If The Social Scientist Is To Be More Than A Mere Technician....
Muzafer Sherif
Pennsylvania State University
There are special reasons that I welcome participation in this, the nineteenth memorial session arranged by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues to honor the work of Kurt Lewin. This Society's concern that research be devoted to important social issues is particularly congenial to my enduring research interests, as it is to so many other social psychologists. In fact, I joined this Society almost ten years before joining the APA.
Another reason is the memorial occasion itself. In the 1930's I was searching the experimental literature and cross-cultural studies with the aim of formulating a basis for the adequate frame of reference for man's behavior. I was fortunate to encounter the experimental work of Kurt Lewin and other Gestalt psychologists. My intellectual debt was acknowledged in a little volume published in 1936, The Psychology of Social Norms, where I started by taking stock of social psychology at the time, expressing dismay at the fragmentary and piecemeal state of things and at its lack of perspective. Lewin's work appeared at that time like a fresh breeze, as I noted in the following words: "Already we have great beginnings toward a more effective approach to our problem in the works of Kurt Lewin and Jean Piaget and their students. Lewin and his followers have made a lasting contribution to social psychology by introducing such concepts as ‘aspiration level’ and
( 42) ‘ego-level’ . . . In Piaget's work we have the best fruits of the developmental approach ..." (p. 24).
Now I turn to my topic, "If the Social Scientist Is To Be More Than a Mere Technician . . .". In recent years, increasing numbers of researchers within social science itself have pointed to the need for new breakthroughs in social science. In addition, men in public life have begun to acknowledge the urgent need for directions, even prescriptions from social science for more effective handling of pressing social ills, conflicts between group and group, poverty, riots and crises that urgently demand solutions.
These stirrings within social science and the urgent appeals from men in public life force but one conclusion: At least some social scientists have to be more than mere technicians if they are to chart for us the daring orientations needed for new breakthroughs.
I believe that the potentiality of a scientific approach to the analysis of human relations, with applications based on it, has not yet had its due turn in court. Other modes of handling human problems have brought human relations to their present state, such as they are — fraught with tension, conflict, distrust, crises and the specter of a war that can destroy everything cherished in culture as well as the hope of human survival itself. The politician's cunning sophistication in Realpolitik, with patchy power arrangements and precarious public relations, has proved over and over to breed short-range adjustments that flare into new crises and new, long-range problems. The stark realism of the military generals in various countries breeds more killing and destruction on a vaster scope. The good will and idealism of the humanist and the religious leader have fallen far short of actualization (not infrequently to their own disillusionment) because the good will and idealism were not based on realistic analysis of underlying causes, and not implemented through long-range action programs coordinate with such a valid analysis.
Some of the Temptations ...
During the last few decades, an ever-increasing number of social scientists have been called by government agencies, private business and foundations for consultation and research evaluation of their programs. Research funds and positions have increased tremendously in recent years, as exemplified by an increase in U. S. federal funds to social science research from 73 million dollars in 1960 to 380 million in 1967 (Committee on Government Operations, 1967). This increase is not altogether an unmixed
(43) blessing. The centripetal pull of the facilities thus provided could not help diverting some outstanding researchers from establishing their own course with more limited resources. As a consequence, the more immediate issues that gain the limelight for administrators are apt to receive priority over problems of lasting significance and future import. Not infrequently, the research problems, the major orientations and the framework within which research programs will be cast are already circumscribed by the supporting agency. And these are not necessarily the problems, orientations and frameworks which are conducive to building valid principles that stand the test of time. A researcher—whether he be social psychologist, political scientist or sociologist —who uses the skills and techniques of his trade within the bounds of programs already laid down with specific objectives can only contribute as a technician.
Of course, the fraction of support earmarked for basic research by various agencies, governmental and private, without restrictions on the kind of problems to be studied or the immediate application value of findings does not fall within this evaluation. One can only wish for the increase of such support that goes with no strings attached.
The marketplace, the government agency and the action program are not the only places to find our technicians. There is an understandable, if not justifiable tendency for each social science discipline to develop its respectable outlook, its genteel modes of approach and its acceptable research instrumentalities, and then to freeze into orthodoxy. I will not take the time to give specific cases of such orthodoxies with their circumscribed grooves. They are the domains of people in the in-crowd who communicate with one another in the currently fashionable lingo, as if the universe were confined within the grooves of their particular orthodoxy. The only genuine issues within these grooves become issues of technical refinement here and there, to the neglect of persistent issues that have hearing on actualities.
