An Introduction to Social Psychology

Chapter 35: Non-Institutional Controls

Luther Lee Bernard

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THE NATURE AND KINDS OF CONTROLS —  A control is any stimulus or complex of stimuli which calls forth a response. Thus all stimuli are controls. Controls may be of many different categories, such as physical, including geographical, climatic, temperature, humidity, etc.; biological, including plant and animal life of various forms and in various combinations; and social controls, including those of physico-social, bio-social, and psycho-social environments in their manifold forms. These classes of controls are all of the objective or environmental kind, and all controls exist fundamentally and ultimately in the environment. There are also individual and personal controls, as distinguished from social controls. But these have been fixed in the individual personality either through the ontogenetic influence of environmental pressures or through the phylogenetic influence of environment in selecting the forms of inheritance. There can be no subjective controls which have not been derived at some time, in the individual or in the race, from the environmental pressures.

In this book we are not particularly concerned with the physical and biological and the physico-social and lower bio-social environmental controls as they operate in the organization of collective responses. They are of importance primarily to the sociologists and other social scientists rather than to the social psychologists. Our concern in this and the following chapter is mainly, but not exclusively, with those controls which are to be found in the psycho-social and human bio-social environments. They are by far the most numerous in modern life and they dominate our responses much more directly and intimately, and for the most part, in much greater detail, than do the controls of the natural and the lower social environments.

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THE TYPES OF PSYCHO-SOCIAL CONTROLS— In general we may distinguish two types of psycho-social controls, the non-institutional and the institutional. The non-institutional psycho-social controls are those which are relatively ephemeral in form, unstandardized, and changing readily and rapidly, as compared with the institutional controls. These non-institutional controls are constituted of behavior patterns which are relatively loosely organized collectively. They are typified particularly by fads, fashions, crazes, and transient conventional beliefs and attitudes of all kinds. The institutional controls are those types of behavior organization which are relatively permanent. Although they change, they do so more slowly and thus retain their organization although their content may be gradually transformed. The forms of psycho-social behavior which are included under the institutional controls are of two general types, the subjective or relatively immaterial and intangible, which are carried only in the individual behavior, and the objective or material and tangible, which have externalized existence. Under the subjective aspects may be included conventions, traditions, and customs, which tend to become integrated symbolically in ritual. The objective institutional social controls are codes, administrative organizations, and physical extensions. In the objective social controls the bio-social and the physico-social elements often outweigh the psycho-social, especially in the administrative organization and physical extensions. In the codes, however, the written symbolical or externalized neuro-psychic content of the psycho-social environmental controls predominates. Beliefs, mores, folkways, etc., are other terms which may, under certain circumstances, be applied to the less objective aspects of institutions.

THE PSYCHO-SOCIAL CONTROLS ARE DOMINANT —  Of course, as was intimated above, the institutional controls are not exclusively psycho-social. They make use of bio-social, physico-social, and even to some extent of natural environmental factors in the integration of their relatively stable and continuous organizations and structures. But, like the non institutional social controls, they are primarily psycho-social. It is the psycho-social elements in both the institutional and the noninstitutional social controls which dominate their organization

(543) and give direction and effectiveness to their functions as controls. There are, of course, non-institutional controls which are also non-social. This is the case, for example, with the physico-geographic, climatic, natural resources and altitude controls. They produce effects transitory as well as permanent upon social organization, mainly indirectly, by means of conditioning the collective living processes, but they are not themselves social. It is the physical and social inventions and the method or scientific inventions — which man produces to help him in his collective adjustments to these non-social controls which become his social controls and dominate most intimately and directly his collective life processes. Most natural environmental controls become institutionalized, that is, produce relatively permanent or institutionalized responses instead of ephemeral and non-institutional responses.

In this chapter we shall consider the leading non-institutional controls, giving particular attention to the psycho-social phenomena of fads, fashions, and crazes. Put we shall also include in our discussion some account of rumor, and the more ephemeral aspects of conventions, beliefs, public opinion, and even o f science. These latter psycho-social processes in their more permanent forms overlap with, or are also included in, the institutional controls.

FADS: THEIR NATURE AND FUNCTION —  Fads, like all other non-institutional or unstable social controls, may consist of either overt or inner behavior. They may be habits of action or of thought. A fad is some form of behavior which does not secure universal or continuous acceptance by the group, but is taken up by only a portion of the group and dies out in the course of a relatively short period of time because of lack of support. A fad usually lasts for only a season or a portion of a season. Its chief appeal is in its novelty and its function seems to be that of calling attention to the one who adopts it. Thus, it is a sort of consciously or unconsciously used advertising device. Some people adopt fads quite consciously for the sage of the temporary prestige which they will gain thereby or for the sake of being in the limelight, or in some other light brighter than that at the periphery of the group's attention. Others adopt fads more or less unconsciously. They have no

( 544) adequate realization of their significance for themselves as means of advertising, but they experience a heightened emotional sense of well-being when they are following the lead of those who have obtained attention by espousing the fad. Their choices are made largely in the realm of the emotional consciousness and subconsciousness rather than intellectually.

