An Introduction to Social Psychology

Chapter 30: Indirect Contact Groups and Communication

Luther Lee Bernard

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WANING OF THE DOMINANCE OF DIRECT CONTACT GROUPS IN THE CONTROL OF COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR— Powerful as are the direct contact groups which we have described in organizing public opinion and in initiating collective behavior types, their influence is being surpassed by that of the indirect contact groups to be described in Chapter XXXI. Communication is being constantly intellectualized, and even the emotions are being associated with and expressed through abstract symbols. Interests expand to embrace larger numbers of people spread abroad over wider ranges of territory. Communication of the whole of the content of our culture by means of direct contacts is becoming increasingly difficult or impossible. Hence the wider and more important interests are organizing groups on an abstract and derivative basis. The old primary groups remain and always will remain, but their function in promoting collective behavior is becoming supplementary to the work of the derivative groups instead of continuing to dominate the latter. Discussion is now largely through the printed page, and dialectic which held the stage as a method for the discovery of truth in the times of the great Greek philosophers takes diminished rank in comparison with the positive findings of the laboratory and statistical investigation. The appeal of oratory, although still heard and applauded, is of small volume in comparison with propaganda in print, which reaches— if less vividly— to the minds of myriads instead of hundreds.

An indirect contact group is a derivative group which has lost its face-to-face character. When well integrated, it is the highest or most abstract form of the derivative group. Consequently it is the most widely and effectively functional of all modern groups. Because the contacts of its members

(466) are indirect it is organized upon the basis of public consciousness and public opinion. Without the operation of these types of functional consciousness in some degree, publics and indirect contact groups generally could scarcely be said to exist. These functional phases of consciousness which are at the basis of indirect contact groups are organized through communication. Communication and discussion are the matrix out of which associations, societies, and publics arise. Consequently this chapter will deal with communication. The following chapter will be concerned with the types and functions of indirect contact groups and especially of publics.

THE ORIGIN OF INDIRECT CONTACT GROUPS— Indirect contact groups and publics are a product of civilization and literacy. They began to have existence with the invention of oral language and the spread of the use of its symbols for purposes of communication beyond the limits of the horde and clan. But it can scarcely be said that the use of spoken or written language alone created derivative indirect contact groups, although such group organization was not possible without language. The underlying cause of the expansion of groups beyond the limitations of direct or face-to-face contacts was the growth of productive technique or inventions. These inventions enabled people over wide territories to make similar and coadaptive or coöperative adjustments to nature, and the rise of media and methods of exchange kept primary groups in functional contact with each other. Thus the surplus population of the primary groups did not split off and begin independent existence, but formed similar units, in the form of clans, phratries, and tribes, and later of nations, and kept up their contacts with the parent and sister groups on the basis of their similarity of productive technique and exchange relationships. Language was the communication technique by which these coöperative or coadaptive relationships were made possible.

But almost as important as language in binding these expanded populations together was the similarity of their social inventions, such as their beliefs, traditions, customs, conventions, and the functional organization of these, such as their religious, domestic, economic, and embryo political institu-

( 467) -tions. But the most important bond of all, because it was at once the medium of communication and the storehouse for those social inventions, was language. Language is the means or technique by which all of these other preliminaries to the derivative or indirect contact groups are realized or made effective. They grew up in the period of language and were not possible before them.

THE EXPANSION OF DIRECT INTO INDIRECT CONTACT GROUPS— While derivative groups were initiated in the period of oral language, such groups could not be much more than compound direct contact groups before the advent of written language. There was no such thing in primitive society as individuals or even families living as independent units, apart from a close immersion in face-to-face groups, while at the same time they were united in a larger and more abstract derivative group by indirect contacts. There was no adequate technique of communication for such abstract relationships.

Early man lived a more or less communistic life. With the methods of food getting which were at his disposal it was not possible for individuals or even families, except in unusual circumstances, to secure adequate and continued means of subsistence by their own unaided efforts and at the same time protect themselves from wild animals and other men. Life had to be coöperative. Because of the lack of abstract symbols of communication, which developed to any considerable extent only with the coming of written language and the storage of objectified neuro-psychic technique, the sole type of cooperation which could be developed effectively was communal or direct contact coöperation.