In this early and formative stage of social science, the huge tasks that confront us are more than technical ones. We have not yet established bearings that permit us to move to the future on solid grounds. Yet, the antidote for our present state does not seem to lie in the application of ready-made models borrowed through analogy from more established disciplines, like physics and mathematics. It is indeed tempting, and perhaps the most elementary mode of attacking new problems, to try a ready-made model that has proved useful in other domains in the attempt to give pattern and form to the unwieldly and complex events of social life.
Of course, formal models are goals to be attained in the ma-
( 44) -ture state of a discipline. But when models are transferred to social science simply because they are formal and aesthetic, without sufficient concern for their isomorphism with the actualities of social relations, their predictive value is bound to be negligible. They too become a technician's sport. We would do well to recall the forceful statement by the sociologist, Emile Durkheim (1915), that the patterns of social realities are not simply an extension of physical and biological patterns and cannot be extrapolated directly from them. Thus, no matter how useful analogical thinking may be in exploration, science created by analogy alone becomes a technical enterprise. No matter how elegant the model, it forces us into a selectivity in choosing problems, in defining variables — at times to the point that the crucial variables are simply chopped off. The point was eloquently stated by Robert Oppenheimer in his invited address to psychologists at the APA convention in San Francisco in 1955.
... between science of very different character, the direct formal analogies in their structure are not too likely to be helpful. Certainly what the pseudo-Newtonians did with sociology was a laughing affair; and similar things have been done with mechanical notions of how psychological phenomena are to be explained. I know that when physicists enter biology their first ideas of how things work are indescribably naive and mechanical; they are how things would work if the physicists were making them work, but not how they work in life. I know that when I hear the word ‘field’ used in physics and in psychology, I have a nervousness that I cannot entirely account for. I think that, especially when we compare subjects in which ideas of coding, of the transfer of information, or ideas of purpose, are inherent and natural with subjects in which these are not inherent and natural, that formal analogies have to be taken with very great caution (Oppenheimer, 1956, 133-134.).
The volume of social science research mounts daily. Social psychology, political science, anthropology and sociology fill their several professional journals and spawn new ones to handle the overflow on specialized topics. Yet there is a growing concern as to what all this thriving enterprise and busy comings-and-goings add up to. The concern is shown by social scientists themselves, by supporting agencies, both governmental and private, and by action programs urgently calling for help. This concern and the stock-taking it provokes are well represented in the four volumes entitled The Use of Social Research in Federal Domestic Programs prepared by the staff of the Research and Technical Sub-committee of the Committee on Government Operations, U.S. House of Representatives (1967).
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Necessity of An Interdisciplinary Approach
Why these concerns, particularly at a time when the pace of research and publication accelerates? It is ironic that only a tiny fraction of the output stands the test of time to be incorporated into the fabric of social science that stretches toward the future. Only a small fraction bears on significant problems of enduring actualities, hence only a fraction has relevance in the shaping of policies and action programs.
No amount of soul-searching within any single discipline —be it psychology, sociology, political science or anthropology— will remedy the situation. Significant research in social science with relevance for persistent major problems has to go beyond the bounds and established grooves of any single social science discipline. No social science discipline can be self-contained. This conclusion was one of the themes in Roger Barker's Kurt Lewin Memorial Address in 1963 (Barker, 1964).
Social psychology, as a meeting ground of individual and socio-cultural variables, is in a unique position to help in the integration of social sciences. By the same token, it is the most vulnerable to provincialism and insularity the moment that it buries itself within the confines of a single academic discipline (whether psychology or sociology) or attempts to develop by feeding exclusively on its own corpus. Within its own confines it cannot select the significant problems for study that persist throughout social science, nor can it incorporate the major variables pertinent to the problems. All by itself, social psychology cannot even develop single handedly the methodology for studying many of the variables that it must include. Social psychology that has the pretense of developing valid theory with relevance to actualities and policy decisions has no choice but to be interdisciplinary (Sherif, 1967).
This is neither the time nor the place to examine all of the issues that the word "interdisciplinary" raises for social science or educational practice. For the moment, let me make myself clear by taking one case — the history of psychology, which from its beginnings was interdisciplinary. Psychology, especially experimental psychology, always borrowed from physics, chemistry, anatomy and physiology. Borrowing from the physical sciences has always been considered proper; it was the thing for psychologists to do. Now, I am saying that for the same reasons and in the same spirit, social psychology must borrow from the other social sciences if it is to be more than a tooling ground for technicians, busily wielding their trade in trivia.