Still others invent the fads, accidentally or purposively. Frequently comes the news from Atlantic City or Palm Beach that some one has designed and wears a striking bathing suit, or that some one at Newport has a new doll, or that another person, who cannot achieve distinction for the profundity of his thought, maintains a reputation for eccentricity by frequently enunciating some new or fantastic theory about almost anything of which he has some glimmering of knowledge. There are people who thus make a business of the art of securing the attention of their companions or contemporaries and enjoy immensely being for the time the center of interest, however trivial the interest manifested in them or their behavior may be.

In contrast with such people— the faddists —  are those persons who are interested in true achievement of a fundamental character. Their interest is so strongly centered in their work or the objects or ideas they have created that they are very little conscious of themselves as creators. Instead of seeking to be the center of attention they are frequently shy and embarrassed when attention is drawn to them by their behavior or ideas. They, rather than the faddists, are the more likely to produce behavior or objects worthy of survival.

FADS ARE EVERYWHERE— Fads are to be found in practically every phase of behavior. They occur most frequently, perhaps, in the realms of clothing, recreation, and in the intercourse of leisured groups. These fields of behavior are still most experimental and no adequately standardized tests have been worked out for their control. In the matter of clothing the fad is usually in the nature of an unusually extreme interpretation or variation of the prevailing fashions. Thus the fiat may be exceptionally large or small, or high or low, or the ornamentation may be especially striking or it may be particularly plain. The faddish skirt may be especially full or tight, or slit unusually high, or the wrap dress may be worn without

(545) sufficient underclothing, so as to reveal more or less of the body. The handkerchief may be noticeably plain or colored, the stockings may run to excessive shades or designs, the cut of the neck may be especially low, or the heels may be very high or very low. In the matter of recreation a group may take up a game not hitherto very popular and concentrate on that. Or they may turn to walking with a vengeance, or to dry bathing, skiing, fancy dancing, ukulele playing, petting, etc. Many varieties of handshakes, lifting of the hat, bowing, verbal greetings, and leave takings become the fads of the day in the polite intercourse of a single generation. One form succeeds another quite rapidly among those who endeavor to keep up to date or lead in the trivial. It is their main source of excitement and means of distinction.

Fads are also to be found in the more serious aspects of life. Diet, which should normally be a matter of some forethought, is often made the vehicle of faddism. Our beliefs about art, literature, morals, and social questions are also subject to waves of faddism. Bizarre or eccentric views on questions of religion, politics, or economic and social welfare may pass current in certain circles for a time and then give way to others, perhaps equally unwarranted or unusual. Even the field of science is not free from faddist notions. A new method of brushing the teeth, a much recommended "psychic" or "hygienic" treatment for indigestion or colds or various other ills, may gain a good deal of currency before its uselessness is discovered. Certain authors and forms of art become "the rage." Some years ago every one was reading historical romances. Later it was the "problem" novel. Recently the small town novel held sway. Cubism had its day; also free verse. Formerly dentists did much more indiscriminate tooth-drawing than is at present the case. There is almost an established rhythm of advice which emphasizes alternately the use of a tooth powder and of a tooth paste. At one time we are told not to drink water with our meals and at another we are told to du au. During the late war it became quite common for people to believe in spirit communications. The various types of breakfast foods have all had their morning. The raw-food eaters succeeded the vegetarians. Now come the vitamin-

( 546) -ists, often finding vitamins everywhere except where they exist. Some fads have a substratum of scientific fact, but it is the nature of the fad to exaggerate practice based on this element of fact and thus, through pushing it to extremes, to discredit it with thinking people.

HOW FADS TINY GROW INTO FASHIONS OR CONVENTIONAL PRACTICES— While fads are usually merely extreme interpretations of practices of existing fashions or other more institutionalized behavior, and as a consequence disappear after they have served their function of advertising their followers, they may however be endowed With a longer life or receive more general acceptance. Thus the fad may, become a fashion by appealing to such large numbers as to become the general rather than the exceptional practice or trend of thinking. The slit skirt which is extreme one season may become the fashionable or average standard of the next. The dress that comes to the knees is a fad at one time, but it may be a fashion at another. Carrying lizards or other animals chained to the neck or collar may or may not go beyond the stage of faddism. Likewise, an extreme interpretation in medicine or ethics, or social work, or even in history, may at one period be accounted only a fad, while further research or practice may confirm it and raise it to the dignity of permanent fact and procedure. Thus, at one time mental healing and osteopathy were regarded by the conservative medical profession as wholly faddistic. Now, some of these practices have been adopted by the medical practitioners as sound in certain types of cases.

