An Introduction to Social Psychology
Chapter 37: Summary and Conclusions
Luther Lee Bernard
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We have now completed the main argument of the book. We may, therefore, restate very briefly the chief themes of the several parts and relate all of these functionally in a final statement. In Part I the contention was that science is ( 1 ) an analysis, preferably quantitative, primarily of an object of study and secondarily of its environment, (?) a statement of the relationship which the object studied bears to its environment, and (3) an analysis of the effects produced in this object by its contacts with its environment. In the physical sciences both the environment and the objects studied are essentially of the same general order of phenomena. Consequently these sciences consist of an analysis of physical and chemical relationships, terrestrial or cosmic. In the biological sciences, however, there is a large differentiation between the object studied and its environment, hence a more considerable emphasis, first, upon the relationship between the organism and its environment and, second, the consequent determination of organic types by their environmental pressures. In the social sciences the distinction between environment and the collective behavior of organisms studied is most marked. It became necessary, therefore, in Part II to point out in some detail the inherited and acquired behavior patterns which ordinarily have been established in the human organism as the result of its contacts with its environments past and present. These are the foundational processes of behavior with which the social scientist must start in building up his account of the integration of the forms of collective behavior which constitutes the subject matter of his special science.
Our concern was with social psychology rather than with the other social sciences or with social science in general. Consequently, it was necessary in Part I to define the relationship
(584) of social psychology to the other social sciences and especially to give an account of the several types of social psychology. In the light of our earlier definitions and distinctions it seems essential to characterize social psychology as the science which studies the development of collective or social adjustment patterns in the individual as the result of his contacts with his various environments, especially with the most important of all of these environments, the psycho-social. This viewpoint in social psychology recognizes all three of the phases of science which we have isolated or defined and which were stated in the preceding paragraph.
Social psychology is interested in the analysis of the collective or general psycho-social environment. In this treatise Part IV is devoted to this phase of the subject. Social psychology is also concerned with the relationships between the environment and the individual living in a social situation. Parts III and IV attempt to give a detailed account of the processes involved here. The social behavior of the organism in cross section was studied in Part II. Here we started with those organic behavior patterns which had been integrated apparently phylogenetically by environmental pressures and traced the growth of neuro-psychic technique, including and particularly emphasizing the acquired behavior patterns and their symbolic objectifications in language, art, literature, and science, with especial reference to their contributions to the integration of personality. With the completion of Part II a brief outline of the behavior equipment of the socially functioning individual at our stage of social development had been presented. The technique of the operation of environmental stimuli upon the individual through immediate selection, was presented in Part III and Part IV.
It may appear to some readers and critics that the scope of our treatment is too narrow or too broad, or in some respects both too narrow and too broad. Undoubtedly some will deplore the lack of applications of the principles of social psychology to some of the more passing problems of social adjustment or collective adaptation in society as it exists. Our purpose in writing this treatise has been to present the principles, not the applications, of social psychology. The applica-
( 585) -tions should be set forth in general and special treatises in the fields of social organization, social control, and social ethics. Others, who believe that the subject matter of social psychology falls wholly within the field of psycho-social contacts, or of coadaptive psychic relationships between individuals in a collective situation, will probably doubt the advisability of the inclusion of most of Part II and perhaps the whole of Part III. To this objection we would answer that the content of Part II must be presented, either formally or informally, in any treatise on social psychology, for the data are indispensable to the discussion of psychic relationships of individuals in a social situation. It has seemed to fit in more logically with our analysis of the subject matter of social psychology to present this material separately and as a unit which would serve as a point of departure for the discussion in the subsequent parts. Certain of the more restrictive social psychologists will also object to the presentation of Part IV, on the ground that it is really psychological sociology rather than psychology, of which social psychology is a phase. Our viewpoint is that social psychology is an outgrowth of both psychology and sociology and overlaps both fields. Others still will see no valid justification for the inclusion of Part III, believing that it belongs to educational rather than to social psychology. Our answer to this view is that an analysis of the methods of integrating the personality is as fundamental to social psychology as it is to educational psychology, which in fact has been largely specialized off from social psychology and individual psychology for a specific function and in a particular field.
These anticipated methodological criticisms are evidences of the partial development of social psychology at the present time and of the conflicting views regarding its subject matter held by the various types of social psychologists. The method of treatment followed in this volume has been largely synthetic. Except for the exaggerations of instinct by one school of social psychologists, and the uncritical use of the concepts of imitation acid suggestion by another school, all of the more general viewpoints in social psychology previously set forth by writers in the field have been largely sound as far as they went. The more recent writings in the field have attempted
( 586) more or less to bridge the gaps in the older treatises. The present work, in bringing together and harmonizing and relating the partial treatments of other previous writers, is merely following out the principles set forth in our definition of science. The school of Tarde and Ross emphasized primarily the dynamic aspects of the psycho-social environment, although it did not define or classify environments. The school of Cooley has developed the relationship of the environment to the individual and the consequent changes in the individual, without treating either process in a wholly concrete and detailed manner. McDougall's school has attempted to account for changes occurring in the individual on the basis of their derivation from within rather than as the result of the reaction of the organism to selecting stimuli from without. This school does not deny the operation of external pressures, but in practice it assigns but little importance to them and offers no account of their operation. The work of Child and Herrick has justified the present writer in his earlier emphasis upon the selective function of environment and has provided him with a concrete method of accounting for organic and neural changes in the individual behavior in response to environment, while the theory of the conditioning of responses through positive association and the inhibitions of protopathic stimuli has given the basis for an account of the mechanisms of acquiring those behavior patterns of a higher neuro-psychic order which function in civilization. The chief additional contribution made to the subject of social psychology by the present work has been in the application of data known analytically by the psychologists to a detailed synthetic account of the ways in which the individual actually acquires his adjustment behavior patterns or habits of adaptation and control in a collective or social situation and thus comes to integrate his personality.