The social psychologist has to borrow findings from other social sciences about the sociocultural environment, with its social,
(46) economic and political organization, its values, and its tools. Other social sciences study these aspects of the sociocultural environment at their meaningful, patterned level. These meaningful patterns constitute social stimulus situations for the individual. The social psychologist cannot reduce these meaningful patterns to isolated single stimuli or improvise their nature without running the risk of ethnocentric distortions. Therefore, he has no choice but to borrow the needed information from other social sciences. What must be borrowed from social science is at least as essential as what the psychologist has always been eager to borrow from the natural sciences about the nature of physical stimulus energies.
Some have expressed apprehension that an interdisciplinary approach would result in social psychology spreading itself too thin. On the contrary, the needed interchange with other social I sciences will contribute to social psychology in establishing its bearings and providing the needed perspective. It can only result in broadening and strengthening the methodological base. This promise of interdisciplinary integration was expressed well by Stanley Milgram in a chapter prepared for a forthcoming volume on problems of interdisciplinary relations in the social sciences (Sherif and Sherif, 1968):
"When a social scientist frees himself from the narrow grooves of his academic discipline, a new range of intellectual problems is made accessible to him, and new paths of inquiry opened. I have seen this time and again among colleagues and graduate students, and am beginning to believe that just as cross-pressures in voting, free the individual from following the traditional choices of his social group, intellectual cross-pressures generated by an interdisciplinary outlook liberate a person's thinking from the limiting assumptions of his own professional group, and stimulate fresh vision".
Concentration of Research on Long-Range, Persistent Problems
We are not the first to be troubled with vexing problems of intergroup relations involving issues of prejudice, segregation and exploitation. We are not the first ones to be caught in flare-ups between groups like strikes, riots or war. We are not the first to live in a time of rapid social change, hence to witness the rise of social movements expressing defiance against the status quo by minorities within nations who have been targets of discrimination or by erstwhile colonial populations in their search toward a new identity and nationhood.
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We are not the first to be confronted with problems of leadership-followership, morale, loyalty-disloyalty, conformity and deviation, delinquency, marginality and other reference group issues — all of which stem from the general fact that man carries out the important business of living within some form of organizational pattern.
Nor is the present generation of psychologists the first that has engaged in studying the difficult problems of categorization of neutral and value-charged stimulus objects, that has engaged in studying problems of self consistency when the person confronts situations that jar or enhance it, or that has engaged in studying his reactions to communications that support or violate his cherished commitments and stands.
Such problems of import in man's relation to man, especially !in times of rapid social change so characteristic of our time, have been persistent problems. Men in public life as well as the several social science disciplines have invested great energy and time for generations to their study and their solution. Instead of cutting ourselves off from what is accumulated in tile literature as a result of their efforts, it is to our own advantage to extract from it and utilize, as a foundation on which to build, that which stands the test of time and that which recurs over and over. Sifting their accumulated experience also saves us from wasting our own time and energies in pursuing lines that others have already discovered to be dead ends. The craze for novelty in the academic market place blinds us to the advantages of such stock-taking, longitudinally and across the disciplines.
The study of persistent and recurrent problems of the kind just mentioned, namely, personal identity and consistency, intergroup relations, social movements of defiant peoples searching new identity, and other forms of social change — cannot be a one-shot venture. These problems require sustained, continuing and long-range concentration. If we keep at them, concentrating on persistent problems rather than hopping on the hand wagon when there are rewards for studying them, then we will not be surprised when their specific manifestations flare upon the public scene as crises of major proportions. And if this long-range and persistent concentration is applied to such long-range and persistent problems, we will not be caught unprepared in theoretical orientation and in methodological resources when the time is opportune to contribute to policy decisions about these problems. Therefore. it is gratifying that this Society has shown more and more concern in recent years with organizing itself towards dealing with long-
(48) range and persistent problems, with the sustained and enduring concentration they require (e.g. SPSSI Newsletter, 1966).
A Persistent Problem Area Illustrated: Intergroup Relations
The rest of this paper will be devoted to one of these persistent tent and recurrent problems, namely the over-riding problem of inter-group relations. Already, a coherent picture is emerging in our understanding of intergroup relations, although it is by no means complete. This coherent picture owes its outlines to cumulative efforts in sociology, political science, history, anthropology as well as social psychology. It provides the essentials for a theory of intergroup conflict and cooperation that does have a bearing on actualities, hence has important implications for policy decisions.
