An Introduction to Social Psychology

Chapter 26: Primary and Derivative Groups

Luther Lee Bernard

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INTRODUCTORY— We have now completed the discussion of the processes and technique by which personality is built up in the individual and by which this socialized individual secures his adjustments to his environing world. We shall now turn, in this last major division of this book, to a brief consideration of those psycho-social and bio-social organizations -,which constitute the general setting in which the individual develops and which determine the direction of his development. These conditions are his environments. Without some knowledge of the ways in which these environments operate upon the individual we cannot understand adequately why the individual responds as he does, why certain models are offered as stimuli, and why certain types of personality rather than others are selected. However, Part IV will not consist of an analysis of the social environments as such, but rather of the ways in which they exercise their controls. Nor shall we attempt a complete analysis of their functioning. Such an analysis belongs rather to the applications of social psychology to the problems of social organization and social control than to the outline principles of the science of social psychology itself. We shall deal in this fourth major division primarily with groups, communication, leadership, and institutional and noninstitutional controls as they bear upon the socialization of the individual and the determination of his collective behavior. These determinants are themselves forms of collective behavior which are antecedent to the socialization of the individual or the molding of him into participation in collective behavior.

In this chapter we shall deal with the development of group integrations from their primary to their derivative forms. A primary group may be defined as a face-to-face organization in which the personality or behavior of the individual is selected

(412) from his earliest years, while a derivative group is either a face-to-face or an indirect contact organization of individuals and includes all group forms which have been elaborated from the original primary groups. This distinction is of fundamental significance in the process of personality integration.

PRIMARY GROUPS —  Professor Cooley has shown very clearly how primary group contacts produce primary ideals or attitudes. The concept of the primary group is a very useful one in social psychology. Primary groups are face-to-face organizations of individual responses on the basis of very elementary or primitive impulses or sets of impulses, native or acquired, in human nature.[1] These groups condition the individual's responses from his earliest days. The behavior itself is likely to be relatively simple, although under modern complex environmental conditions it may become very complex and even abstract, in its derivative manifestations. The most primary of all groups is perhaps the family. After this come the play group, the neighborhood, school, church, occupational and other groups, in increasing degrees of derivativeness. These primary groups are the first with which the new born and developing child has direct and conscious contact, as described in Part III. His contacts with most of the less primary groups are indirect rather than direct. That is, he comes in contact with nonface-to-face derivative groups only indirectly, through his distance contacts with their members, while he has direct or face-to-face contacts with all of the members of his primary groups. Not only are the primary groups the first ones which shape the personality of the modern child by direct contacts, but they are also groups which come down from the remotest antiquity; or, at least, they are modifications of primitive groups of the same general character.

The family and the neighborhood and play groups have existed in some form or other from the earliest periods of social organization of any sort among men. The school and church and occupational groups are modern derivations from the early general community group, in which the functions of religion,

(413) education, and occupation were not clearly differentiated. The community of early times was less abstract and complex than it is among us, and all of these modern derivative functions were performed pretty much by the group as a whole in the rudimentary and less specialized manner characteristic of that time. Or, if there were persons specialized to take the lead in the performance of these religious training and occupational functions, the whole group participated and the functions of the followers were but little specialized. Each lay person had much the same relation to the community activities as the others. The main divisions of classes along lay lines in the primary community group depended upon functions and was with regard to age and sex.

PERSONALITY INTEGRATION A FUNCTION OF THE PRIMARY GROUP— The primary group, whatever its form or type, has always had the function of molding the personality of the young and of controlling the behavior of the old. Thus the primary group was, and still is, a sort of educational and administrative organization at one and the same time. We of modern times, who have come to depend largely upon the less personal group controls of a more or less abstract and derivative character, cannot easily realize the degree to which the earlier primary groups determined personality and conduct. Those types of family organization which are most nearly patriarchal still surviving among us in certain races and creeds perhaps afford our best illustrations of this fact. But supplementary to the family as a closely knit personality forming and administrative group was the clan and later came the phratry and the tribe. The clan was so typical of the function of the primary group here discussed that we still speak of this sort of closeness of personal character molding and control as clannishness.

