Social Psychology: An Analysis of Social Behavior
Chapter 7: Some Additional Phases of Anticipatory Behavior
Kimball Young
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Earlier social psychology laid stress upon imitation, suggestion, and sympathy in describing social behavior. More recently there has been considerable emphasis upon attitudes and values as basic features. And through the influence of psychiatry the mechanisms of compensation, sublimation, identification, and projection have been used in interpreting social conduct. All these are phases of anticipatory behavior, and in the present chapter we shall attempt to discuss them from that standpoint. We shall, moreover, make an effort to bring some consistency out of the variety of interpretations which follow from the use of these concepts.
A. Imitation.
Aside from instinct no term has been more loosely used in social psychology than imitation. It is employed to cover such actions as yawning when others yawn, running when others run, to account for learning one's native language, to describe conscious following of dress fads of one person by another, or even more remotely, as with Bagehot and Tarde, to explain what is known today in anthropology and sociology as the diffusion of culture. Baldwin, an early American writer in social psychology, employed the word to explain nearly all behavior processes— simple or complex— association, memory, and learning. Our clearest conception of this term is derived from comparative psychology and from objective studies made on human subjects. We need not go afield into the experimental studies on the lower animals, but we may summarize some of the more important findings.
I. Imitation among Animals. — Writers on imitation of both man and the animals have used the term in two senses. One group has thought imitation a purely instinctive process by which, in some more or less mysterious manner, animals and human beings learn from one another without
(119) recourse to ordinary trial and error or to rational learning. As in much of the earlier discussion of instincts, one was left in the dark as to just what constitutes the mechanism of imitation, but was assured that it was an instinct. Others have used the term as the "relatively instantaneous regrouping of old habits," in some sort of brief, but intelligent manner. As Watson remarks, most animal experimentation on so-called imitation reduces itself to some means of enhancing the stimulus which will lead to this regrouping of old habits largely by the following methods: (I) by the experimenter showing the animal how to do the desired act; (2) by allowing an animal already trained to the act to perform the same in the presence of the untrained animal; (3) by actually "putting the animal `through the act,"' that is, by directing with one's hands the various muscular coördinations of the animal necessary to acquire the act; (4) and finally, by "encouraging" the animal by rewards, such as sweetmeats. It must be said, furthermore, that much of the earlier work on imitation is unsatisfactory because we know so little of the experimental controls.
With birds, the evidence seems fairly conclusive that imitation plays little rôle in learning. Breed found that newly-hatched chicks got no added impetus or improvement in learning to peck grain from observing older chicks doing so. The behavior observed by Whitman, Craig, Scott, and Conradi on the social influences of other birds on those reared with strange species has sometimes been attributed to imitation. Conradi found that sparrows raised with canaries learned to sing; Whitman found that one species of pigeon reared with a strange species refused to mate with any but the accustomed although alien species. These data point pretty conclusively not to some mysterious instinct, or some spontaneous recasting of old habits, but to the mechanism of the conditioned response.
The results of experimentation on lower mammalian forms are very contradictory and for the most part unsatisfactory. Cole thought that he found some instances of imitation in raccoons, but Shepard found no such evidence in similar studies of the learning of raccoons. Perseverance and trial-and-error methods seemed more effective. Yerkes "failed to get imitation in the dancing mouse." His findings agree with like studies on other varieties of mice.
Thorndike and Watson, working with monkeys, which are held to be peculiarly imitative, got no positive results either by methods of doing the act in the presence of the animal, by putting the animal through the acts,
( 120) or by having them watch other trained monkeys set the pattern for them. Watson remarks:
The monkeys very quickly form by their own unaided efforts such habits of manipulation, but so far as our observations went they were entirely uninfluenced by tuition.[1]
The experimental controls of some of the earlier studies on monkeys have been most unsatisfactory. Animals of uncertain age and previous experience have been used. Furthermore, among the animals themselves the activity of one monkey in securing food may direct the other animals to some food object and thus set up a response of grasping food in the second. But, one asks, is this imitation in the ordinary sense in which the term is used?
We may summarize the matter of so-called imitation in the animals by the following comments (I) There is no evidence for the existence of a special instinct or concatenated reflex pattern which operates to shorten the period of learning when the untrained animal watches a trained one perform the desired feat. As one writer puts it, there is no indication of a general instinct of imitation "leading an animal to copy any action whatsoever." (2) In observing alleged imitation we must look upon the pacesetter as directing the attention of the other animal to the stimulus. This is especially so where sex or age differences are involved between the trained animal and the untrained animal. (3) The fact of similar neuro-muscular-glandular mechanisms must be reckoned with in discussing the foreshortening of learning. (4) Likewise, when the experimenter does the "stunt" in front of the animal, he may be orienting the animal to the significant parts of the mechanism to be manipulated. That is to say, the direction of attention may somewhat direct the random movements of the animal toward the solution of the final problem, such as securing food or escaping from the prison box. (5) Again, as Cole implies, actually putting the animal through the paces with one's hands, with the accompanying kinesthetic cues to the animal, may be of value in learning. It gives a set or orientation to the subsequent acts, but it can hardly be called imitation. (6) One must be certain that the matter is not one of conditioned response in which the act of one animal serves as the novel stimulus to the
( 121) other. For example, a band of horses may start to run when one of their members runs, but at the outset the situation may be as follows: Suppose some horses are grazing quietly in a pasture or on a range. A loud sound or a rapidly moving object, such as a piece of paper or rolling weeds, may stimulate them to a fear reaction followed by running. All of the horses then run away together, but the running of their mates serves as the artificial or new stimulus along with the original one. Hence later, when the stimulus of another running horse appears, the second horse is conditioned to run also. This explanation is far simpler and more in harmony with known facts than to posit some mystic instinct that informs the animal to run when another of his species does so. In contrast, older and trained animals may serve, by conditioning, to assist in inhibiting the fear of the untrained or younger animal, so that otherwise emotionally determined reactions may be directed to some feat demanded by the situation. This is illustrated in the training of fire-horses and hunting-dogs.