One reason why action programs intended to reduce intergroup hatreds have been ineffective, on the whole, is that a realistic diagnosis of the sufficient and necessary conditions for intergroup conflict has been lacking. In other words, action programs, on the whole, have not been based on a valid theory of intergroup conflict. Diagnosis and analysis of etiology should be the first step, and not an afterthought, in formulating policy and action. Certainly, this is not a new idea. The dictum that good practice is associated with good theory and that valid theory is the practical basis for effective action has been stated in one form or another for at least a hundred years.
Theories positing an instinct of aggression have not fared well. The long-range research program by J. P. Scott and his associates (1958, 62) came to clear-cut generalizations about such theories. Basing his generalizations on careful experimentation, rather than anecdote or unrepresentative cases, Scott concluded:
The important fact is that the chain of causation in every case eventually traces back to the outside. There is no physiological evidence of any spontaneous stimulation for fighting arising within the body. This means that there is no need for fighting, either aggressive or defensive, apart from what happens in the external environment. ... This is quite a different situation from the physiology of eating, where the internal processes of metabolism lead to definite physiological changes which eventually produce hunger and stimulation to eat, without any change in the external environment.
Explanations of intergroup conflict or harmony, war or peace between human groupings through analogy with individual events have been off the mark, whether these events were personal motive, individually endured frustration or interpersonal quarrels.
( 49) The psychiatrist J. D. Frank (1964, 41) aptly made this point in discussing war and peace:
... It becomes increasingly clear that individual psychopathology cannot cast much light on the question of war . . . war is a group activity. Individuals fight but do not wage war. This is reserved for organized groups.
Frank further noted that "mentally healthy national leaders are as fully capable of leading a nation to war as mentally unbalanced ones".
We may now define the proper domain of intergroup relations. Every instance of friendship or hostility, love or hate is not necessarily a case of intergroup relations. The domain of intergroup relations includes only those states of friendship or hatred, harmony or conflict that stem from membership in groups, whether the events occur while individuals interact. as members of their respective groups or during collective encounters between groups.
Having delineated the domain of intergroup relations, I shall now state the essentials of a theory of group conflict (Sherif and Sherif, 1953; Sherif, 1966):
... The limiting condition in shaping attitude and behavior, images and action of one group vis à vis another is the nature of functional relations between the groups. The sufficient condition for the rise of hostile attitudes and deeds toward another group is simply that the goals pursued by the parties involved are mutually incompatible. Given these conditions, communication and other transactions between the groups does invariably lead to hostile and vindictive attitudes, unfavorable images or stereotypes, casting blame on one another, for the state of affairs and eventually to overt conflict and fighting. Power is pitted against power; the alternatives that each group can consider are progressively reduced to the choice between deterrence and actual violence. Each group mobilizes its resources with all the meticulous planning and "preparedness" measures to be executed by the more able, intelligent and skilled within its fold.
. . . It follows that the cause of intergroup conflict does not reside primarily within the particular organizational form and the cultural values of any given group (although of course these may become highly relevant when groups are closely interdependent). Ironically, the zeal with which members of one group pursue intergroup hostility is proportional to the degree of solidarity and cooperativeness within the in-group, and these tend to increase (luring intergroup conflict. Thus democracy within the bounds defined as "we" does not necessarily imply democracy in relations with outsiders, if those outsiders are defined as enemies or competitors.
. .. The rise of intergroup conflict has unmistakable consequences for relations and values within each group. The enduring
(50) consequence of intergroup conflict is toward recasting the organization and the values that prevail within each group to strengthen its role in the conflict. Leaders arise who are adept in conflict. Old values are enlisted in the cause, including traditional values of peace and freedom for individual members.
. . . The sufficient condition for the rise of intergroup hostility provides the basis for diagnosis and for seeking effective measures for reducing intergroup hostility. If hostile attitudes and deeds are the outcome of confrontations among groups pursuing mutually incompatible and mutually exclusive claims, it follows that reduction of hostility must depend on interaction between groups to achieve goals that are compellingly desired by all parties to the conflict and that require their cooperation. In short, one necessary and sufficient condition for the reduction of intergroup hatred is interaction towards superordinate goals. This provides the motivational base for making effective the usual methods like conference of leaders, dissemination of information and exchange of persons.
