An Introduction to Social Psychology

Chapter 6: The Environmental Bases of Behavior

Luther Lee Bernard

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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ENVIRONMENT— In the previous chapter it was necessary to refer to the objective bases of behavior in the form of environment. Child's theory of the integration of the organism involves environmental factors as well as those of heredity. From his viewpoint the organism is integrated through its behavior and its behavior is a function of the reaction of its specific protoplasms to the environmental pressures. In this chapter it becomes necessary to analyze the environment as that set of objective factors which coöperate with the inheritance factors in the integration of behavior patterns through its determination of axes in the organism. The pressures of the environment determine the axes of the organism by which it orients itself with reference to the environment; the metabolic and the physico-chemical properties of the protoplasms determine the gradients and dominance in the organism, and all these factors together, determine the behavior. The social psychologist can therefore no more disregard the environment than he can ignore the heredity of the organism, if he expects to have an adequate understanding of the origins and controls of human behavior.

As a matter of fact, however, environment has been largely neglected by social scientists generally and particularly by the social psychologists. In the textbooks of this science the concept scarcely appears with any degree of definiteness. Where the term is used it is employed with a vague and somewhat general reference which is not at all comparable with the concreteness and highly organized character of tile treatment of the concept of inheritance; although this concept also is at times handled all too vaguely. There is great need for ren-

(70) -dering the concept of environment definite and for analyzing it into its constituent parts, in order that the social psychologist may have a clear notion of the objective as well as of the subjective factors which integrate for individual organisms their patterns of behavior.

COMPLEXITY AND DIFFERENTIATION OF ENVIRONMENTS— Environment, which is usually spoken of in the singular, is in reality a very complex set of phenomena. Environment does not function as a whole or as a unity in the determination of the behavior of organisms. Its unity, like that of habit, is conceptual rather than objective and sensory or experiential. No two persons ever come under exactly the same environmental controls. Even though they live in the same family or on the same street they will in all probability be subject to very different types of environments, because the subjective factors segregate them into different categories as far as the incidence of environments is concerned. Brothers and sisters of different ages, with different heredity and with differences in health and training, etc., react to their environments in vastly different ways. These differences in subjective control of their reactions actually segregate for them different kinds of environments; for while the physical and biological environments remain fairly constant for all people in a group, whatever may be their subjective reactions to them, the social environments are so fluid and often so intangible that two persons living in daily contact may be subject to very different environmental influences of this kind. One person may read fiction, another science; one may frequent musical concerts of a high order, another vaudeville and musical comedies; the one may attend church services and engage in civic welfare activities, the other may spend her time for social contacts at receptions, parties and in neighborhood gossip. And yet these two people may live in the same household and to the unanalytical appear to have identically the same environments.

If the psychic and social environments are highly fluid and intangible, it is equally true that not all aspects of the environment have equal objectivity. As a recent writer has said, it is not possible to determine exactly where the self ends and the environment begins. He speaks of the environment as

( 71) existing in layers which may be successively peeled off as we approach that hypothetical entity which we call the self. But the self is so inextricably interwoven with the environment, is interconnected with it in so many ways, that if we are not careful we may destroy a large part of its identity by peeling off so many layers of environment that we kill the roots of the personality. For the roots of the personality are in the environment quite as much as in the heredity of the organism. In a way the more physical the environment is the more objective it may appear to be. But even our own bodies may be considered as an environment for our neural organization and the psychic behavior processes which are dependent upon the organization of neural protoplasm. The psycho-social environment is particularly closely connected with our psychic life and it is very difficult to segregate it functionally, even in a tentative way, from the self, which is so closely dependent upon it for its organization and content. These facts of the relatively unequal degrees of objectivity of phases of environment should be kept constantly in mind in the study of environmental pressures.

THE STUDY OF ENVIRONMENT Is RECENT— Although the general concept of environment is sufficiently ancient, the actual analysis of environmental factors at work in producing specific behavior is comparatively recent. Aristotle in his Politics made some references to the influence of geography and climate upon the location of city states and their prosperity, and his imitators repeated his generalizations. Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century considerably expanded this theme; and Bodin and Montesquieu in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of our era attempted fairly systematic treatments of the social effects of climate and geography. The Spirit o f Laws of the last named contains a well organized, if not a particularly accurate, discussion of the subject. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought forth many anthropogeographers, particularly Buckle, Ratzel, and Huntington, who Have elaborated iii great detail these themes.