In brief, the evidence from comparative psychology on imitation in the old sense, is extremely scanty. We must at all times take into account the factors of conditioning, the possible direction of attention, and the general kinesthetic orientation of the animal to the wanted act by the manipulation of the experimenter himself.
2. Imitation in Man.— In the case of human beings the evidence for an instinct of imitation is as unsatisfactory as it is in that of the lower animals. Sociological writers with a psychological bent have used the term in a broad and loose manner. Thus Ellwood employs imitation "as a name to cover the social method of developing the instincts," or as "the tendency to conform, to be like one's fellows," and for him there is even a "rational imitation," which consists in the "copying of the action of another, not merely for the sake of social conformity, nor yet because it satisfies some primitive impulse, but because it is in accord with some rational purpose to do so." McDougall, following his penchant for logical arrangement, lists suggestion, sympathy, and imitation as general innate tendencies. These three, in a sense, furnish the modus operandi for the elaboration of the basic instincts and emotions. Suggestion comes under the head of the intellectual or perceptual phase of this development, sympathy under the emotional or affective, while imitation represents the motor or action side of the process. His scheme is seductive because of its simplicity. He gives five types of behavior which are characterized by imitation: (I) "Sympa
( 122) thetic induction" of actions, such as laughing when others laugh; (2) ideomotor action; (3) following the pattern of behavior laid down by another; (4) action which is similar to another's due to one's directing another's attention to the act, which act is later more or less reproduced by the second person; and (5) the very unreliable type of "imitation" in young infants, as reported by Preyer, wherein the protrusion of the lips of the par. ent led to a like action by the child. Other experimenters have not been able to verify Preyer's statement for similar ages. McDougall also is suspicious of the evidence for this sort of imitation.
Others have used the term in almost as broad and divergent a manner as these two writers. Even so careful a writer as Thorndike, who criticizes the loose use of the term, continues to state that imitation appears in the following instances:
Smiling when smiled at, laughing when others laugh, yelling when others yell, looking at what others observe,. listening when others listen, running with or after people who are running in the same direction, running from the focus whence others scatter, jabbering when others jabber and becoming silent as they become silent, crouching when others crouch, chasing, attacking and rending what others hunt, and seizing whatever object another seizes.[2]
When we come to examine the alleged cases of imitation we find that most of them can be reduced to instances of conditioned response, where the activity of like forms becomes the secondary stimulus toward which one is conditioned. Smiling when others smile, running, talking, etc., come very largely under the same sort of procedure as that discussed above in regard to running away from danger among animals. In these types of behavior, which Thorndike notes as common, the individuals seem to respond so automatically that it is easy to assume some instinct as the basis for the behavior. Yet, if the history of the learning of the person were uncovered, one could find the early instances of the conditioning. Couple this with the learning which arises from paying attention to what others attend to or approve or reject, and most of this sort of so-called imitative behavior is explained.
Mead has used the term imitation in the sense of conscious following of the action of another where there is imagery of the other person acting as
( 123) a stimulus. This may be kinesthetic, visual, or vocal-motor. "Imitation comes in when we get the same attitude as the other person" whom we are following. For him imitation is not a blind mimicry or duplication of the act of one person by another, but is always related to the situation:
When another self is present in consciousness doing something, then such a self may be imitated by the self that is conscious of him in his conduct, but by what possible mechanism, short of a miracle, the conduct of one form should act as a stimulus to another to do, not what the situation calls for, but something like that which the first form is doing, is beyond ordinary comprehension. Imitation becomes comprehensible when there is consciousness of other selves and not before.[3]
To limit the meaning of the term, as Mead has done, is to take imitation out of the field of innate mechanism and to tie it up with the capacity of the organism to control its behavior, through imagery, in reference to that of another person. The existence of this form of anticipatory reaction, which we call imagery, simply means that from previous experience with other persons the secondary stimulus is now within the organism itself. Hence, one may "imitate" an ideal figure, or some character in history, or a parent or teacher, as readily as one does another person in the flesh. Imitation, then, is simply a phase of the whole conditioning and integrating function found in learning, in which the secondary stimulus and the reaction are similar if not identical. As Humphrey remarks, "this secondary stimulus may originate either in the same or in another organism, so that imitation may technically be either of self or others."