Goals superordinate to the private interests of each group, but highly desired by all parties do promote cooperation between groups and do eventually breed friendly and fraternal attitudes. We have shown this experimentally, and there are historical and contemporary cases confirming this generalization (Sherif et al., 1961 ; Sherif, 1966). While other measures for reducing conflict do have a place in resolving disputes, their effectiveness is markedly limited unless there is a motivational base provided by a series of superordinate goals in which the groups are genuinely interdependent for their attainment.. Thus negotiations by leaders and representatives, communication and exchange of persons, dissemination of information, and so on prove disappointing unless the conditions of interdependence created by superordinate goals have already been established. And let me repeat that superordinate goals are not technical matters. They are goals urgently desired and compelling to all groups involved and not tactics, manipulative devices or persuasive techniques that can be used by one group to impose its will on others.
Social Movements Conducive to More Inclusive Self Identity
The conceptualization presented here in its bare essentials placed the domain of intergroup conflict and cooperation within the context of group functioning vis a vis other groups. Therefore, a closer look is needed at the formation of human groups and, in particular, the process wherein loyalty to small local units is enlarged toward a more inclusive self identity.
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Groups do form whenever individuals with common interest, common gripes or common aspirations interact. In the course of their interaction over time, individuals develop bonds with each other in a pattern of reciprocities (that is, roles and statuses) and live within the set of evaluative categories, or norms, developed to regulate their transactions, at least in matters that concern their common lot. Such matters ordinarily include important relations with other groups.
Groups are not closed systems that survive indefinitely without change. Especially the technological developments of the modern world have made groups increasingly interdependent in many spheres of life, including their livelihood, safety and security. The trend toward increasing dependence of group on group has fostered ever-enlarging social units, encompassing erstwhile autonomous and separate groups. Each of these larger systems, in turn, develops a superordinate organizational pattern, superordinate normative regulators and associated sanctions for their implementation.
Needless to say, the trend toward increased interdependence of groups and the emergence of larger units are not short-term propositions, occurring over night. Nor do the new and larger units come into existence without opposition, resistance and last ditch fights from vested interests in the component units. Groups do have interests of their own, customs and values that their members are willing, even eager to defend. The cake of custom is not broken easily. It may crumble, but it has its staunch defenders.
Initially, the trends toward more inclusive patterns of human relationships and more comprehensive values start as social movements. Every social movement has initially a protest or defiance aspect. It generates also a vision for change expressed in a platform or program to remedy the causes of protest or defiance. Frequently, they are initiated by small numbers of individuals whom the establishment at the time may consider starry-eyed visionaries, irrational radicals, crackpots and the like. But if the torchbearers are men with insight into the widespread concerns and aspirations of people, and not merely self-seeking adventurers, the hill of gripes, declarations of defiance and protest, which are among the first activities of every social movement, find `resonance among large numbers of geographically separated individuals and groups. On the constructive side, the social movement proclaims its positive goals, legislative or organizational reforms or innovations that these goals seek and other instrumentalities for implementing them.
Combining the elements of conflict and the positive aims, a
(52) social movement can be defined as a pattern of attempts-through pronouncements, literature, rallies and direct action — to establish or to maintain a definite scheme of human relations and values, prompted by states of common unrest, discontent and common aspirations of a large number of individuals.
Independence movements toward nationhood, like those of the United States in 1770's and more recently on the Asian and African continents, are among the examples of social movements that actualized the self identity built through their social movements into larger and more inclusive organizational patterns, with instrumentalities for implementing their slogans of self-determination.
There are many incipient and well organized social movements in the world today seeking the formation of more inclusive units. We will gain greater insight into the workings of many forms of collective flare-ups (for example riots), if we view them as part and parcel of a social movement of long duration, rather than as discrete and particular failings on the part of this or that administration, this or that policy or city, during the heat of summer. The particular events associated at the moment with such flare-ups are, in fact, only triggers for which other triggers could easily substitute. Flare-ups in American cities are not unique events of the long hot summers of the 1960's. The Detroit race riots, not of 1967 but way back in 1943 in which whites were the ones who initiated violence, were triggered by a relatively minor incident on a bridge at Belle Island, Detroit. But, as Lee and Humphrey (1944) noted in their study, the riots might easily have been triggered at any of a number of other places in that city, simmering with tension.