The most typical early form of the family as distinct from the clan was the patriarchal. This family in its heyday of development had the power of life and death and enslavement over all of its members. There was no appeal from its power and it molded the personalities and prescribed the collective and individual behavior of each member. Elders, especially males, were the official models of all younger members, just as the

( 414) chiefs and other persons of authority were the models in the community group, whether clan, phratry, or tribe.

This power of the family has greatly diminished in our day. The first to be set free, psychologically and legally, were the adult males. The women also gained freedom little by little, until in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they are perhaps freer in some respects than the males from responsibilities and obligations to the family group. The children have also gradually come out from under the control of the family until now it is a serious problem whether the family group is able to exercise sufficient psychological, economic, and legal pressures upon the developing child to give him a proper respect for and adherence to the traditions and customs of the greater society in which he lives.

THE PRIMARY GROUP AND DISCIPLINE— The great contributions of these early primary groups, especially of community, family, and play groups, to the socialization of the individual were three in number. First and most immediate, perhaps, was that of discipline. These groups set the models for the young to copy and compelled them to conform. This meant that any aberrant tendencies and selfish motives were repressed. Cooperation was the great lesson learned and it was enforced ruthlessly in practice wherever it was necessary to the survival of the group. There was, to be sure, much individual choice. In many cases, for example, one could elect or refuse to go on a war or hunting expedition, but if the person so choosing was conceived to be acting contrary to the interests of the group he would be strongly stigmatized and possibly expelled or outlawed. Conformity and coöperation were just as compulsory in the early patriarchal family, because it was an economic unit and failure to coöperate would have been disastrous. This coöperative discipline was necessary primarily for economic and protective reasons. Discipline is still an important function of the primary group, but it is now more difficult to enforce, partly because derivative group organizations have done much to disintegrate the powers of the primary groups and partly because the derivative groups have in some measure taken over the function of discipline.

THE PRESERVATIVE AND TRANSMISSIVE FUNCTION OF THE

(415) PRIMARY GROUP—  A second function of the old primary groups was that of preserving the useful technique and wisdom of the past. The chief capital of the primitive groups was in this knowledge of technique of production, of the control of the good and evil spirits, of the hunt, or war, and the like. In days before there were books or clay tablets or parchments or papyri in which to record the important cultural technique in detail it was necessary to preserve the forms and content of knowledge intact and without serious modification by oral transmission. Hence there grew up a much greater emphasis upon the formal side of knowledge and technique than we can conceive of as necessary among us, where we trust to reference books, formulas, and libraries for the accurate preservation of important processes. Out of this enforcement of accuracy of form in part grew ritual, most of which has now lost its meaning to us, although the form may continue as an esthetic or magical practice. Custom and tradition and convention were sanctified. Even now when such precautions are no longer necessary for our welfare, these forms still persist, as does the habit of fearing change, and we find it difficult to secure sufficient innovation to take care of needed progress.

Of course this fear of losing the valuable community technique is not the only cause of ritualization and the fixing of customs and traditions. The very fact that set habits tend to organize around themselves a protective envelope of feeling, which becomes unpleasant with any sort of interruption, has much to do with keeping things as they are. But it is also to be observed that people who have nothing to fear from change usually find less dissatisfaction in it and may even develop a sort of habit of change which is in itself pleasant and exciting, and sometimes disintegrating to character. We must still pay a great deal of attention to past ways of doing things, and doubtless we always shall. The primary group is now relatively much less important as a preserver and transmitter of useful culture than it formerly was. These functions are now performed primarily by indirect communicating media, such as books and journals, and by libraries. The abstract and derivative social organization has largely taken the place of the old primary groups in this respect.

