral mechanics domain is the influence-tactics literature (PCP, Cialdini), which maps the same emotional territory using different vocabulary.

Psychology: Fractionation and Suggestability — Fractionation theory operates on emotional state cycling to produce heightened suggestibility. MacDougall's instinct catalog maps the emotional states that can be spiked. Pugnacity and fear are the most volatile — they produce the highest-amplitude states, which (per fractionation theory) generate the most suggestible windows. The insight these two produce together: selecting instincts to activate is not just about the persuasive content but about the emotional architecture of the suggestibility window — certain instincts set up better windows than others. Pugnacity is not just motivating; it may also be fractionation-optimal.
Psychology: PCP Model of Influence — The PCP (Perception-Cognition-Priming) model maps individual-level influence tactics to emotional states and cognitive accessibility. Cialdini's six principles (reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity) are a different mapping of the same territory: which emotional/motivational levers produce compliance. The overlap is significant — MacDougall's pugnacity maps to Cialdini's "scarcity" (finite good creates competitive activation), self-display maps to social proof (what the visible group does), parental love maps to liking. The insight: both frameworks are empirical maps of the same motivational landscape built by practitioners in different traditions. Where they converge is probably real; where they diverge is worth investigating.
Cross-domain: Engineering of Consent — The eight-step methodology Bernays later formalized treats "define your themes" as Step 4. The MacDougall catalog is the motivational vocabulary for that step: which emotional register should the theme activate? The instinct catalog and the engineering of consent methodology are designed for each other — the catalog provides the palette, the methodology provides the process. The insight they produce together: campaigns without motivational targeting are inefficient; campaigns that activate the wrong instinct for the audience may backfire (activating pugnacity when you needed tenderness produces the wrong kind of engagement).

The Live Edge

The Sharpest Implication

The instinct catalog implies that persuasion is not primarily a cognitive process. It is an emotional access problem. You are not trying to convince someone of something — you are trying to find the emotional door that is already unlocked, insert the right key, and walk your message through it. The cognitive case you make after you're inside the door is secondary; it provides the rationalization for the emotional decision already made. This is not a cynical observation about human weakness — it is a description of how emotional and cognitive processing interact in social decisions. The question it forces: if your campaign relies on a strong logical argument, what emotional door did you walk through first? If the answer is "none," you probably didn't get inside.

Generative Questions

The seven instincts were empirically identified in 1923. Do they correspond to any contemporary evolutionary psychology or neuroscience classification of primary emotions? Which ones survive empirical scrutiny and which are artifacts of the theory?
Bernays says "repulsion-disgust is not often called upon." In contemporary political communication (immigration, crime, sanitation, food safety), disgust is heavily used. Has the political environment changed the instinct-utility relationship since 1923?
The instinct catalog has no theory of interaction between instincts — no account of which combinations reinforce vs. cancel each other. What happens when you appeal simultaneously to pugnacity and parental love (fight to protect the children)? Is the combined effect additive, multiplicative, or does one suppress the other?

Connected Concepts

Manufactured Event / Overt Act Theory — manufactured events are vehicles for instinct activation; the choice of event type determines which instinct is triggered
Group Psychology and Herd Instinct Doctrine — the gregarious instinct (from the additional four) is the foundation of the entire group leader multiplier
Engineering of Consent — the methodology that deploys these instincts systematically
Propaganda as Social Technology — propaganda works by activating these instincts at population scale rather than engaging rational evaluation

Open Questions

Does contemporary behavioral science support MacDougall's classification, or have the seven instincts been subdivided, merged, or replaced by incompatible frameworks?
Is there a reliable hierarchy of instinct strength across populations, or does the ranking vary significantly by culture, demographic, and context?