FADS AND FASHIONS COMPARED— Fashions belong to the same order of instability and irrationality as fads, but their instability and ephemerality are not so marked. Ordinarily they persist for a longer period of time and appeal to larger numbers of people. Fads and fashions are to be distinguished primarily on the basis of differences in the degree of their universality, intensity, and duration which exist between these two categories of behavior. Fashions ordinarily persist for a loner period, because their irrationality is either not so great or not so apparent as that of fads. Yet a fashion does not persist, without serious modification, beyond what may be termed its conventional season. Changes in the fashions of

( 547) clothes occur usually each climatic season, or rather considerably—  in advance of the seasons. Changes in the fashions of social intercourse may persist for a longer period, or until the followers catch up with the initiators in the race for distinction or attention. Fashions ill sports also change with the climatic seasons, although they may recur the corresponding season of the year following. Fashions in clothing do not recur in following seasons, because such recurrence would cut down the profits of the fashion makers and would rob the devotees of fashion of much of their chance for distinction. The extent of the fashion is usually much greater than that of the fad. Only the more daring, or reckless, or thoughtless follow the fad. The more conservative middle-grounders make the fashion practically universal in the course of time. The greater degree of universality of the fashion may be manifest in either of two ways. The fashion may cover a larger territory or it may appeal to more people in the same territory. Where a fad becomes practically universal within a limited territory it remains a fad rather than a fashion, because on the basis of a wider comparison it lacks universality. The fact that the fad is usually an extreme form of the fashion has already been illustrated.

CLOTHING THE CHIEF BASIS OF FASHION —  Fashions, like fads, are most common in the matter of clothing, amusement and recreation, and polite intercourse, but are to be found everywhere. Both fads and fashions are means of advertising the personality of the person who adopts them. Quite frequently they constitute in large measure the content of the personality. The people who follow fads and fashions are ordinarily not those who possess the most profound types or richest content of personality. Their personalities, like the fashions and fads they adopt, are superficial, transitory, and often of unsound mental, moral, and social value. They build up their personalities in large measure out of the shifting content of this fashionable and faddist behavior and consequently chi riot anchor themselves morally anywhere in particular. Fashions and fads are means of competition. Their followers, not having founded their characters on the firmer foundations of devotion to a program of tested achievement values,

( 548) constantly and restlessly flounder around in the sea of unsettled emotions and experiences catching at every floating practice or belief which offers any support to their disintegrating and evaporating personalities.

FASHION LEADERS AND PRESTIGE— The leaders of fashions are those who invent or first adopt new behavior patterns and exploit these as long as they give them distinction from the common herd. But as the multitudes begin to adopt the same practices and threaten them with the oblivion of anonymity because of the increasing numbers of devotees, the leaders abandon the old fashions and adopt new ones, thus seeking to perpetuate their distinction and leadership of attention.

The method by which the leaders secure a supply of new fashions is an interesting and instructive lesson in social psychology. They may accomplish this end by individual invention. That is, some leader, perceiving her prestige to be in danger of submergence by the rising tide of the mass of imitators, may launch out upon a search for variations. Thus she may create fads and these fads may become new fashions. Every leader in fashions needs followers, for without followers there can be no fashions, although there may be fads. A fad may occasionally remain individual behavior, but a fashion is always collective behavior on a considerable, almost a universal, scale. So long as those who adopt the new fashion are following the leader her prestige is secure, but when they begin merely to imitate the fashion regardless of the leader it is time for her to seek to initiate a new fashion, for the old fashion has become a folkway rather than a matter of consciously "follow the leader."

THE PROFESSIONAL FASHION EXPERT— Most fashions are no longer invented by the one who introduces them. Modern professional leaders of fashion— if the term professional may be properly applied to those who make it the main concern of their lives to lead in the fashions— are little more than promoters, sometimes movie actresses or only manikins. The rate of change iii fashions is too great fur the leaders to invent a considerable number of the fashions which they introduce. Consequently the competition between leaders of fashion is not so much to invent as to introduce new fashions, although

( 549) there may be competition in the former matter also. Competition in fashion is keenest in the matter of clothing. This is because clothing is the most external of all the forms of borrowed behavior, while sports and forms of social intercourse follow closely after. All of this illustrates the principle that we perceive and imitate most easily visible forms of behavior. It is in this field of the visible and overt behavior fashions, especially that of clothing, that the expert or specialist inventor and purveyor have been most developed in the service of fashion. We have here the expert designer who produces new "creations" which the promoters of fashion purchase at prices which pay the designers handsome commissions for their risk and ingenuity. Likewise, the expert caterer, decorator, amusement providers, and a host of other aids to the leisured, are constantly inventing new methods of appealing to their clients and patrons, who are seeking to maintain or increase their prestige by presenting themselves before the public in something new. The desire to lead in the fashions is very similar to the almost universal desire of amateurs, and of professionals, to star, or at least to participate, in a play or a pageant or a folk dance. The chances for self-advertisement are excellent.