With all of their variations, each social movement that proclaims its protests and defiance of the status quo also builds a self picture, gaining momentum in time so that it cannot be handled or subdued merely with improvised financial hand-outs or similar ameliorative measures that indeed might have been effective in an earlier formative period of the movement. And, every social movement of large proportions has a range or latitude for its militancy, from moderate to extreme. The leaders who occupy positions within this range are those who prove by example and action that they can live up to the particular set of expectations widely shared by rank and file at the time (Killian and Grigg, 1964). This range of alternatives for leadership tends to narrow down as the movement encounters resistance or oppression. Martin Luther King characterized the phenomena well in his 1963 letter from Birmingham jail, where he expressed regret that moderate white religious leaders labeled him as an extremist. On the contrary, he wrote:
(53) "... I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency ... The other force is one of bitterness and hatred and comes perilously close to advocating violence" (King, 1964, 72-73). King correctly predicted that dismissal of his moderation would lead millions toward a-more militant position.
Therefore, the formula that groups or social movements are created by leaders should be completed with the corollary that leaders are also creations of the less articulate rank and file. It follows that the alternatives for policy and action that are open to leaders of social movements, and nations for that matter, do not include all possible alternatives to be found in a formal logical model. Leaders are hound to move and lead within a range of alternatives that the rank and file expect or can tolerate. Those master technicians who tinker endlessly with models of deterrence in international affairs have usually overlooked the significant constraints of internal leadership and decision making. In brief, the long-range and fruitful line of research in this problem area will develop methods to assess alternative strategies that are either acceptable to or expected by the membership of a group, as the basis for analyzing decisions of policy makers and their consequences. Meanwhile, many social movements should be grateful that they did not have the services of a deterrence technician. On the basis of the deterrence model, the decision of the American colonies to risk war for independence from the King would have seemed sheer madness.
Modern Dilemma in Human Identification: Provincial or More Inclusive Loyalties
For many years the over-riding concern for peoples every where has been the
futile waste in life and human resources
caused by wars. World-wide suffering and destruction in the past gave rise to
various world organizations, including the United Nations, to cope with the
recurrence of open conflicts. Yet the nations of the world are not ready to
renounce war as an instrument of national policy. Those who earnestly propose
outlawing war and delegating authority for resolving disputes between nations to
a world body, are still considered to be members of an insignificant social
movement composed of starry-eyed visionaries.
Yet, there are certain irreversible trends and conditions that support the
growth of the movement to abolish war as an instrument of national policy, to
delegate authority for settling disputes
(54) between nations exclusively to a world-wide authority. The trend is toward ever-increasing dependence of nation upon nation in many spheres of life-a trend created by the impact of developing technology in communication, transportation, production and commerce. The principal condition that provides impetus for such a movement is the recent and astronomical increase in what Brock Chisholm called, in plain English "our killing power". Brock Chisholm credits the increase in "killing power" with an unprecedented effect, namely with transforming the scope of the social units responsible for individual survival from national to worldwide proportions. I quote from Ghisholm (1966, 55):
. . . our killing power has become such that ... the survival unit quite suddenly ... is no longer the nation but has become the human race itself, and for this we have no precedent, no previous experience and no education for dealing with any such situation. It was quite unknown on earth until just now.
It is important to note, however, that the trend toward enlarged ''survival units" has been underway for some decades and has already resulted in the creation of a good many organizations, numbering no less than- one hundred, for the international regulation of a variety of specific activities, starting with a Universal Postal Union in 1875.
In a recent United Nations publication, thirteen experts in international law (Thirteen Experts, 1963) from countries as varied as the United States, Switzerland, the Soviet Union, India and France, examined the trend toward organizations whose rules cut across national boundaries. One of these experts introduced the operation of such organizations through his own experience, in the following words:
The invitation to deliver this lecture reached tyre by letter in Buenos Aires thanks to arrangements made by the Universal postal union. I cabled my acceptance through facilities operated in accordance with the International Telecommunication Union. I later crossed three continents by air services made possible by the rules and facilities of the International Civil Aviation Organization and the World Meteorological Organization. I was exempt from quarantine because I held a certificate of vaccination issued by the World Health Organization. Seven international organizations had some part in my being here (1963, 6).
The thoughtful examination by these thirteen experts of the trends toward international organization reveals common threads which social psychologists might well heed.
First, in every case, the move toward cooperative efforts grew from common interdependent problems — for example in commu-
(55) -nication or weather prediction or health — which the separate nations could not handle independently.
Second, the cooperative efforts did eventually lead to agreements on rules that are binding for all nations in (he specific activity involved and in international organizations to implement them. In other words, the nations are bound to rules and organizations superordinate to those prevailing within the bounds of the individual member nations.
Third, the evolution of the common yardsticks or norms applicable to all countries frequently required changes in habitual practices within nations, in the particular sphere of common concern. In other words, with respect to those practices, nations were required and did change their concepts of their sovereignty, namely that portion of this sovereignty involving practices that conflicted with the newly evolved international union.