Imitation, therefore, whether it be a simpler sort described by Thorndike or of the sort involving acquisition of culture patterns, may be explained as a special phase of the integration of conditioned responses into habits and attitudes. It is not some special device of nature added to other mechanisms, but is merely a part of the whole capacity for alteration of responses through the association areas of the cerebral cortex. When one recalls the fact of more or less identical mechanisms of learning in all human beings and the more or less common patterns of personal-social and cultural environment to which the individual is exposed, it is not difficult to understand why human behavior, in many dimensions of life, is similar in form and content.
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B. Suggestion.
Suggestion is often looked upon as the subjective aspect of imitation. Upon examination it also resolves itself into a phase of anticipatory reaction involving both the stimuli and the images, ideas and attitudes which more or less unconsciously affect conduct. The types of incipient or overt responses that any given set of stimuli will arouse depend upon social conditioning. Once the image and accompanying attitude are set off, conduct tends to flow in that direction. This is the foundation of Scott's statement that "every idea of an action (or function) will result in that action unless hindered by a competing idea or physical impediment." That is to say, anticipatory reactions become overt unless some other anticipatory responses inhibit them. We have here nothing else than the sphere of conditioning and inhibition transferred into the organism. Since we are moved by emotions and feelings far more effectively than by rational ideas, the most far-reaching effects are produced by appealing to those emotionalized images and attitudes to which we have become conditioned.
Suggestion, then, involves both the external and the internal factors which determine behavior. Titchener defines suggestion as "any stimulus, external or internal, accompanied or unaccompanied by consciousness, which touches off a determining tendency." Other writers define suggestion without reference to the stimulus as a state of internal or mental expectancy or emotional setting. It would seem that, rather than accept either of these views to the exclusion of the other, we may look upon suggestion as a form of stimulation and response relationship between persons in which both stimulus and internal conditioning play a part. Suggestion, therefore, is not some special mechanism, any more than is imitation. It is, rather, a term used to describe a certain form of social stimulation wherein the vocal or other stimuli of a person or persons set off images, ideas, attitudes or acts on the part of another person or other persons because other images, ideas, and attitudes do not inhibit them. Suggestion is but slightly, if at all, influenced by thought or deliberation. This is what McDougall means when he says:
Suggestion is a process of communication resulting in the acceptance with conviction of the communicated proposition in the absence of logically adequate grounds for its acceptance.[4]
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Suggestion plays a significant part in social behavior, for much of our attitude and action is stimulated by others and followed out without recourse to reasoned and deliberate consideration of the situation and the action in reference to it. To mention the conditions of suggestion is to repeat in more special form what we have already discussed briefly under the topics of internal and external conditions as they determine behavior. There are, however, some particular features of suggestion which we may note in passing. Illustrations of these features will appear especially in our treatment of prejudice, fashions, crowd behavior, and public opinion.
1. External Conditions Making for Suggestibility.— Without attempting to be exhaustive, we may say that stimuli which are rhythmic and monotonous tend to set up responses in terms of the desires of the person making the suggestion. The hypnotist resorts to rhythm and more or less monotonous repetition of verbal expression and tone of voice to induce hypnotic sleep. The public speaker may employ somewhat similar methods with an audience in the repeated use of certain phrases spoken in pleasing vocal tones. Connected with these are volume, duration, and repetition of the stimuli. Again, prestige-bearing persons, leaders in various groups, by their very presence may set up conditions of suggestibility, as may books or printed pronouncements of leaders or authorities. Children are especially suggestible in the presence of older persons— parents, teachers, and older children— when these persons stand in the position of dominance, physical or social, or both.
2. Internal Conditions of Suggestibility.— All of the internal conditions noted in Chapter VI play a part in suggestibility, but of particular importance are fatigue, the effect of intoxicants or fasting, and the whole range of internal conditioning arising from attitudes of submission to authority, to principles of moral or social conduct, to various prejudices and preconceptions about group superiority, or class conscious differences, as in fashion or social philosophy. Especially pertinent to suggestion is the place of emotional disturbances as they develop dissociation from the inhibiting tendencies and give rise to the play of autistic associations in image and behavior. Since the emotions :arise most easily in crises, any dislocation of the balance of social activity, such as a flood, a crime, a war, a religious or political campaign or a financial panic, produces an excellent setting for the operation of suggestion.
It should not be imagined that only children or ignorant or feebleminded
(126) persons are suggestible. Given the crisis in matters believed serious or of great value to life, any person is reduced to a condition of easy suggestibility. Only in this way can we explain why during race-riots, wars, and political and religious controversies men of otherwise seeming wisdom give way to violent behavior of primitive and anti-social sort. While there are distinct individual differences in the degree of suggestibility, there are but few men sufficiently well-balanced, emotionally and intellectually to be able to resist impulses to action which in calmer moments they would imagine insane or, at least, unbecoming to themselves.