( 416) THE PRIMARY GROUP AND PRODUCTION —  The third compelling function of primary group life was that it made each one a producer. By being forced psychologically and socially to copy some one else as a model and to conform to those patterns emphasized in the primary group, one became a producer or worker in the group without realizing that he was performing a vital function. He found his adjustment unconsciously, as it were, and largely through play. In primary groups, and especially in the closely knit ones of primitive society, the play activities of children were much more functional and in the nature of the imitation of their elders. It is not until society comes to be organized on a derivative group basis that play ceases to be so functional socially or occupationally and becomes more artificial, being made up of carefully planned and organized games which perhaps train the child in general cooperation and in self-discipline and in the exploitation of his powers, but do not initiate him into the socially productive processes. While the primitive child learned the major arts of life, such as hunting and fighting, directly from the group through play, the modern child makes similar occupational and functional adjustments primarily through formal training agencies, such as the school.

This change comes about because occupation ceases to be to the same extent a general community matter and is largely withdrawn from community view and therefore there is now less in the way of models for play imitation by the young than formerly. Also the occupational processes have become more specialized as a result of the derivative organization of modern society. The consequence of this fact for play is that the occupational and other adjustment processes are more difficult to imitate in play by the young. The old and original primary groups no longer teach occupations to any considerable extent, except perhaps housekeeping and agriculture; and even training for these occupations is going largely into the schools of one sort or another.

THE DECAY OF PRIMARY GROUP CONTACTS— The old primary groups are no longer performing their functions of personality integration and adjustment of the individual to society with the same degree of facility and completeness as

( 417) formerly. The reason for this is that the old primary groups are no longer the centers of so large a proportion of the most important activities of men. Only the most minor industries, except agriculture, now center in the family; and recreation and amusements have been largely transferred from the primary play group for all except the very young to commercialized amusement organizations. The child can no longer get adequate samples of the collective life in which he is to participate from the home and neighborhood and community, because the most important collective activities center outside of these original units of social organization and are more abstractly organized than these relatively concrete primary groups can organize them. The old neighborhood and community no longer exist intact outside of rural life, and even there they are being broken up or merged into larger and more abstract units by the automobile, interurban freight and passenger transportation, the rural free delivery, newer forms of economic organization and technique, such as agricultural coöperation, and the advancement of science, invention, and industrial organization generally.

The family also shows serious indications either of dissolving or of being reorganized on a more flexible basis and with more functional contacts with and extensions into large and more derivative social units and processes. The different members of the home, except on farms, probably have no occupational interest in common. All of them may work in different parts of the city. The industries in which they labor most likely have an abstract overhead organization which is neither visible as a whole to the participant worker nor resident in his community. If the work is technical and specialized, the worker can learn his occupation only through the channels of apprenticeship or of the trade school. Thus the individual's contacts with industry, both through training and through participation in the productive processes, are becoming increasingly abstract. Citizenship and community life contacts are becoming equally abstract, both in the training for their exercise and in their performance.

THE DOMINANCE OF THE DERIVATIVE GROUPS— The meaning of all of this is that the derivative group is growing into

(418) dominance as a molding and controlling mechanism over the primary group. The contacts are indirect or distance contacts to a greater extent, and the type of communication is largely or mainly by symbols transmitted indirectly from person to person through abstract communication media, and is therefore predominantly intellectual and abstract, although not necessarily so. There are all degrees of primariness and derivativeness in groups, from the most primary, the family, to the least primary, such as the international scientific and governmental or trade societies. The following list of groups, by no means complete, in which there is an attempt at arrangement on the basis of the transition from the most to the 'least primary groups, will serve to illustrate the principle of increasing derivativeness of group organization and of social contacts here set forth.