The serious impediments retarding the evolution of superordinate binding rules for resolving international disputes exclusively by international bodies lie in the claims and objectives of nations which they enshrine within the confines of their own sovereignty, despite the conflict of these claims and objectives with the trend toward the increasing interdependence of people everywhere. As a result, many peoples in various countries of the world today are caught in dilemmas between their growing identification with more inclusive values encompassing humanity, on the one hand, and the more provincial and local identifications of their own particular groups, be it their tribe, state or nation, on the other hand.
Not infrequently, the demands of provincial identifications and loyalties are at odds with more universal and inclusive values. There are forces of resistance attempting to block the trend toward increasing interdependence between groups by intensifying such provincial loyalties. Many examples come to mind. We learn from C. Legum's volume on Pan Africanism (1962) and United Nations reports on Apartheid (1963) that while the new nationalisms in Africa move toward broadening the narrow and local insulations of tribalism, the colonial powers still foster insulation of these very same peoples within their more restrictive tribal loyalties. Those who are familiar with The Closed Society by the historian James W. Silver (1964) must be impressed by his vivid account of the constricting effects of making "states rights" supreme. The closed society produced the closed mind, which Milton Rokeach (1960) has analyzed extensively in other localities as well.
(56) The Trend Is Toward Loyalty to Human Bonds
Still, there is an unmistakable and irreversible trend toward loyalty to human bonds more inclusively than the tribe, state or nation. It was not enough for the leaders who participated in the Nazi barbarism to declare at the Nuremberg trials that they were simply carrying out the orders of their superiors. Many people have pondered the implications of these events, and many persons in various countries today are caught in a dilemma as to when the demands of more provincial identifications conflict with the more inclusive loyalties to humanity, doubtless with tremendous psychological wear and tear to these persons. Surely such dilemmas raise psychological questions worthy of serious research of long-range scope, for the dilemmas will not disappear so long as the trend toward interdependence continues. These research questions include the following: When is a person justified in refusing to carry out orders from the superior authority on the grounds of his attachment to humanity? Can definite criteria over and above legal technicalities be specified for such refusals? Otherwise, we cannot single out cases where such refusals reflect genuine identification with and devotion to humanity and those that reflect simply subjective whims of the individual in question. What are the social and psychological issues in the establishment of such criteria? Of course, research concerned with such problems will necessarily involve social, political and legal aspects as well as social-psychological questions.
There are still other facets to the dilemmas of loyalty between provincial and more inclusively human bonds. There is an assumption of some standing that loyalty to primary groups—such as tribe or family—is the prerequisite for loyalty to larger, more comprehensive values and human ties. Certainly, larger loyalties can include those to the primary groups whose values are compatible. Thus, when they are compatible, identification with and loyalty to every broadening and more inclusive human bonds need not be conducive to the arousal of an attitude of "self-hatred" for the person's more provincial primary group or affiliation.
But when the primary group promotes incompatible values, does it follow that identification with the provincial group (tribe, family, clan) will promote devotion to wider human values? The issue is raised here as a research problem on integration or conflict of human loyalties that deserves serious concentration under conditions of a changing world. From what we know about the categorization process, it is a reasonable hypothesis that the more constricted scope of identification is likely to result in total
(57) rejection of more comprehensive, more universal human bonds, perhaps proportional to the person's love and attachment to his primary group.
Creative Alternative to the Law of the Jungle
Perhaps more serious, but not unrelated to the dilemma between provincial identification and widening human bonds, is the gap between the proclamations and deeds of nations in regard to resolving their disputes. As eloquently proclaimed in the United Nations Charter, almost every nation today states its abhorrence of the scourge of war and its dedication to peace. In principle, that is in abstract principle, most nations have proclaimed the necessity of a world body to settle their disputes.
On the ruins of the first World War, the victors founded the League of Nations. But, as the U.N. Secretary General U Thant (1964) summarized its ill-fated existence, its doom was forecast in its birth as adjunct to a war settlement by the victors. We learn from an account of The Evolution of the United Nations that the Charter of the United Nations was framed before the realization that nuclear weapons made familiar concepts of `war obsolete and before the realities of power relations among nations would change (Bunting and Lee, 1964, 50). From the same sources, we learn that nations soon proceeded to form regional pacts, nearly all of which "were a straight vote of no confidence in the Security Council" (1964, 61).