It is evident, then, that suggestion is really a phase of inter-individual stimulus and response in which the play of external and internal determinants of conduct operates more or less independently of inhibiting attitudes and ideas. Suggestibility may be described as a phase of the anticipatory reaction system developed around certain images, ideas, and attitudes regarding the values of our group, or around particular internal patterns related to our more strictly non-cultural social contacts. Suggestion operates to arouse us in regard to the mores and to non-moral behavior as we see in fashion and other non-institutionalized types of collective activity.
C. Sublimation and Substitution as Conditioned Responses.A number of terms have been introduced into social psychology from modern functional psychiatry, especially from the various schools of psychoanalysis. Among these are sublimation, substitution, compensation, identification, and projection. All of these are closely bound up with the field of anticipatory reactions as the latter affect social intercourse. If these concepts, however, can be brought under the common denominator of conditioning and integration, it will greatly facilitate recognition of the essentially close relation of social psychology to psychiatry.[5]
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Sublimation refers to the replacement of an original response pattern by an acquired one. The original response is thought to be more primitive, more animal, while the new response is more ethical or socialized. What we have in so-called sublimation, then, is a clear case of conditioned response in which, first of all, the stimulus is modified, and which in many cases means modification of the response as well. Moreover, in sublimation the factor of social or ethical approval is profoundly important, although the content of this approval may distinctly differ in various groups. In the case of anger or rage, the new stimulus may not be some form of bodily restraint, but restraint of the expression of ideas held radical by others. Then, too, the expression of the rage may itself be toned down to verbal renunciation rather than express itself by striking out and throwing the bodily force against the individuals, be they policemen or others, who deny one the right to speak freely. In the case of sexual behavior, the responses in women may be modified from the direct expression of sexual activities and the attendant maternal functions to a concern with child welfare. Much of the literature illustrating sublimation carries with it this socialized aspect of the conditioning process. There is no objection to such use of the term, but it must be borne in mind that the mechanism is at root a biological one of conditioning. The ethical or socialized aspect is one of interpretation. Some tribes of people might not consider the social welfare work of a spinster to be anything particularly praiseworthy as over against bearing children in or out of wedlock. In fact, in peasant societies in our own time the unmarried woman is looked upon with some disdain. It is only in complex modern society that unmarried women receive social approval for activities which rest biologically on sexual drives, but which in practice take a substitute form. In short, the mechanism is one of substitution, and the form it takes is determined in large part by the cultural t' standards of the group in question. Profanity as a substitute response for the full expression of rage is not different in its biological aspects from the production of a poem of hate during a war. Neither is the writing of a love sonnet or a romantic drama very different in reference to thwarted love life than is the development of a dislike fur women or the production of
(128) ribald or lascivious stories about sex life. The range of substitutions for sexual activities is very wide. The quality of these substitutions is determined by the social group. The particular form of the substitution, in the main outlines, remains the same. Once more we see how important a recognition of the cultural norms is in the interpretation of the social behavior of individuals; moreover, how important social approval is in terms of culture standards for the individual who so conditions his behavior. The biological mechanisms do not differ greatly, but what the activities mean for other persons and for oneself, in reference to them, is determined by the content of these substitutions. The man who releases his sexual suppressions in the form of lascivious stories or ribald verse may be avoided by others, just as the man who indulges in sexual perversions is punished by his group. On the other hand, the woman who has been deprived by circumstances of normal motherhood may win great respect for her work as a nurse, as the head of an orphanage, as a social worker, or as a juvenile judge dealing with children's cases. For this reason, the mere analysis of the mechanism, the how, of behavior can never give us the complete picture which we wish in the field of social behavior. It may be sufficient for experimental, laboratory, individual psychology, but it is hardly sufficient for a social psychology which is concerned with the interaction of individuals.
Sublimations are perhaps most prominent in the field of rage and sex because these are the two fundamental drives which are most held in check in the present cultural order. In our society we have provided channels through which these tendencies may be sublimated. To put it differently, we lay down the framework of habits which will drain off these physiological impulses into activities given social approval by others. In addition, substitutions exist for fear, for the more primitive egoistic acquisitiveness of the person, for more primitive concepts and fantasies about the supernatural, and in other dimensions of behavior. One of the most distinctive examples of this is seen in the Christian moral codes which put so much pressure upon sex and freedom of expression, but which, in turn, through the link-up with the nationalistic political order and with the capitalistic economic system, permit the tremendous energy thus accumulated to be siphoned off into activities which increase material comforts in the world.
While in broad outlines sublimation is akin to other forms of substitu-
(129) -tion of stimulus and of response, the very fact of social approval adds a factor in the first case which it does not in the second. This additional factor makes sublimation more satisfactory to the person concerned with it than balder unsocialized substitution possibly could. We may define sublimation, then, as a type of substitute stimulus-response pattern in which social approval adds the quality of ethical valuation not found in other forms of substitution.
D. Compensation and Sense of Inferiority.
Dr. Alfred Adler of Vienna has become so well known that his concept of compensation for felt inferiority is commonly used to explain all sorts of human behavior, sometimes rightly, very often incorrectly, and most often incompletely. Such terms get the bad repute of all particularistic explanations; that is to say, some one mechanism, simple and easy to state, becomes the basis for explaining or interpreting the complex behavior of personality.
