An Introduction to Social Psychology
Chapter 25: Summary of Part III
Luther Lee Bernard
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Part III has been essentially a continuation and an application of Part II. The principles of habit integration worked out in Part II were here developed and applied to the general problem of personality development in the child and adult. The term personality building or development was used in Part III because the psychological problem before us was to find out how the infant born into the world with an incomplete behavior equipment of instinctive mechanisms acquires a sufficiently complete set of behavior patterns to enable him to make the necessary adjustments to his environment as lie finds it and as it develops around him. This process of developing in himself, in response to the environmental stimuli to which he reacts, behavior sets or adjustment mechanisms is also the process of personality building. An equipment thus attained for the control of behavior in a social situation or for making adjustments to environment is personality.
The whole perceptual or recognitive process is preliminary and accessory to the completion of personality development. Every recognition of relationship of self to environmental pressures or stimuli, each orientation of the organism with reference to stimuli, builds up within the organism response mechanisms which become a part of the personality content. For personality is behavior and potential behavior, or readiness to respond to stimuli and the inhibitions upon response.
One may be conscious or unconscious of his responses and inhibitions in the adjustment situation. The unconscious or vaguely conscious adjustments probably predominate. But consciousness of one's adjustment behavior undoubtedly strengthens one's control over the process of adjustment itself. Likewise, consciousness of one's adjustment capacities, attitudes, values, beliefs— recognitions of the inner self— greatly
(404) integrates personality by rendering it self-conscious or under the direct supervision of an analysis of the adjustment process. If later these adjustments lapse into the unconscious it is ordinarily because no conflict has arisen to interrupt their automatic functioning or to transform them.
Personality is built up through all of the processes of recognition because all of them contribute to the integration of behavior patterns and the establishment of gradients in the neuro-psychic and the neuro-muscular protoplasmic systems. But the chief sources of personality development are those forms of recognition which we call projective and vicarious, or imitative. It is not necessary to know we have a personality trait or complex of such traits in order to possess personality. Every adjustment we make to environment, overt or inner, muscular and neural, conscious or unconscious, contributes to our personality content. All of our recognitions, direct and original, or indirect and vicarious, of the overt or of the psychic or symbolic personality, constitute so much of a contribution to the personality or behavior control organization.
But we live in a very complex world and our behavior sets, which in the aggregate we call personality, must also be complex and highly developed, even highly self-conscious at points, in order to give us the greatest degree of control over ourselves and others in an adjustment situation and in that complex of adjustment situations which we call life. No one person could possibly make by his own unaided efforts, all of the analyses and behavior integrations which are necessary for successful adjustment in this complex modern world. It is necessary that each one shall profit from the experience of others and take over their behavior patterns by imitation. In this way achievement in adjustment and in personality integration becomes coöperative or collective.
The second and third chapters in Part III dealt with the mechanisms, conditions, and consequences of suggestion, both as a form of imitation and as an independent method of conditioning and releasing responses. We fumed that, as a form of imitation, suggestion is irrational and capable of much less elaboration of personality content than rational and conscious imitation. Also, suggestion is frequently the result of the
( 405) stereotyping of the imitated response and a high degree of effectiveness in conditioning the response to a highly selected partial stimulus or cue. In other cases suggestion is merely a method of ready release of any strongly conditioned response by the presentation of the stimulus, usually in the form of a highly selected cue or shibboleth, or other stereotyped and conventionalized symbol. Altogether suggestion, either as imitation or as an independently conditioned stimulus-response mechanism, plays a considerable part in our behavior. In the next chapter we discussed the mechanisms, types, and results of imitation in personality building and adjustment making. We found that the larger part of what we are and of the adjustments which we make is the product of this process of vicarious recognition, or imitation.
The next three chapters of Part III outlined the actual steps by which the child and adult develop in themselves, primarily through imitation, those behavior integrations which we call personality. The treatment here is primarily from the standpoint of the types of models used for the purpose of vicarious development through imitation. We found that the young child imitates first of all the concrete behavior of the persons in his immediate environment. The law of his growth in personality development is that of progress in imitation from the more simple and concrete to the more complex and abstract models, or at least of behavior patterns in the models. The child is ever striving to expand the scope of his personality and to encompass more intricate and far-reaching types of adjustment. Thus he begins with his parents, brothers and sisters, and playmates, as models, and progresses through the whole range of actual personalities with whom he comes in contact. From each of these he takes what he is capable of perceiving or understanding, and when they no longer afford him sufficient stimulus, he passes on to a wider field of models for vicarious personality development.
Thus, generally before he reaches his 'teens and early adolescence, he has developed well established habits of drawing his personality material from ideal personalities. This process began much earlier through the instrumentality of behavior stories told him by parents, older children, and teachers.
( 406) It now makes use of biography and fiction, and finally of the more concrete and descriptive aspects of history. This also is personality imitation, but it is imitation of ideal personalities. He prefers ideal personalities as models, because they are not subject to the same limitations of achievement and the same imperfections as actual and proximate personalities. The great mass of the population perhaps still does not get much beyond this stage of personality development through imitation.
The third stage of vicarious integration is the most important for a proper development of personality content and adjustment mechanisms in the modern world where so many of our most important contacts are indirect and abstract. This third stage of the imitation process consists of the imitation of abstract qualities and principles and is indirect rather than direct in character. The models are primarily those found in art, particularly in literary art, in philosophy, and in science, especially in the social sciences. This is the imitation or assimilation of abstract generalizations, as a method of making short cut and more inclusive adaptations to the social world as a whole. These generalizations of behavior appear to some extent in the more concrete forms of art, but especially in literature, and more particularly in philosophic and scientific literatures.
These latter types of literature have been developed primarily for the purpose of communicating a generalized or conceptual symbolization of human behavior to those who can assimilate it, that is, who can embody it conceptually and symbolically in their inner behavior mechanisms and retranslate it into concrete overt responses. This is the most important of all of the stages of imitation and out of it comes the most highly concentrated development of personality or orientation mechanisms. As yet, only a small portion of the population has developed this method of imitation beyond the most rudimentary stages. It is the problem of our educational system and agencies, formal and informal, to realize the importance of abstract invitation and to stimulate a universal exercise of it.
This final chapter of Part III brings us to the first two chapters in Part IV, which are concerned with the growing abstractness and indirectness of contacts in society and the in-
(407) -creasing abstractness of our formulation of ideals and aims. Part IV will deal with the organization of the stimuli-giving environments which dominate or condition the processes of personality integration in the individual and the collective integration of response. In Part III we studied the psycho-social environment as it presents itself to the child in the forth of models for imitation and the responses which the child makes to these models. In Part IV the viewpoint is different. `ire shall study the psycho-social environment from the standpoint of its objective organization and control mechanisms