Leading in fashions may have little intellectual responsibility attached to it. I f one possesses sufficient wealth he can hire or purchase the plans for the competitive display as well as the objects of display themselves. Wealth is the primary necessity to modern leadership in fashion. There are no longer many bargains in self-display.

FASHION COMPETITION AND WEALTH— The very success with which the fashion promoters secure a following makes it inevitable that the more highly competitive fashions, especially those in clothes, should have short lives. The ease with which fashion news circulates and designs can be copied, the machine processes by which styles in clothing and weaves in fabrics, ideas, materials, procedure of all kinds, can be duplicated almost everywhere makes it certain that very soon all of those who measure success in life by the degree to which they approach their leaders in dress, manners, standards of living, in ,conduct, and in their ideas will soon have produced pretty good

( 550) imitations. Thus they make themselves like 'the personalities of the leaders of fashion, however superficial the content of these personalities may be. This wholesale copying brings about a tremendous uniformity or rhythm of change. Everybody becomes much like everybody else, but unlike himself of yesterday. A premium is placed upon the mere fact of change regardless of its more ultimate and long-time adjustment values. From this situation of mob uniformity the leaders or promoters of fashion wish to escape. Consequently they patronize the new designs and precipitate other changes. And this goes on continuously and endlessly. The result is that fashion becomes highly commercialized where it is most competitive and leadership in fashion does not depend on brains or at least not on the brains of the leaders— but on the possession of the money with which to purchase the new designs. This money is not earned by the leaders of the fashions, but in most cases by some one else. Consequently competition in modern fashion has reduced itself primarily to the unintellectual basis of a competition in the spending of money which some one else provides. The moral and social effects of this tendency are interesting, but not particularly pertinent to the present treatment.

TENDENCIES IN FASHIONS COMPARED —  There are of course fashions in the less competitive fields— in the semi-intellectual, esthetic, literary, artistic, and other phases of life— which are not so strongly subject to this rapid rate of change. Here leadership is less likely to depend on ability to spend and more likely to rest upon individual ingenuity and intellectual capacity or some other higher quality of personality in the fashion leader. Fashions in clothing and entertainment are the lowest form of fashions from the standpoint of the personality qualities demanded of their leaders and therefore the types most universally exploited. These fashions are so highly competitive because they are so superficial and objective, so easily perceived and understood and imitated. To follow them requires little or no intelligence beyond the ordinary, because others cal, he hired to do the planning and work. Thy are almost external to one's personality. But even in these there is some degree of variation. While every one attempts to conform to

( 551) the general pattern, individual initiative, or more likely the inventiveness of the designers, will produce a great many variations which will conform to individual taste or personality. Consequently in highly competitive fashions there are two types of endeavor. One is imitation of the main patterns of dress, entertainment, behavior, thought, while the other is competitive and differentiating within the larger trend, the striving for a minor note of uniqueness within the larger whole of conformity. Both tendencies are highly profitable to the commercial caterers of fashion.

LEADERS AND FOLLOWERS of FASHION— While the general purpose of the leader and follower of fashion is the same the acquirement of distinction— the methods used are very different. The one promotes the new and invites a following up to a certain point of success, but thereafter fears it and seeks to escape from the sameness which her success in leadership has created. This success in leadership depends largely upon her prestige, and particularly perhaps upon the judgment or luck she has in choosing her designer or caterer. It is up to him to offer new wares which will enable her to hold her place of leadership. Sooner or later almost all leaders go down in this competition, for the high financial rewards to the caterers stimulate the strongest competition among them for new "ideas." Even the prestige of certain sources of fashion, like Paris or London, or in such a name as Poiret, does not always suffice to give a monopoly against new designs or plans and new designers.