The concept of compensation has been used in at least two divergent senses. The most common one describes an individual who, lacking strength in some particular feature of his make-up, attempts to develop some other trait or characteristic to offset this. For instance, the boy who is too fat to run and jump with other boys on the playground, who is hailed as "Tubby" or "Fatty" or "Butch," gets his social approval, his prestige, his sense of security, by outdoing his tormentors and would-be playmates in arithmetic, geography, spelling, or declamation inside the schoolroom. Or at the level of physical activity, the boy with crippled legs may develop into a skillful person where his hands come into play; that is, he may make beautiful toys, do artistic wood-carving, or learn to play the piano well. The man who is unsuccessful in love-making may boast of his conquest of women, or he may turn his attention to some other form of prestige-producing activity.
The second use of the term presupposes the existence of a weakness which leads to a determination to overcome the same by developing, not a substitute tendency, but the very tendency itself. The most often cited illustration of this is the case of Demosthenes, who being a stammerer and wishing to take up the law and public speaking, practiced long and diligently to improve his speech until he became the greatest orator of his day. It seems to the writer that this is not compensation in the proper
(130) sense of the word. The overcoming of handicaps by direct attack upon them is common enough, but this should be designated by some term other than compensation. We shall consider compensation only as a form of substitute response as described in the first instance; that is only the sort of activity in which a boy or girl, man or woman, finds some substitute response system for one in which he is not successful socially, is a proper case of the compensatory conditioning. The stimulus may be desire for social prestige in forms laid down by the group, but physical, emotional, or intellectual handicaps bar the way. Because the substitute response, the activity in another field, gives prestige, we take it up instead.
The sense of inferiority, which is so common with most of us in one way or another, has led Alfred Adler, G. Stanley Hall, and others to say that compensation for inferiority is a universal fact. While the concept should not be overworked, there is no doubt that the conditioned response mechanism operates in hundreds of social situations where we do feel inadequate. Whistling to keep up one's courage is as true of the politician facing a difficult campaign as it is literally true of the small boy passing a graveyard at night. The fanaticism of the religious bigot is often a compensation for lack of the very qualities which he finds in others. This is frequently seen in crowd behavior. It is a factor in our persecution of the underdog whom we fear. It plays an important part in the development of those forms of defense mechanisms which we call prejudices.
On the other hand, inferiority may give rise to a direct attack upon the weakness involved rather than lead to compensation. It may be an incitement to fine performance. As a stimulator of ambition it is not to be ignored, although the writer is under the impression that we have sometimes had too much of the theory that the lack of a trait or talent is all the more reason for striving for it. Many students strive for the impossible in education, in training for art or the professions, because of the attitudes of their parents and others who stimulate them to attempt activities for which they are actually organically weak. All of us have seen very disappointed men and women who were the victims of the faulty advice that one can do anything one wants to do. The answer to that problem is an intelligent selection of what one wishes, not a blind battle against the impossible. There are some genuine sins of this sort to be laid at the doors of the out-and-out environmentalists in psychology, education, and sociology.
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In the end, whether one takes the indirect route of compensation or the direct and frontal attack upon the weakness, success or failure rests largely upon the social responses of approval for one's actions which come from one's family, neighbors, fellow club members, profession, or community. In the one case the mechanism of acquirement is a conditioned response; in the other it is a matter of practice in the habit of tendency already under way.
E. Sympathy, Identification, and Projection.1. Sympathy and Social Stimulation.— Sympathetic responses to others rest distinctly upon conditioning. Sympathy is not some instinct or mysterious innate capacity or one distinct emotion, but depends upon social intercourse. While it involves early training and experience, sympathy probably does not come to full expression until the development of social imagery, that is, until the covert, anticipatory types of response arise in which other persons' experiences can be associated with one's own. In other words, sympathy rests upon imagination, and it is not full-grown until imagination reaches out to other persons. Human communication, particularly that of speech, is essential to mature sympathy.