Our discussion of the conditioning of responses brought us to a consideration of the constructive integration of personality in ourselves through imitation. Some writers and teachers will be unfriendly to this apparent attempt of ours to revive the somewhat waning concept of imitation. The present author's work in this connection is not dictated by any sentimental partisanship for the term imitation. He sincerely be-
( 587) -lieves that the concept has a valid and perhaps an indispensable place in social psychology and sociology, although probably not in individual psychology as such. It is true that the whole process of imitation can be described in terms of the conditioning of responses. Imitation is merely a short cut symbol, like many other such, with a definite meaning of its own. Because it is a short cut symbol for an involved social-psychological process it is valuable in the theory of sociology and the other social sciences which deal with psycho-social processes in the large and do not enter into detailed psychological analyses of these processes. It has seemed to the author that the proper place to present this analysis is in social psychology, which overlaps with both psychology and sociology.
The author also believes that some advance has been made in this volume in the psychological analysis of the social-psychological mechanism of suggestion, and especially in the account of its operation in collective behavior situations. Response by suggestion is one of the most persistent and common forms of behavior in collective relationships. It is almost the whole content of much of our institutional and non-institutional behavior. In the past social psychologists have too frequently treated suggestion, either by implication or expressly, as the cause of response or behavior rather than as a method of response. Neither imitation nor suggestion is the ultimate explanation of any form of behavior, as was assumed when it was commonly believed that there was an instinct to imitate and an instinct of suggestibility. To characterize an act as imitated or as suggested is merely to classify it preparatory to further investigation into the circumstances under which it was conditioned to its stimulus on the one hand or to state it as an objective behavior process on the other hand.
This brings us, finally, to the question of the relationship of social psychology to the other social sciences, a subject we are now better equipped to discuss than we were at the beginning of the volume. Some sociologists many years ago looked upon sociology as primarily an application of psychology to the theory of the organization of collective contacts, and recently there has been a strong movement to make analogous statements regarding economics. Doubtless we shall in time observe
( 588) similar tendencies with respect to political science and history, as these subjects develop beyond the empirical stage into that of a constructive elaboration of theory. But sociology, or any other social science, is not social psychology. As we explained in Part I, social psychology arose to meet the demands of the social sciences upon psychology for principles and concepts which would aid in the explanation of social adjustments. Since modern social contacts are primarily psychic, the social sciences are very largely dependent upon social psychology for methods of interpretation of the collective behavior with which the social sciences are concerned. Some of the social sciences have been regrettably slow in recognizing this fact. But dependence upon social psychology for aid in the interpretation of collective phenomena is far different from an identity between the social sciences and social psychology.
All of the sciences are related more or less directly or indirectly. The data of all of the sciences must be used by each of the sciences in some way to explain the phenomena of its own problems. Sociology, for example, is not wholly foreign even to physics and chemistry, nor to astronomy and mathematics. The social sciences are especially closely related to psychology and biology. Social psychology is therefore one of the chief intellectual handmaidens to all of the social sciences. They use her data and principles of the explanation of behavior. But they are separate sciences by virtue of the separateness of their problems. A science is organized about its problems, and all of the other sciences are called upon to aid in providing a theoretical solution of those problems in so far as they can contribute explanatory data. The problems of sociology have to do with the origin, organization, maintenance, transformation, functioning, and decay of groups of all kinds. Political science is concerned with the same problems, but especially with reference to groups of one specific kind— the political. Economics has a like set of problems centering in economic, or production, distribution and consumption, behavior. History deaf with the past functioning of individuals and groups in these same types of relationships. In order to state and solve their problems theoretically these several social disciplines must make very extensive application of the data of social psychol-
( 589) -ogy. But in less degree they must employ for like purposes the data and principles of biology, and even of chemistry and of physics. Yet we should not identify the social sciences with biology or chemistry, however much the former may be indebted to the latter for an explanation of their problems.
The problem of social psychology is as distinct as that of any other social science. It is to find out how men behave in groups, or, in other words, to study the reactions of individuals to the psycho-social environment and the consequent building up of collective adjustment behavior patterns in the individuals in response to social stimuli. In order to answer these questions it is necessary, on the one hand, for the science of social psychology to have an analysis of the psycho-social environment in terms of the processes operating to provide stimuli to the responding individual, and, on the other hand, to understand the organization of behavior patterns in the individual himself. With these two backgrounds it is possible to give an account of the further integration of behavior patterns of individuals responding individually or collectively to psycho-social stimuli. It is such materials as these that we have attempted to present in outline, without more than merely illustrative applications, in the volume which is now closed.