On the other hand, the people who follow the fashions seek to borrow reflected distinction by conformity to the leader. As it were, the followers steal the virtue or magical power of those who are ahead of them in the game and force the leaders into new modes to escape contamination from the mob. At the bottom of this competitive fashion process imitation of the fashions is mainly negative in motive. Those who are interested primarily in other and more fundamental values of life conform more or less tardily to the changes of fashions and then only to escape the unpleasant and eliminative effects of being too different from others. There is a strong antipathy among the conventional and the dogmatic, who are usually the

( 552) more ignorant and fear ridden, to people who look different from the ordinary run of people. The demand for conformity is very strong among us. The strongest weapon which could be used against excess of fashion would be the inoculation of tolerance.

THE CRAZE is less rational than either fad or fashion and may grow out of either. Ordinarily crazes develop slowly, gradually gaining momentum in the emotions and practices of men and women. In these early stages they are fads or fashions, but finally the mutual and reciprocal suggestion of the adherents of the fads or fashions begins to work rapidly and the movement gains momentum quickly and becomes a craze. It sweeps over great numbers of people at large, or most or all of the members in a selected group, with magnetic power. Under the influence of this strong interstimulation a high degree of irrational excitement and faith in the virtues of the plan or object of the behavior is generated and the craze is followed madly until it results either in success or in a logical contradiction and absurdity.

Crazes, like the other forms of unstable, non-institutional social controls considered in this chapter, may be either in the nature of overt behavior or of the character of internal behavior or ideas and emotions. All crazes have some emotional content and not infrequently they partake of the nature of ideals. The idealism of crazes is often extremely strong, although it may employ unsound procedure and be very irrational. Many crazes are based on almost purely physical overt behavior, such as dancing, athletic exercises, fashions in clothes and entertainment. Others involve a certain type of intellectual activity, mainly of a perceptual order, such as card games, mah jong, doing cross word puzzles, solving rebuses and conundrums. Such crazes often develop to a violent intensity, involving a large portion of the population and consuming much or most of the free energies of people which should be devoted to more original thinking on the adjustment problems of life. Other crazes fall into the category of beliefs, and are borne along by public opinion, These are especially likely to be found in the fields of politics, religion, art, and even pseudo science. The most nonsensical views about the coming of the world to

( 553) an end or the will and ability of a certain man to save civilization, if elected to office, or the "divine" mission of a certain school of art or a new religion may be entertained with the strongest conviction by people who mutually stimulate each other to such absurdities. Sometimes, of course, a craze may be based on valid principles and be the result merely of very great enthusiasm for the cause. Quick and violent revolutions rightly or wrongly undertaken are merely crazes. We have a craze wherever there is highly intense collective activity with a large degree of mob-mindedness manifest.

CRAZES AND SUGGESTION— Suggestion is the chief psychosocial process involved in the craze. The fad and fashion may develop along the leisurely pathway of imitation. It is not until the responses are well conditioned to the stimuli by means of imitation that the fad and the fashion turn into the craze. For it is not until then that suggestion can operate readily and freely. Once the conditioning of responses is sufficiently complete the multiplication of stimuli resulting from constant interstimulation of the group produces, in the absence of rational or irrational inhibitions, that multiplication and concentration of uniform collective responses which we call a craze. The fact that not all fads and fashions become crazes when the conditioning of responses has been sufficiently established through imitation is due to the existence of inhibitions. Sometimes these are positive ones in the nature of rational judgments which restrain the behavior from excess. In the other cases the inhibitions are negative and are of the nature of financial inability or of religious or domestic or other conventional restraints which prevent the responses from operating with full strength.

INTOLERANCE AND THE DEFLATION OF CRAZES— Crazes which win general approval are not regarded as irrational, but are accounted as praiseworthy enthusiasm, sometimes even as inspired. Revolutions which succeed are always right, no matter how much suffering they may cause. Religious revivalists and political campaigners and art enthusiasts are very self-congratulatory over the degree of mob excitement which they have stimulated. The dogmatists and servants of darkness and ignorance are always self-styled servants of the Lord or "defend-

(554) -ers of religion" or "knights of civilization." No other people are so incapable of therapeutic introspection as the crazed. It is when the people tire of the continued enthusiasm or monotony of activity required of them or when they find that their assumptions were incorrect that the craze loses its drawing power. In such cases the craze deflates rapidly, sometimes within a few hours or days, although it may have been growing for months, occasionally for years. Marathon dancing increased in wildness for weeks in 1923-1924, but quite suddenly collapsed as soon as the limits of competitive endurance were reached and the newspapers, considering that there was no longer sufficient news material in those extravagances, ceased to stimulate them by their sensational accounts. Many a revolution or riot has collapsed from fatigue due to too greatly sustained excitement or even from such a mechanical cause as the turning of a fire hose upon a mob. The cold water turns the behavior in other directions and the interstimulation ceases, consequently the responses no longer work to perpetuate the craze. Likewise, when the midnight hour appears and the end of the world has not come, the watchers begin to go home and the realization of the fact that they have followed a false prophet inhibits their ardor for a year or a decade or a generation. Even the religious zealots who murder with fire, sword, and gun, and behave irreligiously and maliciously towards others with different beliefs, in the name of their gods, lose their convictions or grow fatigued from the monotony of their responses in the course of time and desist from their intolerant and nefarious practices. Their enthusiasm for "righteousness" collapses and cannot be revived, even by their medicine men and priesthood.