Sympathy rests first of all on the common experiences of the persons concerned. All of us are more or less exposed, in a given cultural and social set up, to many common situations. As Cooley remarks in his Human Nature and the Social Order, "a man's sympathies as a whole reflect the social order in which he lives, or rather they are a particular phase of it." We have all suffered hunger, thirst, rage, fear, disappointment, success, love or hate in the course of our conditioning to the world around us. We suffer at the death of loved ones. We are pleased at the success of our friends and family. But sympathy is dependent, also, upon maturity of imagination which makes possible the arousing of images, ideas, emotions, and feelings similar to, but by no means identical with, those of others. That is to say, it is not only the emotional experience of the other person which makes for sympathy, but the fact that we understand or comprehend through imagination the situations which arouse in him these images, ideas, emotions, and feelings. To put it otherwise, sympathetic responses involve the perception of some symbol or expression of others which we associate with somewhat similar experiences of our own. We do not duplicate the other person's emotions, images, or ideas; at best we only
(132) approximate them. Certainly to witness the expression of emotions to animals or men is not necessarily to induce similar emotions in us, as McDougall's thesis of the sympathetic induction of emotions would lead one to believe. To see an adult or child cry in the street does not cause one to cry, but it may lead to covert associations and even actions which depend upon a host of past experiences of one's own. And yet, to be sympathetic one need not have gone through every experience of everyone else. The very nature of imaginary responses makes it possible for one to recombine one's own experiences in anticipation, so that one may imagine how one feels at the death of a loved one or at the loss of prestige or property without having had exactly the same experience. As Cooley puts it:
It is not to be inferred that we must go through the same visible and tangible experiences as other people before we can sympathize with them. On the contrary, there is only an indirect and uncertain connection between one's sympathies and the obvious events-such as the death of friends, success or failure in business, travels, and the like— that one has gone through. Social experience is a matter of imaginative, not of material, contacts; and there are so many aids to the imagination that little can be judged as to one's experience by the merely external course of his life. An imaginative student of a few people and of books often has many times the range of comprehension that the most varied career can give to a duller mind; and a man of genius, like Shakespeare, may cover almost the whole range of human sentiment in his time, not by miracle, but by a marvelous vigor and refinement of imagination [6]
2. Sympathy and the Conditioned Response: The origin of sympathetic responses rests upon conditioning and integration arising out of social interaction. If a child cries, his own crying serves as a secondary stimulus to himself and becomes thus a further stimulus to his own crying. Furthermore, the crying of another baby may serve as a substitute stimulus and set off his own crying. That is to say, the movements of another may serve as secondary stimuli to one's own movement, as we noted in discussing the conditioning in so-called imitation. The expression of fear in another's face and voice may set off our own fear responses, built upon an earlier experience of being frightened by some biological stimulus, but having with the particular stimulus at the moment no connection other than this secondary stimulus. We might meet a man or a group of men
( 133) running down a street showing great anxiety in their faces and the perception of these gestures would be sufficient to frighten us, without our knowing anything whatsoever about the situation that set off their fear.
Again, suppose I stick a pin into my flesh. There is a sensation of pain, the sight of blood, and an unpleasant feeling. Suppose, instead, I see someone else being pricked with a pin. I do not ordinarily experience the pain,[7] but I do experience the feeling of unpleasantness associated with it. As one grows older and the imagination extends to images and ideas, as well as to emotions and feelings, the perception of emotion and feeling in others may give rise to associated but scarcely identical images and ideas in oneself. We can only infer, of course, that our emotions and attendant images and ideas are akin to those of others. Speaking of sympathetic emotional responses produced by news from a friend of the loss of his wife, Allport remarks that one's reaction is more adequately "described as sympathy with my own past experience than as sympathy with his." Yet since we are exposed to such a multitude of common social situations, we may, without doing injustice to the facts, speak of sympathizing with a friend's feelings.
From our contacts with various social groups— family, play group, school, church, community, and so on— our entire habit system is built up. Thus, when someone breaks the social code to which I am habituated, that is, breaks my own fixed response system in reference to some situation, I experience displeasure almost as if I had broken the code myself. If someone portrays for me the suffering of Armenian children, I imagine how it would be if my own children were in want. This vicarious experiencing of the action of others, especially on the side of emotions and feelings, is precisely what is meant by sympathy. Hence, through imagery of another, we grow like him in many fundamental traits. When this person suffers injury, sorrow, or joy, we participate with him in the experience, even though he be quite removed from us in time and space. It is possible, in this vicarious manner, to sympathize with people in other regions of the world, or to re-live the sorrows and joys of characters portrayed in literature or other art. Sympathy is really the root of sociability. Mere gregariousness may mean a certain sense of security and cooperation for survival with members of one's own species, but sociability goes beyond this to
( 134) cover the field of identification with others or vicarious experience through common social imagery.