With the coming of written language and consequently more abstract and inclusive symbolization of relationships, coopteration over a wider range of contacts, including the indirect, became not only possible but also easy and is now the dominant relationship in our society. We still live in face-to-face groups. We are born and reared in such, and we work and amuse ourselves in them but we are constantly becoming less dependent upon them, and even they are dominated and shaped by the indirect contact groups. Our modern world, especially the urban world, finds more and more of its essential contacts at

( 468) a distance, and of an abstract character, while the less essential contacts of amusement and recreation, and the like, are more frequently reserved to the face-to-face groups. But even these less essential functions of life are coming to be engineered or organized and directed from above or through abstract and indirect contact channels.

CHANGES IN THE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION— DIRECT EXPRESSION —  The growth of indirect contact groups depends, therefore, upon the expansion of the means of communication. The means of communication have undergone a development from the concrete and direct to the indirect and abstract, which corresponds to the development of groups from the face-to-face type to those with distance contacts. We have already noted the fact that early communication was by facial and bodily expression and gesture. Primitive man was comparatively more dependent than we are upon the emotional expressions of the face and the posture of the body and gestures. Yet with all his dependence upon such expressions as a means of communicating his attitudes, the content of such expression was in all probability not so rich then as now. The mobility of the modern face and the multifold expression of feature, of eye, and of posture, are remarkable. There is nothing in the expression of the savage which corresponds to it, just as there is nothing in his life and emotional experiences which adequately compares to the emotional richness of the modern man and woman. The actor in civilized society utilizes these forms of facial expression and gesture to indicate a refinement and elaboration of feeling which is largely foreign to the primitive man. And all people among us are in some degree amateur actors of the same kind.

The primitive man wears a mask in his ceremonials to symbolize in stereotyped form the expression of the spirit or personality or to represent the character of the power which he is impersonating. Modern man dispenses with masks and makes his face and body indicate the idea or attitude which he wishes to convey. Consequently modern expression is much more fluid and mobile and the content of such communication is vastly more subtle and intricate. Yet we must not suppose primitive man to have been expressionless. The very fixity

( 469) and stoicalness of his expression when on parade or in the presence of strangers was a part of his aptitude at expression and served to indicate very well the attitude which he had at that moment. Other movements and attitudes, in which the stranger was not so likely to see him off his guard, were characterized by other and equally appropriate types of expression. The expression of the primitive man is inferior to our own as a means of communication, not so much because of any lack of adaptation of the form of the expression to the content or feeling, as because of the lack of richness and variety.

PRIMITIVE AND MODERN ART COMPARED— Art in its utilitarian aspects begins as the means of representing and preserving the direct expressions discussed above. Early art, as was shown in a previous chapter, is a form of writing serving the function of perpetuating the bodily attitudes of men and animals and the facial expression of men. It communicates from man to man and from group to group the perceptions and emotions of men. Gradually, on the one hand, it becomes abstracted and stereotyped into interchangeable word and idea symbols which form the basis and the early content of intellectual writing. On the other hand, it retains its flexible diverse form and concrete pictorial symbolization and is perfected as a means of emotional expression and communication. This is art proper, as distinguished from writing in the intellectual sense. Thus modern representative and plastic art— painting and sculpture— are vastly more expressive, or at least have a greater refinement of expression, than primitive art of the same general type.

Modern art has a greater expressiveness for two reasons. One is that modern life has vastly extended the range of experience and deepened it. The other is that man has become self-expressive, instead of trying merely to depict the forces, powers, and personalities which rule him. The widening of human experience has enabled man to perceive more in nature and in man, in human relationships, aims, fears, hopes, than could have been dreamed of by early man. Increase in experience, according to the principles of recognition and imitation which were presented in Part III, deepens the powers of perception and feeling. These two powers together increase the

( 470) facilities of the individual for making projective elaborations, which are the essence of artistic creation. Just as the life of modern man is richer, so is his power to understand others greater, and his power to communicate his attitudes and perceptions and ideals to others is correspondingly augmented. This accounts for the wealth of expression in modern plastic and pictorial art.

