An Introduction to Social Psychology
Chapter 17: Summary of Part II
Luther Lee Bernard
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In Part II an attempt has been made to present the necessary facts regarding the human organism viewed as a complex organization of inherited and acquired behavior mechanisms, responding to typical environments. The method there followed was to present, first, the organization of the various types of protoplasms and to show how they became integrated under environmental pressures; and, secondly, to show how they determine the future behavior of the organism as a whole in response to the environmental pressures or stimuli which condition them. Since the neural protoplasm is the most important of the protoplasms for integrating and determining organic behavior, special attention was next given to the development of neural mechanisms as conductors and distributors of impulses initiated by environmental stimuli and as methods of securing appropriate responses to environmental pressures. The pursuit of this subject made it necessary to show how the dominance of the cerebral cortex in integrating the behavior patterns of the organism is finally lost to the dominance of externally stored meaning symbols and complexes of symbols which constitute externalized or stored neuro-psychic technique or culture. This technique operates back through the cerebral cortex in which it arose and thus, as psycho-social environment, controls the major part of the behavior of civilized man. Finally, since in modern life behavior is dominated primarily by the psycho-social and derivative control environments, and since these environments are reflected in the individual consciousness, from which they arose, it was necessary to present an analysis of some of the major forms of consciousness to male clear the method by which the psycho-social environment is organized and in turn operates upon the human organism, and how the individual
(263) personality responds functionally to that environment. The forms and functions of the unconscious and the subconscious and the co-conscious behavior mechanisms were discussed for the same reasons. In connection with the treatment of the individual's behavior in a social situation, which was the theme of Part II, an outline of the structure and functioning of the environments was also presented. The environments constitute the social and natural conditioning factors to which the human organism responds in integrating and repeating its behavior patterns.
The method of development followed in Part II, therefore, was to proceed from the description of the structure and functioning of the purely biological to an account of the psychological or bio-psychological aspects of the organism and its behavior. An attempt was made at all points to show how these processes are conditioned by the environments which operate upon the organism. It is perhaps not necessary to caution the reader at this point to remember that the author does not consider the individual and the environment as entirely separate and distinct facts. They are in fact more or less interchangeable data. Not only are all organisms actual or potential environment for all other organisms, but parts of our own behavior serve as stimuli for our own other responses. Also, it is impossible to determine at what point the personality ends and its extensions, such as clothing, ornaments, physical extensions of the sense organs, verbal symbols, and other persons with whom we associate and the organizations to which we belong, become external to the self. And the most important of our environments, the psycho-social, is made up of the neuro-psychic behavior patterns and their symbolic extensions. This content is constantly interchanging from what is subjective to what is objective to the individual, and back again.
In Part II the treatment has been mainly analytical and in cross section. In Part III the purpose will be to discover the manner in which the behavior which we outlined in Part II develops or is integrated in the individual under the selective influence of environmental stimuli. This part will therefore be concerned primarily with the dynamic aspects of behavior and
( 264) will be synthetic as well as analytical in character. We shall attempt to trace this development or integration of behavior patterns from the earliest and simplest forms of adjustment mechanisms up to the most complex and abstract. In the early forms of behavior the response is primarily overt, direct, and immediate. In the forms developed later the immediate responses are more frequently internal or neuro-psychic. These later complex and largely conscious integrations of behavior patterns are normally preparatory to total overt adjustment responses by which the organism adapts itself to its environment. But overt neuro-muscular response by each individual organism is not necessarily the sole or chief end of social adjustment. Overt response of any particular type may be inhibited in the individual organism through a long period of time, even for a number of years, in order that the adjustment of the individual or the collective adaptive response of the group to its environment may be all the more effective. Such suspended individual overt response could of course occur only after the higher forms of neuro-psychic technique, including those of external storage, had been developed.
In developing Part II in its more specifically physiological aspects the work and findings of Professor C. M. Child and his coworkers in experimental biology were followed. In presenting the integration and organization of the neural mechanisms and systems the lead of Professor C. J. Herrick was adopted. It has seemed to the present writer that these lines of experimentation and analysis have most to offer as aids to the development of a behavioristic social psychology. These men and their coworkers are, with the possible exception of the late Professor Conn, the first among the biologists to recognize adequately the rôle of environment in integrating behavior patterns in the organism. The sociologist and the social psychologist, working from the standpoint of the integration of the higher conscious, and largely purposive, behavior systems of the organism have for a much longer period recognized the significance of environmental pressures or stimuli as conditioning factors. But it is only recently that even the sociologist has begun to formulate a theory and to make an analysis of the environments which will enable him
( 265) to adopt relatively refined methods in the study of these higher processes of behavior integration in organisms, individually and collectively. It is now possible, as it was not before, for the physiologist and the biologist, and especially for the neurologist and the social psychologist, to find a common meeting ground upon which they can render mutual aid to each other through the utilization of this category of environmental dominance or selection. The biological sciences will have most to offer in the matter of mapping out behavior patterns, while the social and mental sciences, working with their environmental data relative to the types of pressures or the distribution of stimuli will be able to give a wider background to the biologists seeking the causes and conditions of the differentiation of higher behavior patterns.
Although the problem of Part III will be the development and growth of specific behavior patterns arising within the individual as he functions in the adjustment situation, no attempt will be made to go back of the postnatal stage of the development of the organism. In Part II the factors operating prenatally to differentiate the physiological and neural structures were presented briefly in order that the reader might understand how largely the general conditions of the adaptation of the organism to its environment might be set through acquired structure and function, pathological as well as normal, even before birth. But to attempt to give a detailed account of the development and integration of neural patterns before birth would go beyond the limits of social psychology into the fields of neurology and embryology and duplicate poorly the work which has been done so brilliantly by Child, Herrick, and others. Also, the field of social psychology lies almost exclusively in the period of the postnatal behavior of individuals.