Thus, despite proclamations of devotion to a principle of settling their differences through a world body, nations are still most sensitive to their sovereign right to take the matter of waging war into their own hands. They bristle over their sovereignty in settling disputes in their own way.
The gap between proclamation and deed is a cause of great concern to those who fully realize that modern "killing power" made obsolete the conception of survival only as tribe, clan or nation. The survival unit, as Chisholm declared, has become the human race. Distances and oceans are no longer dependable shields. The formula that the survival unit is the whole human race becomes more than a metaphor when General MacArthur (who is considered by many people in the United States as the personification of military grandeur) publicly asserted that "War has become a Frankenstein to destroy both sides.... If you lose, you are annihilated. If you win, you stand only to lose.... Science has clearly outmoded it as a feasible alternative" (MacArthur, 1955, 37).
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Alarmed by the bleak picture of a stone age that inevitably lies ahead if the law of the jungle continues, men of sufficient vision beyond provincial blinders have been offering various devices to get out. of the predicament. Thus men of such vision and good will in various countries offered blueprints for world federation. Experts on international law, government and economics proposed programs for a viable and effective world organization for settling international disputes and decreasing the appalling gaps in income, living, health and educational standards that divide peoples into "have" and "have pots", with all of the attendant consequences.
Clark and Sohn's Plan...
One of the most elaborately thought out plans for an effective world body to function as the arbiter in international disputes is that proposed by Grenville Clark and Louis B. Sohn (1966). Their influential book, World Peace Through World Law, is now available in many languages and in a short time has gone through three revisions. In the 1966 revision, two alternative plans are proposed. One plan is an article by article revision of the present U.N. Charter. The second is a detailed proposal for a new world body, in which supreme authority is vested in a representative body which the authors refer to as the General Conference and an Executive Council replaces the present Security Council, but functions under the directives of the General Conference. The main features of this detailed proposal specify that the organization is open to all nations ratifying the plan. No nation can be barred or expelled from the body. In fact the authors insist that the effectiveness of the new world body depends on its unanimous or near unanimous ratification by all nations. It includes a Disarmament Authority and a Peace Force. Representation is proportional to the population of constituent nations. Representatives would initially be selected by national legislatures or comparable bodies in each country, with the aim of their election eventually by popular vote within each country. The purpose of these latter proposals is at least to reduce the possibility of the representatives being mere agents of the governments that happen to be in power at the time (cf. Sevareid, 1965, The Final Troubled Hours of Adlai Stevenson).
Recently the historian Waskow (1967) proposed private initiative to establish training schools for developing personnel to man an eventual transnational peace-keeping force, with emphasis on the need for their developing unequivocal loyalties to peace beyond their own national loyalties. The psychologist
(59) Charles Osgood (1962) has proposed a variety of measures to reverse the spiral of the arms race in a series of steps designed for Graduated Reciprocation in Tension-reduction (GRIT).
The effectiveness of all such blueprints and measures is predicated on the assumption that nations, and especially great powers, are so motivationally committed to the settlement of disputes through a world body that they would relegate this most sensitive and central sphere of their sovereignty to it. How fortunate for humanity if such a strong universal motivational base existed.
The great obstacles is not lack of resourcefulness in social design or in technical matters, but the insufficiency and contradictions in the more inclusive identification and loyalty that might provide the base of support for a world-wide arbiter of international disputes.
Nations do not as yet conceive themselves as interdependent parts of the survival unit composed of the human race. Despite the mounting evidence of peoples' interdependence for their safety, security and future progress, the nations have not embraced the superordinate goal of human survival, in the attainment of which their own well-being and survival lies.
A viable world body directed toward the superordinate goal of human survival, which will safeguard cultures built through centuries and insure their future development, cannot be patterned in the image of "my way of life" or "your way of life". It requires superordinate organization, superordinate value orientations in which more provincial identifications and loyalties are not at odds with more comprehensive loyalties, at least as these pertain to the sphere of mutual safety. It requires instruments and sanctions coordinate with the superordinate organizations and values.
Where is such an organization to come from? It is probably safe to conclude that no government today could commit itself to such a scheme, mindful of the consequences at home - accusations of selling out, of being traitors, and of exposing their people to danger. It is only the people who can provide the broad base for their official spokesmen to take such hold steps. And this broad base does not come out of thin air. It has to develop and be nourished first as social movements in various countries. As we noted in our brief analysis of social movements, public leaders are as much creations of popular movements as they are the initiators of new policies and actions.
It is not within the ken of one social psychologist or the scope of one paper in this APA Convention to chart the course
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