The influence of inventions, as a form of environmental pressures, has also been extensively treated by the anthropologists during the last hundred years or so, and very recently

( 72) there have been some attempts to reduce this phase of the subject to something like systematic order. The environments which are here termed psycho-social were recognized with some degree of clearness by the Sophists, the social philosophers who preceded and were in some cases contemporaneous with Socrates and Plato. Some of these thinkers actually denied final determination of the right and the expedient to the gods and to natural law and declared that the proper criteria of conduct were to be found in public opinion and in custom, tradition, and convention. But it is doubtful if any other thinkers went as far in their analysis of the psycho-social environment before the nineteenth century. In the latter part of this century Bagehot, Tarde, Ross, and others of their school, began to objectify, classify and explain the intangible psychic processes which become organized in the life of groups. No previous writer had attempted to classify and describe the environments in such a way as to make the concepts extensively available for control purposes in building up patterns of individual and collective behavior.

The reasons for this neglect of environment are doubtless many, but a few of them stand out conspicuously. In the first place, the connection between environment and behavior is by no means obvious, except possibly where the grosser forms of the physical and organic environments act directly upon the organism and produce sensory results as well as changes in the tissue organization of the body. Thus many of the effects of temperature, humidity, soil, and geographic contour and surface must early have become apparent to more thoughtful observers, as they did to Aristotle, Bodin, and Montesquieu. But it is not as easy to perceive the connection between the intangible psycho-social factors in the environment and the changes which are wrought in our own personalities when we are brought in contact with them. Before we can achieve such an understanding it is necessary for us in some way to objectify these intangible or abstract psychosocial factors and to organize them into conceptual categories in the environment. This is what the Sophist philosophers of Greece in a measure learned to do; and this is also what the social psychologists in the second half of the nineteenth cen-

( 73) -tury, writing under the influence of the new processes of communication which had grown up as the result of the industrial revolution, elaborated in something approaching scientific clearness and detail.

On the other hand, the concept of inheritance was early defined in its simple forms, because the biological connection between parent and offspring was perfectly apparent to every one. The degree of resemblance was sufficiently marked and its occurrence so frequent that no one doubted the connection.

But it is worthy of note that abstract theories of inheritance of a complex and differential pattern did not appear until the nineteenth century. The Mendelian theory, the most systematic and most generally accepted of all of these complex abstract theories of differential inheritance, did not begin to become generally known until the year 1900.

SUPERPERSONALITY AS ENVIRONMENTAL CAUSE OF BEHAVIOR —  Another significant reason why environmental analysis, as an aid to the explanation of the origin of behavior traits, came late is that the approach to an explanation of social and psychic causation was through the theological concept of divine will and the metaphysical concepts of natural law and its derivatives, reason and intuition. This is really another way of saying that such causal explanations were at first concrete and only gradually evolved into an abstract analysis. The will of the gods was a synthetic and projected explanation on the analogy of individual will which man had actually experienced and observed in operation as a cause. Before the individual could grasp the concept of a collective exercise of will and a collective response, he created superpersonalities on the analogy of human personalities which he knew, and he ascribed to them a power to influence individual and social behavior greater than any power he himself possessed. The superpersonal environment was thus a projected personality environment.

NATURAL LAW AS ENVIRONMENTAL CAUSE— The concept of natural law evolved indirectly out of that of personal divinity, through a process of increasing depersonalization. At first it was the semi-animate, semi-abstract Nous which took the place of Zeus as a universal cause of things. But Nous

(74) long retained some of the attributes of personality, such as love, justice, order, and power. When finally the abstract concept of natural law as a set of universal rules objectified into a timeless and spaceless infinity, evolved from the half personal concept of Nous, it became necessary to find some method by which this intangible essence of natural law could penetrate into tangible human beings and produce their behavior. The method by which this problem was solved involved the invention of personal concepts of an individual reason and intuition and the social concept of general or political reason or law. Thus human conduct, as individual behavior and as social action and law and the various collective codes and procedures, was regarded as the extension of this principle or essence of natural law infiltrating itself into personality and collectivity by means of direct contact between these and the universal. The concept of divinity was now relegated to a position in the background, as the deus ex machina, which had created natural law as the systematized thought of divinity but no longer concerned itself with this law. In this way the account of causation in individual and collective behavior became metaphysical. It was directly descended from the ancient personal will explanation so closely akin to magic which had created, for purposes of the objectification and universalization of the causes of behavior, the numerous systems of mythologies or theologies. The natural law environment was, therefore, not only a projected but also a conceptualized environment.

SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS AS A FORERUNNER OF ENVIRONMENTAL THEORY— A scientific account of the origin and organization of behavior could arise only as concrete and definite analyses and measurements were made of the relationships between classes of objective phenomena on the one hand and human beings acting individually and collectively on the other hand. Such analyses, as we have seen, were begun by such men as the Sophists, Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun, Bodin, Montesquieu, and others, and are now being rapidly perfected. The growth of scientific facts and the analysis of environmental data are closely correlated processes. Each supplements and aids the other, and each is a function of the other. This

( 75) process of scientific analysis has gone far enough forward that it is now possible to offer a tentative synthesis of results in the form of a classification of the types of environments and their pressures, as an aid to an understanding of environmental controls over individual and collective behavior.

A SCIENTIFIC CLASSIFICATION OF THE ENVIRONMENTS— A general outline classification of the environments, with representative subdivisions, may be presented as follows

I. The physical (inorganic) environments

1. Cosmic, 2. Physico-geographic, 3. Soil, 4. Climate, 5. Inorganic resources, 6. Natural physical agencies (falling water, winds, tides, etc.), 7. Natural mechanical processes (combustion, radiation, gravity, etc.)

II. The biological or organic environments

1. Microörganisms, 2. Insects and parasites, 3. Larger plants used for food, clothing, shelter, etc., 4. Larger animals used for food, clothing, etc., 5. Harmful relationships of larger plants and animals, 6. Ecological and symbiotic relationships of plants and animals acting indirectly upon man, 7. Prenatal environment of man, 8. Natural biological processes (reproduction, growth, decomposition, assimilation, excretion, circulation, etc.)

III. The social environments

I. Physico-social environments

(I) Tools, (2) Weapons, (3) Ornaments, (4) Machines, (5) Transportation systems, (6) Communication systems, (7) Household equipment, (8) Office equipment, (9) Apparatus for scientific research, etc.

2.Bio-social environments

A. Non-human

1) Domesticated plants, used for food, clothing, shelter, medicines, ornaments, (2) Domestic animals used as a source of food, (3) Domestic animals used as a source of power, (4) Medines and perfumes of an organic character, (5) Animals used as pets and ornaments, etc.

(76)

B. Human

(6) Human beings serving as laborers (slaves, etc.), (7) Human beings serving as ornaments, entertainers, etc., (8) Human beings rendering impersonal voluntary or professional service, (9) Regimented human groups, such as armies, workingmen, etc., (10) Men coöperating voluntarily through the use of language mechanisms.

3. Psycho-social environments

( 1 ) The inner behavior (attitudes, ideas, desires, etc.) of individuals with whom we come in contact, (2) The uniformities of inner behavior occurring in collective units and perceived as customs, folkways, conventions, traditions, beliefs, mores, etc., (3) Externalized language symbols used to project the above types of behavior and to condition responses in ourselves and others, (4) Those inventions, primarily physical, which perform a similar service in conditioning psychic responses, but usually with less facility and completeness.

IV. Composite or institutionalized derivative control environments (derivative combinations of the various types of environments organized for purposes of social control).

I. General in character

The economic, political, racial, esthetic, ethical, educational, etc., environments.

2. Special in character

The American, Italian, Jewish, Scandinavian, New England, Southern, Argentinean, Republican, Democratic, Catholic, Buddhist, revolutionary, conservative, feminine, masculine, etc., environments.

THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENTS— The physical (inorganic) and biological environments represent nature in practically unmodified form. These environments have been operating upon man from the periud before he became human and continue to influence his behavior both individually and collectively. The operation of the natural environmental factors upon man is both direct and indirect. Examples of direct operation may

(77) be found in such matters as many of the effects of the sun's heat, of electrical disturbances, cold, the change of the seasons, degrees of humidity in the atmosphere, altitude, the action of winds, floods, rainfalls, etc., the effect of bacteria and kindred lower organisms, the influence of the mother through the prenatal period of the individual's development, etc. All of these direct forms of influence of the natural environments take effect primarily upon the protoplasmic organization of the individual by more or less direct impact and not through the method of stimulus and response, which is the common method of environmental influence upon neural protoplasm.

The indirect influences of the natural environments are vastly more numerous and more important and are exercised through the manner in which they condition the collective adjustments of man to nature. That is, climate and temperature, the seasons, humidity, altitude, the supply and character of plants and animals providing food, clothing, shelter and power, the surface configuration and topography of the geographic environment, the supply of plant food in the soil which conditions the relative plentifulness or scarcity of food, the occurrence of the metals and minerals and other inorganic resources which may be utilized by man for industrial purposes, and the presence of insects and other carriers of disease germs determine in the main the conditions under which men can live together in groups and make an effective common or coadaptive adjustment to natural and artificial environments. They set the limits in large measure to the size of populations and to the age, sex, and occupational constitution of those populations. Also, as a consequence, they indirectly determine the form of political organization, the prevalence and distribution of culture in the form of the fine arts, science, and humanitarian attitudes, the quality of religious feeling, and various other psycho-social manifestations of human behavior. Thus it is seen that the effect of the natural environments upon the psychic and psycho-social behavior of men, both individual and collective, is almost entirely indirect. Furthermore, it is probably becoming constantly more indirect as we learn to cause the natural environments as a whole to operate upon man primarily through the derivative physico-social and bio-social environments,

( 78) which are the result of man's transformation of the natural environments.

THE LOWER SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTS— These are the physico-social and the bio-social environments which have arisen as part of man's technique of adjustment to the two great natural environments which originally shaped the evolution and development of all living things, including man. It is through these environments that man first came to deal indirectly rather than directly with nature, although he never lost entirely his direct contacts with the native physical (inorganic) and organic environments. The physico-social and bio-social environments are primarily environments of invention and training. Artificial shelter, clothing, and prepared foods of all kinds belong in the category of either physico-social or biosocial environments. Tools, weapons, ornaments, cities, transportation and communication systems, machines, equipment, scientific apparatus, books, ice, fire, chemical compounds, are some of the inventions of this type. Man has produced them through his inventive skill as aids in what we sometimes speak of as the control of nature, and he has produced them from the materials of nature.

On the other hand, domesticated plants and animals, human as well as non-human, improvements of biological types through breeding and training and nurture, many forms of medicines and creature comforts of man, pets and ornaments, are the products of a transformation of his organic environment on much the same basis as that in which the physical environment is transformed by man. There is, however, this partial and significant difference between the transformation of the physical environment and of the organic environment into their derivative physico-social and bio-social environments. In the former case the transformation occurs relatively completely in each generation or other short period, the concrete products having to be produced from physical nature at definite intervals as they are consumed in use. But in the case of bio-social products, especially those which arise through control of inheritance or through the institutionalization of nurture and training, the new instrument tends to persist largely of itself and to reproduce its kind either through bio-

( 79) -logical mechanisms or through the continuity of custom and the consequent persistence of institutions. Thus the ability of man to invent and use oral language gives to his behavior a continuity and a quality as a phase of the bio-social environment which is not approached by the physico-social environment. The distinction here is by no means absolute; but it is significant enough to deserve mention because of its relation to the permanent physico-social and bio-social processes.

THE LOWER SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTS AND BEHAVIOR— The physico-social and bio-social environments are intimately connected with human behavior, individual and collective, in two well-marked ways. In the first place, it is human behavior that creates the inventions and gives the training, physical, biological, and psychological, which constitute the content of these two environments. The earliest inventions are of course empirical and are often accidental to such an extent that they involve little constructive or projective thinking. But even so they are the product of behavior that is of necessity neuro-psychic in content and constitute standardized forms of adjustment to environment. The higher forms of inventionsphysical, social, and method— are particularly the product of projective thinking, in some cases of the most abstract type. Such inventions call into play the highest types of cortical neural organization and utilize the most abstract forms of storage symbols and content of the externalized neuro-psychic technique described in the previous chapter. In such cases man transforms his environment— sometimes his concepts of itas an aid to adjustment to that environment by means of behavior of the most advanced type. Most inventions are cooperative and therefore involve the exercise of collective as well as of individual behavior. The same is true of training.