WHY ART BECOMES MORE INTELLECTUALIZED— But this increased emotional expressiveness of modern art does not continue to grow unrestrainedly. Modern life becomes increasingly intellectual and demands more and more that its means of communication shall become intellectualized in order to carry the heavy load of ideas and principles which are necessary to effective adjustment in our abstractly organized world. Even plastic and pictorial art are affected by this demand for intellectualization. This does not mean that art becomes less expressive. As a matter of fact, it becomes more expressive, but its expressiveness is more under control. As said earlier, modern symbolism in art is largely an attempt to intellectualize it, to stereotype and conventionalize its forms in order to use them to communicate ideas and systems of thought in a thought-heavy civilization. This fact explains the puzzling observation so often made by the archeologist to the effect that the art which is so vigorous and responsive and flexible in the youth of a people often becomes so formal and stereotyped and unbending at just that point where apparently the wealth and culture of the people should have made it most live and vigorous and emotionally creative. Their culture had by that time become so intellectualized and the load of tradition and supposedly valuable meaning which their culture carried so heavy and the need for keeping this meaning intact apparently so great, that the attempt to carry it down to posterity and the wish to interpret it uncorrupted to the present and future generations through the channels of art forced them to systematize and stereotype the communication symbols. This froze up the creative spirit in their art.

Perhaps the inferiority of the creative spirit in Roman art, as compared with Greek art, and of late Greek art as compared with early Greek art, was not due wholly to the esthetic

( 471) and intellectual poverty of the latter peoples, but in part to their greater moral earnestness and deeper sense of the necessity of communicating the cultural values of their civilization and of losing none of it. Such a feeling is likely to arise in the moral and intellectual maturity of a people, especially if this maturity is reached in a declining age economically, as was the case with the Greeks, or in the midst of exacting external pressures, as was the situation with Rome. Such a people no longer feels free to live the life of easy, happy self-expression and experimentation. Their intellectuals and moralists, who may be found among even the artists, feel the necessity of making their productions carry some message. Thus this intellectual and moral weight calls for a formalization and standardization of the prevailing means of communication, especially of those that reach the masses who must be educated in the principles deemed most indispensable. That is why an ethical religion almost, if not quite, always formalizes art, in large degree sterilizes it emotionally by confining its expression in fairly definite channels, and intellectualizes it by causing it to communicate definite and well recognized concepts and values.

ART AS A REFLEX OF NATIONAL LIFE— Great national feeling will do the same for the art of the age. Periods of national integration are not periods of new ideas in art. Art becomes too self-conscious, is forced to assume too much of a message to posterity and to contemporaries. This is Vergil's great fault. He taught a lesson of loyalty and patriotism to the Roman people. Horace, the country gentleman and man of irresponsible pleasures, wrote better poetry although he did not teach better lessons. After the age of political experiments and of economic plenty in Medieval Italy, art lapsed as emotional creation and became didactic. It became representative of the mind seeking for effective adjustment to a narrowing or troublesome environment, and not of the creative joyous spirit of adventure made possible by the possession of economic polity. Dame's works appeal to us more as a museum depicting his age or as a labored sermon than as a spontaneous expression of poetry. The great literature of Spain falls within the period of expansion and the fruits of victory, but after

( 472) Cervantes comes philosophy and didacticism. The eighteenth century in England, an age of political and economic trials, was also an age of decline in all forms of expressive art except character painting and that of the psychological novel, which arose and served as a means of making people more self-analytical to meet the needs of adjustment in their changing age. The bounty of the nineteenth century gave everywhere a new impetus to expressive and creative art. But to-day, with the tide turning towards an economic decline, we are beginning again to stereotype and intellectualize art. We call it modernism, a term which is by no means inappropriate, since the movement to which it applies is the outgrowth of the increasingly derivative and self and socially conscious character of our modern world. It does not matter that the artist does not himself realize the meaning of the new tendencies in his art. He would not be an artist, but a philosopher, if he did not respond readily and almost naïvely to the pressures of his environment, including the "spirit of the times."

SELF-ANALYSIS IN MODERN ART— In those ages in which the heavy demands of adjustment to environment force art into formal and intellectualized or at least into stereotyped and generalized forms of expression and communication, the self-expressive element in art tends to diminish or perish. There is no longer room for Pan and the dance of the dryads and the frolics of the satyr. Life has become a serious business and the weight of its problems turns emotional play into intellectual striving. Even self-expression becomes introspective and analytical. Omar reflects in beautiful numbers upon the meaning and uncertainty of existence. The problem of fate and the uncontrollable character of destiny appear in the Greek drama. Morality plays carry on the religious questionings of the Middle Ages and seek to turn the soul of man inside out. The psychological novel of Fielding, the psychological drama of Ibsen and the modern decadents, the morbid self-examining poetry of the Bohemians and Greenwich Villagers so self-conscious in their attempts to abandon themselves to living, the self-revealing. psychoanalytic novels of Zola and D. H. Lawrence and Theodore Dreiser, the emotional retrospections of William de Morgan, among a flood of other writings of this sort, reveal