IGNORANCE AND REPRESSION AND CRAZES— Since crazes operate primarily through suggestion they are most likely to occur among the ignorant and those of lower intelligence levels. But, as Ross has pointed out, even the intelligent may be drawn into the maelstrom of a craze if its volume and intensity become sufficiently great. This is the more likely to occur when there are insufficient data or a lack of distributed information with which to test the validity of the assumptions of the craze. The very intensity of the craze itself may come in

( 555) time to inhibit judgment and leave the normally intelligent exposed to its suggestions. Ross has also shown that one craze is frequently succeeded by another, exciting and arousing emotions of a different character. One set of reactions may become fatigued or the unsoundness of the craze may become manifest; yet there may be a large fund of excitement and undirected energy available when the old craze collapses. This favors the promotion of a new craze if the responses of the people are properly conditioned to any set of stimuli prevalent in the group. Finally, not only is an ignorant society or group more likely to be the victim of crazes, but any active or dynamic society suffers from the same disadvantage because of the large amount of physical and mental energies which it releases in relatively uncontrolled or non-stereotyped responses. The best way to prevent crazes is to make people intelligent and to give them an abundance of functional outlets for their energies and complete freedom of thought. Enforced homogeneity of thought or behavior will not prevent crazes, but may confine them to the lines of interest which are dominant in the group. If the causes of homogeneity also make for repression, crazes are almost certain to break out as exaggerations of some of the accepted practices or beliefs. The repressed energies demand some sort of escape and they find it through the paths of least resistance.

Although crazes tend to be organized as excessive exploitations of fads, fashions, and conventions, they may arise synthetically and apparently spontaneously out of materials of thought or action which are common to the group but were not previously organized into collective responses. The conditioning of responses to stimuli which exist in the group is basic to the craze in such cases. It is necessary merely to organize these stimuli in the thinking or overt behavior of the group to have them operate as sources of suggestion. If there are not adequate inhibitions present the collective responses may become a craze. But this source of the craze is relatively rare, although it may reënforce the craze arising from other sources.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BASES OF FADS, FASHIONS, AND CRAZES are rather deep seated. When responses have become so automatic that they can be made unconsciously, the individual turns

( 556) to various other activities, sometimes of doubtful value. The child in his search for new experiences is manifesting the same behavior. The human mechanism is so constructed that it economizes energies by relegating much-repeated behavior to automatic levels. But human beings cannot live entirely on an unconscious or a simple perceptual level. As a result they must seek effective outlets for their energies. This is especially true of people who live routine lives. The desire for distinction is also very deeply rooted in human nature. It is an almost inevitable product of the early care of the child. Being the center of attention is usually conditioned to pleasant associations, and the desire to be in the limelight is a logical outcome. Finally, the desire to be like others in our group is another strongly conditioned trait of human beings. Wide divergences from the standards of the group are weeded out by negative conditioning. These are the psychological bases which give rise to extreme forms of non-institutional controls, namely, the desire for new experiences, the desire for distinction, and the desire to be like others.

PROPHYLACTICS FOR NON-INSTITUTIONAL CONTROLS— Professor Ross has discussed the prophylactics for "mob-mindedness" at some length. We may summarize them generally in the light of our discussion of their psychological causes. Since much of the adaptive behavior in modern times has become routine and capable of being handled more or less automatically, we must furnish other useful outlets for organic energies. A more socialized type of education and a more rational control over the aims and methods of all of our directive institutions would help here. There should also be opportunity for distinction in rational fields. The scientist who is working on a problem and the artist who expresses himself fundamentally in his work are rarely followers of fads. If we could give all people equally engrossing forms of self-expression and distinction, they would be less susceptible to fads. If they cannot gain distinction in socially acceptable fields. they will try to get it in those which are socially less valuable. If they cannot have fame they will seek notoriety.

OTHER CONVENTIONS — A convention is any contemporary practice or belief which occurs collectively or in reduplication.