Not only did the inventions and training which constitute the physico-social and the bio-social environments arise out of human individual and collective behavior as a result of efforts, conscious or otherwise, to control more advantageously man's adjustment to his environment, but these inventions and training also react back upon the behavior of men in a multitude of ways which have the greatest significance for the future organization and evolution of their adjustment processes. Many

( 80) inventions react upon man by direct impact in ways quite similar to those in which the natural environments operate directly upon him. Many also operate indirectly by conditioning the size and constitution of populations, the forms and effectiveness of economic organizations, the types of political and religious and other cultural and control institutions and organizations, and even the major interests and functions of men. These invention and training elements of the physico-social and bio-social environments do vastly more to condition the collective behavior of men, by setting limits to it and by giving stimuli and material for its development, than the corresponding untransformed factors of the natural environments. The conditioning effect upon collective behavior of modern transportation and communication, of power-machine industry, and of cheap food, clothing and shelter, to mention only a few illustrations, is so striking that it does not require elaboration.

THE TRANSITION TO THE PSYCHO-SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT—  But besides these direct and indirect effects of the material social environments upon behavior, it is in connection with these environments that we first come into touch with the tremendous importance of the psycho-social environment for the control and differentiation of human behavior. Many of the inventions of the material social environments and much of the training of human beings, especially in language content, are carriers of psycho-social content and thus make this latter environment effective in the control of human behavior. This is especially true of books and other printed matter and of all objects of art. It is true also of the trained human being who is at once a bio-social product and a carrier of vast quantities of that language technique which is so large a constituent element of the psycho-social environment. The psycho-social environment cannot exist without carriers and these are to be found in the two lower social environments, especially in the human bio-social environment. In fact, the customs of men constitute bio-social environment, and the same may be said of conventions, mores, folkways, fads, fashions, crazes, in their external manifestations. But since it is to the psycho-social content rather than to the carriers that we respond, we ordi-

( 81) -narily speak of customs, conventions, mores, etc., as psychosocial rather than as bio-social environment. The latter environment in its earlier forms was created gradually as the result of the accumulated neuro-psychic adjustment technique arising out of man's compulsory adaptation to physical nature. That is, he no longer adapted directly to the natural world, at least in any preponderating degree, but he adapted to it indirectly through his bio-social environment of men cooperating through the use of language in the collective forms of customs, folkways, conventions, mores, etc. This coöperating bio-social environment he built up as a buffer or protector between himself and the remorseless natural world with which in his early history he came so rudely and harshly in contact.

Originally our institutions and conventions in their overt behavior aspects grew up as phases of the bio-social environment on the basis of gesture and vocal language and overt cooperative behavior of men. They were the overt aspects of the inner habit organization or neuro-psychic technique. This was also the source of the psycho-social environment, which arose with the practice of attaching standardized or conventionalized meanings to external symbols, and especially with the invention of written language or symbols. It is in the symbolic behavior of men that the highest forms of the bio-social and the lowest forms of the psycho-social environment overlap. Just to the extent that symbolic behavior comes to exceed in importance total overt responses or behavior, as language takes the place of action in adjustment, just to that extent must the human bio-social environment be transformed into this more stable and voluminous and abstract content of the psycho-social environment. The psycho-social environment is no longer simple and concrete and transparent; it constantly becomes more abstract and general.

THE PSYCHO-SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT is the environment of inner or neuro-psychic behavior and ideas. But, since neuro-psychic processes cannot be observed directly and cannot exist without organic or inorganic carriers, we can know this environment only through its symbols. These symbols are manifest in the overt (usually symbolical overt) behavior of other men and in detached or externalized language symbols, pictorial

( 82) art, sculpture, books, phonographs, etc., including even the physical inventions and trained animals, plants, etc., which have acquired the power of conditioning neuro-psychic behavior in men. Thus either the bio-social or the physico-social environments may carry this symbolic content which conditions in us psychic responses or by which we recognize meaning or psychic behavior. Even the abstract language symbols used in literature must be carried by a physical invention, such as a book, magazine, radio, phonograph, if they are not transmitted directly from one person to another. Thus the lower social environments and the psycho-social environments overlap with each other to a marked degree, just as all other environments overlap with one another.