3. Sympathy and Identification.— Identification, brought into social psychology from psychoanalysis, is distinctly a phase of the sympathetic reaction. Jung defines identification as:
An estrangement of the subject from himself in favor of an object in which the subject is, to a certain extent, disguised. For example, identification with the father practically signifies an adoption of the ways and manners of the father, as though the son were the same as the father and not a. separate individual . . . . Identification may be related to things such as spiritual movements or business as well as persons and to psychological functions.[8]
Hinkle thus characterizes this process:By this [identification] I mean an unconscious assumption of the attitudes and feelings, the burdens or sorrows of others, and thus through identifying themselves with them they take on the life experience that properly belongs to another and live this experience instead of, or as well as, their own.[9]
To identify oneself with another is to play the rôle of this other. And to do so implies, for its development the enlargement of imagination. At the outset, the confusion of one's own body and one's own reactions with those of another is apparently common, but in time there results a separation of one's own self from other selves. In this way the sense of selfhood is established. What one's own self turns out to be depends upon one's conditioning in the family and other groups. And the building-up of this self rests upon identification, or upon introjection, a term frequently applied to the process of identifying oneself with another. Introjection begins as 'soon as the child is brought into contact with various groups of persons who intrigue his attention. Participation in the group, in fact, rests upon the conditioning of persons in this way toward others. The putting of oneself into another's place, which is so common in sympathy, has simply here a somewhat wider connotation. As Eliot states:
Introjection is what happens when spectators push their neighbors toward the opponents' goal; when negroes swell when Jack Johnson wins; when Ghandi fasted for his people's offenses, and "all India crawled on its belly when
(135) one Hindu crawled at Amritsar"; when the mystic is in communion with his god, or the subject en rapport with his hypnotist; when the humble VIN. Preemby takes on the rôle of Sargon King of Kings; when the adolescent, before or after his father's death, wishes to behave in his rôle; when a savage fears to divulge his true name or have his picture taken, because it is too closely a part of his self to give it to a stranger; when the reader feels himself the hero of the romance or drama.[10]
Identification, then, is a phase of the general field of sympathy. The ability to place oneself in another's position depends upon common conditioning. The earliest conditioning is toward the mother or nurse and then, later, to other persons— father, brothers, sisters, relatives, friends, and various groups. The mother image, which the Freudian analysts discuss, really arises in this process of identification of oneself with the mother in the acts of feeding, bathing, being carried about, and attended to. And how a person responds to himself and to others is definitely determined, in part at least, by these early social contacts with the parent. Later his identification reaches into all of his group experience. The person feels and speaks for his group: "He behaves as if the group's unity were his own." Some persons so easily identify themselves with various groups that we dub them "joiners." These persons, as Eliot remarks, easily think in terms of "we." They are versatile, play many rôles, and become rather easily adjusted to other people, at least in the outward form of participation.
4. Projection.— Closely associated with identification is the opposite process of projection. This consists of transferring subjective or anticipatory attitudes, images, and emotions to other persons. Eliot describes projection as follows:
The attributing of experiences to the not-self or to other selves. A frequent usage of "projection" is to describe the process by which attitudes and traits imagined within the self are projected upon the screen of another self.[11]
Projection is thus an externalization of inner anticipatory processes. The psychological process itself, however, is imagined to be located outside of us. Ordinarily projection is perfectly normal. It lies at the basis, perhaps, of the very distinction between an internal and an external mental world. The cause of the projection, in its more morbid forms, is unknown; it lies,
(136) so the psychoanalysts tell us, in the unconscious. To project a cause or situation outward is merely another phase of the effort of the organism to control its overt adjustment through the anticipatory responses. Some repressed or unwanted idea or attitude is thrust outward into some situation or upon another person, real or imaginary, who is thought to be the cause of the idea or attitude. Bernard Hart remarks that "people who possess some fault or deficiency of which they are ashamed are notoriously intolerant of that same fault or deficiency in others." The incident in Hamlet where the player-queen shows excessive aversion to the possibility of a second marriage, although a secret wish for such a marriage is already present in her mind, is a nice illustration; and the real queen, who harbors similar thoughts, is in a sense caught up by her identification with the projection of the player-queen before her.
Projection comes into operation in prejudice wherein the members of the in-group attribute to the out-group characteristics which they themselves hate, or emotions which they themselves feel but are ashamed of because of social taboos. It occurs in the development of delusions of persecution so frequently seen in prejudice and mob behavior. Likewise it is seen in delusions of grandeur in regard to the superiority of oneself or one's group. It is familiar to every student of family relationships in the projection of thwarted ambitions of parents upon their children. This attribution of traits, attitudes, ideas, and wishes upon others is so universal that it assumes a particularly important place in much of our social behavior.
Identification and projection represent somewhat ambivalent processes in building up social contacts. Both are phases of anticipatory response in which imagination aids in the adjustment of the person to other persons. In identification this consists in a type of sympathetic replacement of the qualities of the other in oneself; in projection it consists in imaginarily thrusting outward upon others qualities which we ourselves possess. The excessive pathological manifestations of the identification process are seen in the hysteric, with his excessive sympathy and his painful feelings which he picks up from the world around him. The pathological features of projection, on the other hand, are seen in the paranoiac who attributes to others the vicious, unsocialized ideas and attitudes which originate in his own behavior. The one leads to extreme sentimentality and romanticism, the other to cruelty and persecution. The one is connected with high emotional over-evaluation of the inner world, the other with an attempt to
( 137) avoid over-emotional evaluation of the inner world by thrusting it away into the environment.
F. Purposes, Values and Attitudes as Anticipatory Behavior.
1. Nature of Purpose.— Out of combinations of imagery and external stimulation grow ideals, purposes, or aims which profoundly influence attention and action. In the determination of behavior what the German psychologists called "die Aufgabe," or what Burnham terms the "task," is highly important. Aims, tasks, or purposes consist largely of verbal concepts, visual images, and accompanying attitudes. While the introspective psychologist has concerned himself particularly with more immediate, conscious attitudes as they affect his experimental results, the social psychologist is interested in the more permanent goals, aims, or purposes that are built up in the person. These aims are rather completely set up for us by personal-social and cultural conditioning: by our parents and family, by our playmates and gang affiliations, by our teachers, preachers, business associates, and professional or vocational associates. The purposes of an individual are not the result of some divine power or the supernatural product of a soul or an instinct, but are distinctly the outgrowth of one's environment which determines one's life organization in this or that particular direction. Purposes are closely linked with attitudes and values, and these, in turn, are often covered over for us by rationalizations. Let us examine more closely the function of these three factors in the make-up of the more permanent phases of our behavior.