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Although these groups are listed in the general order of their increasing derivativeness, it must be apparent that it is not possible to draw such a dividing line with complete precision at all points. A group may be more primary or more deriva-

(420) -tive than another in some respects and less so in other regards. For the purpose of illustrating the tendency of the derivative groups to grow in numbers and as centers of dominant organizations at the expense of the primary groups it is not necessary to make such close distinctions. The general fact can be illustrated sufficiently well by the partial list here presented. Each group below the neighborhood has some elements of a derivative organization character in it, and even the play and neighborhood groups are not entirely and always original face-to-face groups, although they are usually and in the main such. The line drawn after the community is intended to indicate that at this point groups cease to have the face-to-face character, although they have long since ceased to be primary.

CAUSES OF THE GROWTH OF DERIVATIVE GROUPS OR SOCIAL ORGANIZATION ON AN INDIRECT CONTACT BASIS— The growth in importance of the derivative groups has come about because of the improvement and complication of the technique of men's coadaptive adjustments to nature and to each other, and the consequent expansion and abstraction of human contacts. When men possessed little or no technique of adjustment except the direct exercise of those instruments which nature gave them, they lived very close to nature and in small groups, for only in small groups could they gain their sustenance from nature. But the growth of productive technique complicated the production process and increased its efficiency. Larger groups appeared and the problem of distribution arose, especially after division of labor appeared and indirect as well as direct contributions to the productive process became possible. Training in the principles of production and distribution became necessary, and accessory processes, such as communication, transportation, the invention of productive instruments, the maintenance of exchange and credit systems, the growth of publicity and propaganda, and the like, appeared to complicate the factors generating group contacts. The human instruments in all of these processes became more widely scattered and contacts between them became of necessity more abstract and symbolical. Overhead organizations which arose to coördinate and make effectively purposive their be-

( 421) -havior were likewise of necessity abstract and indirect in their organization.

In this way group organizations arose and split off in somewhat the manner indicated in the list above. The school came as a modification and partial synthesis of the earlier and more primary groups mentioned. It and other face-to-face contact groups, such as local occupational groups, political or other assemblies, local coöperative societies, clubs, churches, fraternal orders, and the like, are not primary in the strictest sense of the word. They are derived, but their derivation is not acutely marked, for most of their contacts are still of a face-to-face type. All of these and others like them retain many or most of the characteristics of the more primary groups, such as localness, early and direct participation by the members, as in other more primary groups. But all of these partially or wholly derivative local groups are affiliated with overhead or directive organizations which are derivative in a high degree. Examples of these are the state and national educational associations, church hierarchies, councils and governing boards of various types, national officers or councils of fraternal orders, etc. The development of these more abstract and indirectly communicating derivative groups has been in the nature of an overflow of functions from the local groups and the extension of fellowship or participation with increase in numbers to include those who live at greater distances. There has also come the necessity of some sort of coördination of local group activities as the technique of wider and indirect adjustments has developed, as collective behavior has become more complex, and as the contacts themselves have extended farther afield.

Even the old primary community groups have expanded and developed various stages of overhead or control groups of increasing abstractness. Thus has appeared historically the tribe and nation on an ethnic basis and the county, kingdom, empire, and various international organizations, on a civil or political basis. Business also has grown out of the simple communal modes of production and distribution until its many tiers of overhead organization rise into vast and complicated abstract corporations or derivative groups, some of which are

(422) international. Even the family has its normal extensions into the school, the settlement, the day nursery, the supervised playground, and its pathological or semi-pathological extensions into the family welfare association, associated charities, various clinics, etc. Most abstract of all are the scientific associations, dealing almost wholly with conceptual symbols, which serve as a means of evolving and disseminating the technique by means of which derivative social organizations of all sorts can be perfected.

THE NECESSITY FOR DERIVATIVE GROUPS— Contacts in modern life have come to be at such long range and so indirect in character that derivative groups have become a necessity. They dominate our social organization, just as the primary, close or direct contact groups of primitive men dominated the social life of that time. Important as the primary groups are in the molding of character of the members of groups and in training individuals for their functions in the social complex of behavior, the derivative groups are even more important.