( 557) According to this definition we should include fads, fashions, and crazes among the conventions. But there are also other conventional or contemporary practices and beliefs which scarcely reach the degrees of universality of collective acceptance and of irrationality and instability which are ordinarily attributed to fads, fashions, and crazes. They are more irregular in their appearance or continuance, or they are more firmly established in fact and therefore not susceptible to the laws of the more irrational or pervasive conventions. In this classification we may list rumors, beliefs, public opinion, and scientific data and principles. To be sure rumors and beliefs may at any time become the subject matter of fads, fashions, or crazes, and public opinion may carry either an irrational or a rational and scientific content, or both together. But there is yet a distinction in practice, however difficult it is to define schematically and verbally, which appears to justify relatively separate categories for these types of conventions last mentioned. One basis of distinction is, perhaps, to be found in the fact that they may, with the exception of rumor, have a history which extends far back into the past from which they have been derived with little or no change of form or content. Also, they are likely to extend into the future without losing their identity. This latter fact is particularly true of science. Beliefs and public opinion are more fluid and are constantly merging with fads, fashions, and crazes. Rumor is particularly ephemeral and fluid, only now and then being stabilized or crystallized into beliefs, public opinion, or scientific fact. Also, these four secondary types of conventions are wholly in the field of mental or internal instead of overt behavior.

RUMOR travels from mouth to ear, from mind to mind. It is irresponsible. Hence it suffers constantly from elaboration and is transformed and augmented by the daydreams and wishes, the envies and jealousies, of the minds through which it passes. Wise people give little attention to rumors, at most merely taking a hint from them for further investigation. Yet, because of the multitudinous minds through which rumor have passed and in which they have undergone elaboration, it is practically impossible to verify or disprove a rumor by the method of tracing it to its source. Rumors are not recorded,

( 558) hence their instability. Rumor, because it is verbal and irresponsible and therefore meets the need of the average mind for an outlet for repressed wishes through elaboration, constitutes a large part of the collective mental content. But there is a growing tendency to test rumors by subjecting them to a comparison with known facts, a sort of test in the light of their inherent probability. The fact that we are aware of the tendency of the human mind to elaborate statements as a subjective relief from repression helps us to discount many rumors which we might otherwise be tempted to believe. Of course, back of rumors there is some sort of truth, but its nature is always very difficult or impossible to unravel. Frequently the background of fact in a rumor is as much or more in the behavior of the elaborators to whom it has served as a release for repressed desires than in that of the person to whom the rumor is attached. Jung has given an excellent example of this. Gossips are almost universally people who do, or are restrained only by fear from doing, the things they retail with so much avidity. On the other hand, people who are morally incapable of doing what is recounted are, in the vast majority of cases, also incapable of recounting it. But in spite of the fact that we know these things in the abstract, we are very much influenced in the concrete by rumors in making our judgments. Because of their anonymity it is usually difficult to identify rumors as such.

BELIEFS may arise out of rumors, facts, or inferences from observations, or they may come down to us from the past as traditions. They may be clearly defined in our consciousness, or they may be so hazy and indefinite as to be in the category of emotional attitudes. They may be reduced to printed or written form, and thus serve collectively as declarations of principles or as creeds. They may float about, so to speak, in the public opinion of the time, in the form of proverbs, axioms, platitudes, aphorisms, adages, wise sayings, maxims, and the like, and thus be the property of everybody implicitly, but of nobody by avowal. There is among us a sort of cavalier method of treating proverbs which professes a half scorn for them as merely folk beliefs but nevertheless makes use of them by innuendo and specific citation in an argument or when we

( 559) wish to support a cause. The creeds likewise have our nominal acceptance rather than our overt or conscious espousal. Often we adhere nominally or perfunctorily to creeds and declarations of principles without actually knowing their content. We profess this acceptance through our adherence to some organization which espouses these principles as its guiding code. But here we are getting into the realm of institutional controls which at this point are difficult to separate from the noninstitutional. Beliefs vary greatly in fluidity, from an instability approaching that of rumors at one extreme to that of printed declarations of principles and even established facts at the other extreme. A very large portion of the content of the collective mental behavior falls under the category of beliefs.

PUBLIC OPINION is any fairly uniform collective expression of mental or inner behavior reactions. Its content may be that of rumors, beliefs, facts, principles, or of fads, fashions, and crazes in their psychic aspects. It is a collective phenomenon which is also a composite fact. Public opinion is what the members of any indirect contact group or public think or feel about anything and everything. Ordinarily we insist that these opinions and attitudes of the members of the group shall have sufficient uniformity to insure a unity of definition of the content of public opinion. But some writers use the concept much more loosely and include the most diverse opinions and attitudes under the general term public opinion. It would seem better, however, to speak in such cases of public opinions, reserving the term public opinion for uniform mental reactions to stimuli.