Much of the psycho-social environmental content reaches us directly through the language behavior of individuals and we adjust to this environment in this form merely as to the psychic or language behavior of individuals. In such cases we think only of individuals and to all intents and purposes our environing world is made up of psychically behaving individuals and of environmental objects of a lower order. This is especially true of the less cultured or intellectual types. They do not think particularly of the uniformities of psychic behavior which exist in their psycho-social environment. But less frequently we see the human element of our psycho-social environment not as separate persons but as groups of persons behaving uniformly, or we may even see it as abstract collective processes or forces or tendencies in the psycho-social environment. We may speak of these as customs, folkways, conventions, traditions, beliefs, mores, fads, fashions, crazes, gossip, propaganda, public opinion, even science and religion.

The question has been raised as to whether such abstractions can really constitute psycho-social environment, since they are intangible and cannot offer stimuli directly to the senses. It is true that they cannot be perceived directly as sensory objects in the same way in which an apple or a pencil can be perceived They are graspcd conceptually rather than through concrete perception. However, the difference is only one of degree. The gestalt theorists have reëmphasized for us the fact that we almost never see all of the details of an object.

( 83) We ordinarily see all objects conceptually. That is, on the basis of our response to certain strategic or skeleton stimuli we integrate the perception or concept of the object as a whole. We see what we are prepared by previous experience to see. Some people can see only the behavior of individuals and this not very well, while others can see the behavior of groups of men or the collective behavior of men, even though they do not see all of the men or all of their behavior. And some few can see such collective behavior very well. Their previous integrations of perceptions of behavior enable them to project the parts of the behavior which they do not see through their senses directly and to see abstractly or conceptually the larger psycho-social processes in society. It is in this way that we have learned to apprehend customs, traditions, conventions, folkways, mores, public opinion, in fact societies, publics and all mankind. We respond to such stimuli quite as definitely as we respond to the stimulus of a single person, but more abstractly. Even the individual is an abstraction, but less so than the group. We may say, therefore, that these abstract uniformities of behavior are as much objective realities as persons, but more abstract realities. They also condition our responses quite as much when we have acquired the power of integrating them perceptually or conceptually. They are not mere metaphysical fictions as some psychologists would have us believe.

But the most important phase of the psycho-social environment in our civilization is the externalized symbolic one of newspapers, books, etc. It standardizes and stabilizes our responses and it carries a psychic content more abstract and weighty than that of individuals or collections of them.

BEHAVIOR AND THE PSYCHO-SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT— The double relationship between behavior and environment referred to above is especially well marked in connection with the psycho-social environment. It is the psychic behavior of individuals primarily which constitutes the psycho-social environment, either when externalized and stored in the form of meaning symbols and complexes of meaning symbols of the neuro-psychic technique, or when merely objectified and communicated through the symbolic behavior or language as customs,

( 84) beliefs, conventions, etc. Because the psycho-social environment is built wholly out of objectified neuro-psychic behavior as meaning, it is ordinarily the most fluid of all of the environments. It is never twice the same, but is changing constantly as men think and as they develop attitudes, especially as they think and act collectively. Man has integrated and projected this environment for himself as a sort of bulwark or protection against nature and through its aid he has largely transformed nature into the derivative physico-social and bio-social environments. Science, as one of the larger, and unquestionably the most important, of the elements of the psycho-social environment, has been most useful in this process of transforming the natural environments into the derivative environments.