The fact that the derivative groups are not directly apprehensible by the senses and that their nature and functions must be appreciated through rational processes of inference and induction does not detract from their significance. As great overhead abstract organizations, having their plan of integration codified in the form of a constitution or charter or some similar legal document, or at least operating on the basis of a common or group or public "opinion," they work with an exactness and a continuity of policy which is at least as marked as that of face-to-face groups whose "purpose" or modus operandi may change as the whims of the members change. Also the power of the derivative groups, especially of the great abstract and relatively constant ones, such as the state, industrial, religious, educational, and scientific associations, is very great. As a consequence they dominate the primary groups from which they were originally derived.

The derivative groups grew up as extensions of the primary groups in order to regulate those contacts and functions which had transcended the limits of the primary groups and their functions were at first subject to the direction of the primary groups. This fact is illustrated by the early practice of form-

( 423) -ing confederacies out of smaller established political groups instead of at once welding them into a strong national or other overhead and independent organization. The confederacy was given only as much power as was necessary to perform the functions which had outgrown the smaller and more concrete group organizations, and sometimes even adequate powers for these functions were denied. But gradually, with the increasing complexity of social life, these wider functions became more important, perhaps more numerous, than the narrower ones. Consequently the overhead or derivative organizations were granted or assumed greater and greater powers, until they came to dominate the smaller and more primary groups. This movement was first observable in political groups. But the same thing has happened more recently in industry and finance, and it is now occurring with respect to the family and the community. It is not possible to check it, nor is it desirable to do so. But it is important, for purposes of social justice, to make sure that the powers of the great abstract and derivative groups shall be organized and employed for the good of all of the members instead of for the advantage of only a few who happen to be serving as directors.

METHODS OF INDIRECT CONTACTS IN DERIVATIVE GROUPS — The methods of contacts in the highly derivative groups are very different from those in the more primary groups. In the latter they are direct. That is, the behavior of the person giving the stimulus to another member of the group may be perceived and integrated perceptually by the receiver of the stimulus. The stimuli may come in the form of touch, temperature, some chemical substance, movement, spoken or written symbols, and they may be apprehended through any one or more of the senses. But in the case of indirect transmission of stimuli between members of the derivative groups the giver of the stimulus is not ordinarily in direct sensory contact with the receiver of the stimulus. Consequently communication is by means of stored symbols, and intermediary carriers must be utilized to transmit them. The derivative groups could not function effectively, could not even be formed, until these carriers had been developed.

The earliest carriers of indirect contact stimuli were adapted from the carriers of tradition and custom, by means of which

( 424) the more abstract cultural content of earlier groups was preserved for the later ones. Thus the medicine man and seer, and later the minstrel and traveler, were concrete personal carriers of distance contacts. Apostles and missionaries came later to perform a similar function, and we have modern analogues in the persons of preachers, lecturers, and propagandist speakers of all sorts. Early and recent art, but early more than recent, for reasons stated in a previous chapter, have also been the means of making these indirect or derivative contacts. The modern theater, movie, and radio have extended and transformed some of these transmissive functions of the minstrel, propagandist, and artist.

The greatest of all of the means for the indirect transmission of contacts are the abstract storage symbols of an intellectual character. These came late, but they have been of the very greatest importance. Books, newspapers, magazines, have extended the voice of the propagandist and have multiplied infinitely the messages of people at a distance. Not infrequently men and women speak to hundreds of millions of people, occasionally to practically the whole literate population of the earth, through these agencies. Their power to create uniformity of behavior and of purpose among large sections of mankind cannot well be overestimated. It is not strange, therefore, that with such aids the derivative groups have been able to grow to almost unlimited size and largely to displace or transform and dominate the primary groups.

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Notes

  1. For Professor Cooley's definition of the primary group, see Clow, F. R., "Cooley's Doctrine of Primary Groups," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XXV, p. 327

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