Public opinion is very powerful in modern society. One cannot live in the midst of views and attitudes, if expressed with any degree of vigor, without being influenced by them. The great volume of public opinion which is generated in the modern world through conversation, press, theater, telephone, telegraph, radio, lectures, preaching, and other agencies, is especially favorable to the production of uniform responses, particularly among those who are but poorly informed in matters of fact.

Public opinion may arise out of a contemporary situation,

( 560) or it may descend from the past as tradition and thus have an institutional aspect. While public opinion is never free from institutional determination and from some degree of control from the past, it is constantly undergoing revision in the present. This fluidity is due in part to the highly dynamic character of modern society and in part to the fact that scientific data and principles are gradually entering into the content of public opinion and are transforming it.

SCIENCE— Experimental methods in the laboratory and careful observation and statistical generalization of phenomena are constantly producing a mass of tested data and principles in every field of interest. The highest grade of mental content is tested knowledge or facts. These are accepted by most people as the standards by which all other behavior, mental or overt, should be tested. Thus science becomes the arbiter of all truth or harmony of collective behavior. In each field of interest we build up collections of tested and harmonized data and principles and call these collective organizations the science of that particular field. All of the sciences of the several fields together are found to harmonize among themselves and they are spoken of collectively simply as science.

Science may be institutional or non-institutional. All of the institutions are slowly transforming the inner and overt behavior content of their members in harmony with the findings of science. Highly competitive institutions, like the economic and to some extent the political and educational, undergo this reorganization fairly readily and willingly. The less competitive institutions, such as the theological and esthetic, make the transformation with much difficulty and delay. But since science is nothing but tested knowledge or behavior and since tested knowledge and behavior are better than untested, the transformation to conform to the findings of science must inevitably occur everywhere, unless our culture is to deteriorate and our civilization to decay.

Science is also entering into and transforming beliefs and Public opinion as rapidly as we are able to make it available for these modes of psychic behavior. Gradually it drives rumor into the periphery of our consciousness, and fads, fashions,

( 561) and crazes recede before its bright light of investigation. Ultimately these great irrational collective forms of conduct will have to justify themselves on the basis of collective utility and scientific fact and principle, or disappear.

HOW THE NON-INSTITUTIONAL CONTROLS WORK— As was said above, these controls operate to make uniform our behavior in the group. This uniformization takes place both through imitation and suggestion. New conditionings of responses to stimuli which have been perceived or recognized are accomplished through the process which we defined above as imitation. Collective behavior on an imitative basis is therefore a growth. It proceeds only as rapidly as the individuals of the group can perceive the stimuli and make them effective by conditioning their responses to them. But once these responses are thus conditioned suggestion becomes the dominant means of behavior control. Thus in a completely uniformized society people would be completely controlled, at least after maturity of behavior had been reached, through suggestion. Such a situation we actually find existent in many primitive peoples who have long been isolated from disturbing contacts with other cultures and who have made no dynamic inventions of their own. They have little analytical awareness of their institutions and can give only perfunctory, if any, reasons for their practices. Even an advanced society which became highly institutionalized and ossified would behave in much the same manner, as was the case with most advanced oriental cultures until recently.

But where new advances in science are constantly being made, as among ourselves, and where economic resources are being exploited as a result, and where new means of communication and transportation, new industrial organizations, changes in the plane of living, and the like, are constantly being introduced, the collective mental and overt behavior will be highly dynamic. The people will be highly conscious and analytical and critical of their institutions. Institutional behavior will in large measure give place to non-institutional behavior. But in a highly developed society the institutions do not of course disappear. They become much more flexible and submit to

( 562) revision the better to fit themselves as controls for the functional adjustment of their members, or they resist changes altogether. This growth of the non-institutional controls, especially of the fads, fashions, and crazes, is therefore a function primarily of a dynamic or transitional phase of social development. It necessarily involves much incomplete adjustment or maladjustment while the readjustment is taking place. This produces much waste, but the ultimate adjustment is usually so much more to be desired that it justifies any incidental waste.

It is at this point that science becomes a corrective as well as a cause of maladjustment. While in modern society science is often at the basis of the disorganization which arises in a transition period, it also becomes the chief means by which waste and maladjustment can be reduced to a minimum in the transition process. It becomes the critic and corrective of the extravagances of fads, fashions, crazes, rumors, beliefs, and public opinion in their revolt against institutions. Its greatest service will be found in making the transition process orderly and conformable to the requirements of economy of thought and action. It is possible that we shall always in the future have a highly dynamic world and therefore a dynamic society. It will be the task of science to discover the most economical and efficient methods by which necessary changes and readjustments can be brought about in such a world. It is in response to this need that the social sciences are now being developed and extended into many practical applications.

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