( 473) how uncertain of their behavior our brave protagonists of freedom are in reality in spite of all their redundant protestations. Such art only reveals the fact that the artist, and perhaps the rest of the world with him, no longer dares to respond freely to suggestion and to express himself upon impulse. It is the art of inhibition, not of freedom. It is the art of a struggling world, which finds difficulty in making its adjustments to nature and man, not the art of the care-free creator of types of beauty and will, which grow out of the abundance of free and uninhibited experience. This tendency toward inhibition has grown with numbers and complexity in our world. We are in a retrenching age morally and emotionally.

INTELLECTUAL COMMUNICATION is the latest form to develop. The intellectual symbols used in this type of communication developed through the abstracting and stereotyping of representative symbols used in art in the manner mentioned above. This gave rise to a new type of art, literary art, as distinguished from the old plastic and pictorial art. But literary art is an offshoot of pictorial art through the symbolization of communication terms. The manner in which literary art was developed and abstracted has been treated in a previous chapter.

As shown in Part III, gesture language symbolized emotional attitudinal experiences rather than intellectual ones. No considerable intellectual communication content ever could have been developed through the use of gesture symbols alone. The communication of intellectual content by means of deaf and dumb alphabets became possible only after verbal symbols of the oral or written type had been invented. The deaf and dumb language is a translation or transformation of the written language, just as writing is a translation of oral symbols and communication. But for many reasons the deaf and dumb manual translations are not so effective for communication purposes as is writing. In this age of distance contact groups, which must utilize indirect media of communication, written language is still the chief forte employed, despite the appearance of the radio. It alone possesses all of the qualities, such as abstractness, precision, and durable and unchanging content, which enable it to serve the purpose of conveying meaning

( 474) from persons or groups in one place to others at a great distance in space or time. Radio transmission has some, but not all, of these qualities.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MECHANISMS OF INTELLECTUAL COMMUNICATION— We have seen how facial expression and gesture, although they probably served as the means of direct communication before the invention of oral language, were greatly developed, supplemented, and enriched by the appearance of verbal language or speech. Speech socialized life as nothing before it had been able to do. Ideas appeared, meanings developed rapidly, an understanding of the world, and a constancy of interpretation of nature unknown in the past, began to appear. Man was approaching to philosophy with the growth of speech. But above all, it permitted the interchange of attitudes, of impressions, fears, joys, information, finally, of abstract ideas and principles. Art was an attempt to objectify these impressions, feelings, attitudes, ideas. Art developed and became as richly expressive, as beautifully descriptive, and as idealistic, finally, as the nature of man became rich with experience, as his inner self developed and rose in organization from chaotic impulses, fears, and tumultuous emotions into an integrated, orderly and continuous personality. As ideas emerged from his emotional complexes and became fixed in his memory as definite norms of measurement or points of reference to which other impressions, impulses, or ideas were referred for comparison and testing, the intellectual content of his mental life appeared and developed.

These ideas also had to be symbolized and expressed or recorded objectively. Thus, as we have seen, picture writing, as the most flexible form of objective expression of mental content, appeared as a modification of primitive pictorial art. Pictographs were at first merely stereotyped ideographs or idea-graphs, so formalized that when once learned they could be recognized anywhere and at all times by those who had mastered them. These were further simplified and stereotyped into the alphabet, acid synthetic integration of idea symbols began to be formed abstractly to supplement the concrete ideographs. The ideographs had themselves been objectified to symbolize things and to express action. Abstract qualities were included

( 475) in the meaning of the ideograph by slight modification of its form. Thus, through the modification and stereotyping of its form, it came in time to express the whole content of spoken language in writing. But the synthetic formation of words on an alphabetical basis, the invention of composite and abstract (non-pictorial) ideographs, marked a great advance in variety of expression and hence of the elaboration of the written content of communication. With the invention of synthetic words it was no longer necessary to find a picture or pictograph for every idea. Writing was simplified in form and made more abstract in content at the same time, and the way was thus opened for the recording and storing and transmission of an illimitable volume of knowledge.