But the psycho-social environment in turn re-creates the behavior of man. It was this environment which largely transformed him from an element in the original natural organic environment into an element in the bio-social environment, on the biological side. It made of him a trained and domesticated animal at the same time that he as such an animal was creating the psycho-social environment out of his own neuro-psychic behavior. The two processes have always been reciprocal. But to-day the volume of the psycho-social environment, especially on the externalized side, has become so great and its refinement and differentiation and definition so specific and effective that it acts as a powerful force to create new behavior patterns in nascent or developing individuals. The race throughout its history has created the psycho-social environment, but the psycho-social environment creates exclusively and completely the complex mental and moral and social character traits of individuals. This environment which mankind, collectively, has created now dominates completely their spiritual life. Through the stimuli which it offers it molds them entirely, and if it affects men differently at different times and in different places this is because it is possessed of an almost endless variety of forms and intensities acid operates upon men of vastly different capacities and characteristics.

THE. COMPOSITE OR DERIVATIVE CONTROL ENVIRONMENTS are, as the title implies, made up of all of the other environments,

( 85) with the psycho-social invariably in the ascendancy. This is the environment which actually functions in our social organization. The other environments, when considered as wholes, are more or less abstractions. Their constituent elements never are assembled in one place and at one time in all their completeness, but it is possible to think of them as synthetic wholes arising out of the multiplicity of our experiences and observations. But the composite or derivative control environment, either general or special, represents an actual organization of selected 'aspects of the other environments which are recognized as having more or less concrete, as well as conceptual, integration, although no one of these environments in its entirety ever operates upon an individual or upon groups. Thus if we consider a national environment, such as the Irish People, or the economic or industrial environment, or the Christian Church as an environment, we can readily conceive each of these as objective and concretely integrated facts. Each does possess a considerable degree of objective unity of organization, and yet no one person subject to the environment is equally affected by all aspects of it. Nor are any two people affected by nominally the same environment in the same ways. Even here different ones of these composite control environments affect the individual or the group with different degrees of concreteness and inclusiveness.

DEGREES OF DEFINITENESS OF ORGANIZATION— It is through these environments that society becomes organized, that is, becomes most truly and completely a society or a group of societies and associations. This social organization possesses all degrees of definiteness and concreteness. It may, at one extreme, have the indefiniteness of organization of the "nationality" or the "race," which is a more or less loosely assembled group of concepts of customs, traditions, mores and folkways, and institutions, changing slowly and possessing no definite internal unity, but a certain vague conceptual unity. At the other extreme, it may possess the definite unity of a highly organized association performing a specific function, such as the W.C.T.U., or the Republican party, the Baptist Church, or a local civic improvement club, or a bank. Even

(86) in these illustrations of associations different degrees of objective and conceptual unity are observable.

INSTITUTIONS— In between these two extremes are to be found all sorts of gradations, most outstanding of which perhaps are what we ordinarily call institutions. Institutions are themselves highly composite environmental phenomena, the component elements of which possess varying degrees of definiteness and unity. In any institution will be found a certain number of definite associations. Possibly the institution itself may have the nominal or actual character of an association, as in the case of some religious denomination or a political party. Alongside of the more or less definitely organized associations in institutions will be found many other elements, such as traditions and customs, mores and folkways. These various elements of such an institutional environment function together as a variable and inconstant unity. The nature of an institution changes slowly, as its content changes, and its life history is long, but not eternal.

COMPOSITE CHARACTER— Elements from all of the environments may be assembled in the derivative control environments, and such is usually the case. Some of the more limited and definitely organized associations may lack elements from the natural environments, but all other environments will be represented. In the more general derivative control environments, including the social institutions, all elements are present. But in all cases the psycho-social environment is dominant in the composite or derivative control environments. The very existence of control, with a certain degree of consciousness of the nature and functions of the control environment, implies this fact. Here we find the two-fold or reciprocal relationship of behavior and environment most completely illustrated. Constantly the behavior of individuals and groups is molding and reshaping the character of the derivative control institution, and this institution is in turn molding the character of constituent individuals and groups and associations. Often this interchange of behavior pressures is highly conscious and purposive oil the part of individuals subject to the environment. But whether conscious or unconscious in its operation, it is in such behavior relations that we find the chief subject matter of so-

(87) -cial psychology and it is out of the study of such relationships between behavior and environment that the science of social psychology grew.