THE FUNCTION OF WRITING IN INTELLECTUAL COMMUNICATION — As man's thinking became more and more projected towards the future, as the result of his undertaking activities which could not be completed immediately, the value of writing as a means of recording plans and aims of behavior became much greater. It is here that the storage function of abstract language symbols became of most use. Not only did written language make it possible for human society to cease living on a hand-to-mouth basis, as it were, but it facilitated coöperation over very wide areas. In our day communication by means of abstract written symbols has made our civilization all but world wide, and we are attempting to build it with reference to future generations as well as our own. Modern science, which is the chief instrument of man in this two-fold aim of his to achieve a widespread and lasting culture, is possible only because we have an abstract written language in which we can express and store and communicate definite and quantitative meanings regarding people and things in such a way that the behavior of others towards these objects may be the same as or comparable to our own, even though these people may be separated from us by great distances of space and time. Only on such a basis of identical or similar responses of different people to the same behavior stimuli, made possible by an abstract and definite language symbolism which unifies space and time, is it possible to achieve that high degree of cooperation and continuity which is the essence of civilization.

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THE DOMINANCE OF INDIRECT CONTACT GROUPS RESULTS FROM THE USE OF ABSTRACT AND INTELLECTUAL COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS— Everywhere in the world where this language and its resultant science have penetrated and become a familiar possession, the life of man has become organized into indirect contact or derivative groups. The primary and direct contact groups continue for the performance of certain necessary and valuable types of adjustment, but their character is modified, often even determined quite completely, by the requirements of the abstractly organized overhead or derivative groups. The abstract groups are dominant in modern life, and as long as we live by science and in a world of the widest possible coöperation this will continue to be so. Likewise our lives are molded, indirectly or directly, by the abstract derivative values, ideals and principles, which have grown up as the scientific formulations of projected forms of adjustment in modern society. This is a guarantee that we may live sanely, if not always intimately; although there is no reason why emotional and intimate contacts and attitudes may not also obtain as before, if they conform to the requirements of the more general and abstract principles and values governing collective existence on a wide scale. We can no longer live locally or clannishly and partisanly in a narrow way without danger of conflict with powers greater and more abstract and indomitable than ourselves and our clans. It is the abstract derivative group which rules modern life, and the language of communication which brings about relatively uniform and coöperative responses to the distant and often abstract stimuli which operate upon us collectively is the language of the printed page, the broadcast vocal language of the radio, and the reduplicated pictures or films of the movies. The lecturer also plays his part in carrying the abstract message, but his is a declining rôle. The movie works primarily on the emotions and unconscious behavior sets. It is powerful, perhaps the more so because it works mainly through unconscious emotional mechanisms. But the control of collective behavior of to= morrow lies primarily through the newspaper and the radio. The abstract or derivative groups which possess these mechanisms of communication as their mouthpieces will dominate

(477) our civilization. The problem of a democratic and scientifically organized society is the problem of how to socialize these instruments of communication.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS —  Thus we find that indirect contact groups were made possible by new means of communication, especially through the use of abstract language symbols. The earliest language forms were facial and bodily expression, gesture, and vocal cries, words and holophrases. These types of language were used only for communication in the direct contact groups and were first developed in primary groups. But they also served as the bases for the development of language symbols which could be used for communication between members of indirect contact groups. Thus facial expression, posture, and gestures became the early symbols of plastic and pictorial art. And vocal symbols, transferred to written characters, later served for the development of communication in indirect contact groups through intellectual language.

We have described the development of these several forms of indirect communication in the preceding paragraphs of this chapter. As the technique of indirect communication developed and became successively more abstract and intellectual in content, the wider in extent and the more inclusive of numbers and of interests became the indirect contact groups or publics dependent upon these modes of communication. The most widespread publics were not possible before the appearance of writing or printing. And the great diversity of intellectual publics which characterizes modern life had to await the advent of an abundance of printed material. Just what will be the effect of the phonograph, the moving picture, and the radio upon the extent and number, as well as upon the intellectual character, of publics is still a matter of conjecture. But it seems to be a safe generalization to make that every increase in the extent and ease of indirect communication helps to hasten the approach of the fusion of all peoples and of all classes in one general cultural public. Whether the culture of this composite public will be of relatively a high or a low order will depend partly upon the means of communication used, partly upon the degree to which this communication is com-

( 478) -mercialized, and partly upon the native abilities of the members of this wider public, and their willingness to provide for specialization of function, and for freedom in planning and developing the future.

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