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR DISTINGUISHED —  Frequently it has been necessary in the preceding pages to use the terms individual and collective or social behavior. The meaning of these terms should now be clear. Individual behavior is the response of the integrated organism to stimuli from its environment. The nature of this integration and the part which environment plays in it were elaborated in the preceding chapter and will be discussed in some of its details in the following. Collective behavior, on the other hand, is the occurrence of identical or similar responses in several individuals at the same time and place or in response to the same or similar stimuli, or of unlike responses which have a reciprocal or supplementary relationship to each other.

COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR AND UNIFORMITY OF RESPONSE —  Such identity or similarity of responses may arise from identity of inner organization of individuals or from their being conditioned by identical or similar stimuli. In practice of course it usually proceeds from both of these conditions. Where people respond in this similar manner we speak of them collectively as groups, whether they have face-to-face contacts or are connected only by stimuli operating at a distance.

Modern life has developed so many communicating agencies that it is possible, almost inevitable, that vast numbers of people should be subjected to the same or similar stimuli and that their behavior should take on a highly uniform character. In relatively settled or static periods and societies the derivative control environments, especially the institutional environments, assume such a highly uniform character that almost all behavior seems to possess a collective aspect at the same time that it is individual. So true is this that the individual may stand out from the group scarcely at all. In more dynamic times and societies, individual behavior is less uniform in character, because of the rapid change iii stimuli acid of their unequal incidence at different places. But it may still be collective behavior because it is reciprocal or supplementary or both. But on the whole, due to the universalization of communication

( 88) apparatus, modern society approaches in its wider behavior processes the highly uniform character which obtained in the primitive primary group, organized and perpetuated under the sway of custom and tradition and convention and relatively untouched by the dynamic force of science or revolutionizing experience. This wider uniformity of modern response is not due so much to the sway of custom and tradition as to the universality of modes and content of communication, that is, to convention in the large. It must not be supposed, however, that the uniformity of our complex civilization is as specific and simple as that of primitive groups. Although communication makes possible the wider spread of stimuli, the responses to these stimuli are more various within certain general limits.

COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR AND DISSIMILARITY OF RESPONSES— A more highly complex type of collective behavior is that which is not composed of the uniform or similar responses of several individuals to the same or similar stimuli, but is in the nature of interlocking reciprocal responses of the members of a group to one another or of supplementary responses of different individuals to the same or concurrent stimuli. It is the reciprocal and supplementary character of such responses which integrates into a group or society the organisms which make these responses. Of course reciprocal responses must also be coöperative or supplementary rather than conflicting if the group or society is to remain integrated. A large portion of the collective behavior of modern societies is of this reciprocal and supplementary, but differential, character. The reason for this is that modern societies are too complex and too rapidly changing to permit of complete dominance by any one stimulus or for responses to be of uniform character in minor details, although there may be relative uniformity in the larger patterns of behavior. The greater the variety of different types of plants growing on any unit of area the larger the total number of plants that area will accommodate. Similarly, societies can become increasingly complex in their behavior only by differentiating the content of that behavior increasingly. But all of these differences in behavior must be integrated into a larger functional unity by having a common objective in adjustment, such as that of survival, or conquest, or production,

( 89) or any other end. Coöperation in solving common problems does not necessarily imply uniformity of behavior in detail. But it must involve supplementation and integration in keeping with the larger values and pressures.

ALL BEHAVIOR IS OF COURSE INDIVIDUAL, for response must occur through the integrated organism. And practically all behavior, whether individual or collective, is social. Even individual behavior is nearly always response to stimuli from a social environment or is conditioned by such stimuli or by responses of other individuals or by collective behavior which serve as stimuli. It is possible to think of groups or societies as organisms, and the experimental biologist Child takes this viewpoint, already made familiar in a different connection by some of the leading sociologists of the nineteenth century. In such a case we might conceivably speak of collective behavior as an indivisible or irreducible form of response to environmental stimuli, and some might be inclined to regard this as the true social behavior. But closer examination shows us that after all the unity in the behavior reduces itself to similarity and supplementariness of the responses of the constituent or individual members of the groups. The group itself is both the product of this uniformity of response to similar or reciprocal and concatenated stimuli from the environments and is one of the environmental conditions which tend to uniformize and coördinate the stimuli which operate on individuals within the group. The group or society is therefore both effect and cause of response.

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