2. Attitudes: The word attitude has been variously used in social psychology. Thomas and Thurstone seemingly use it to include all the internal determinants. Thus Thurstone once defined attitude as:
The sum total of a man's inclinations and feelings, prejudice or bias, preconceived notions, ideas, fears, threats, and convictions about any specified topic. Thus a man's attitude about pacifism means here all that he feels and thinks about peace and war. It is admittedly a subjective and personal affair.[12]
This is much the sense in which Titchener used the prase "determining tendencies" which are concerned with the orientation of the person to any
(138) particular problem or situation. Some writers have used it synonymously with the phrase "mental set" and in this usage it somewhat overlaps the term "Aufgabe." Warren, who represents a somewhat more traditional psychology, describes how attitudes arise:
When a certain type of experience is constantly repeated, a change of set is brought about which affects many central neurons and tends to spread over other parts of the central nervous system. These changes in the general set of the central nervous system temper the process of reception; they lead to the formation of certain general modes of receiving and integrating stimuli. In terms of the subjective mental life these general sets are called attitudes. A man's attitude toward any situation which confronts him is quite as important a factor in his mental life as the nature of the specific stimuli which enter into that situation . . . .
Attitudes alter from time to time with the growth of experience; but changes of attitude proceed far more slowly than changes of specific mental states .[13]
Attitudes in the narrow and more specific sense are essentially motor sets of the organism toward some specific or general stimulus. They rest upon innate stimulus-response patterns as these have been modified, elaborated, and integrated together through learning in the social world. But these elaborations and integrations become reduced again to sets or tendencies to action. In fact, the attitude partakes of the nature of an incipient reaction. It is fundamentally a form of anticipatory behavior. Attitudes, in a sense, telescope behavior into shorthand forms. For this reason it is highly important to recognize their place in the total complex of social activity. Associated with attitudes are images and ideas, but attitudes are not to be confused with the latter two. Likes, dislikes, avoidances, approaches, withdrawals, appreciations, hatreds, and loves are fundamentally the core of attitudes, as these are directed to various situations. The attitude marks the inception of behavior toward situations. It gives direction to it. For the prediction of his behavior therefore, it is more important to know the attitude of a person than to know his mental images or verbal opinions. Attitudes are really forms of habit and bespeak one's actual trends in conduct better than do the verbalized rationalizations which we call Opinions. Attitudes thus offer a clue to the unraveling of human motives. The building-up of attitudes, however, is so largely unconscious that often we
(139) are not aware of how they arose. Frequently the marginal impressions of an experience determine our response, because these marginal stimulations seem to touch off the deep-lying attitudes. Emerson's remark that "What you are sounds so loudly in my ears that I can not hear what you say," expresses precisely the influence of attitudes rather than mere verbalisms in our judgment of those about us.
3. Attitudes and Values.— Attitudes do not exist without reference to value meanings. And meanings are related to situations of all sorts around which we have constructed our habits and built up our series of images. Value represents, as Znaniecki puts it, the counterpart to attitude. Attitudes are not developed in vacuo but always in reference to something in the environment. These relations of organism to situation constitute the world of meaning. Thomas and Znaniecki put it thus:
By a social value we understand any datum having an empirical content accessible to the members of some social group and a meaning with regard to which it is or may be an object of activity. Thus, a food stuff, an instrument, a coin, a piece of poetry, a university, a myth, a scientific theory, are social values. Each of them has a content that is sensual in the case of the foodstuff, the instrument, the coin; partly sensual, partly imaginary in the piece of poetry, whose content is constituted, not only by the written or spoken words, but also by the images which they evoke, and in the case of the university, whose content is the whole complex of men, buildings, material accessories, and images representing its activity; or, finally, only imaginary in the case of a mythical personality or a scientific theory. The meaning of these values becomes explicit when we take them in connection with human actions. The meaning of the foodstuff is its reference to its eventual consumption; that of an instrument, its reference to the work for which it is designed; that of a coin, the possibilities of buying and selling or the pleasures of spending which it involves; that of the piece of poetry, the sentimental and intellectual reactions which it arouses; that of the university, the social activities which it performs; that of the mythical personality, the cult of which it is an object and the actions of which it is supposed to be the author; that of the scientific theory, the possibilities of control of experience by idea or action that it permits. The social value is thus opposed to the natural thing, which has a content, but, as a part of nature, has no meaning for human activity, is treated as "valueless": — when the natural thing assures a meaning, it becomes thereby a social value. And naturally a social value may have many meanings, for it may refer to many different kinds of activity.[14]
(140) In short, the field of social value is the field of meaning, and attitudes are incipient responses in regard to these values. Faris describes attitudes in the following terms:
The nature of attitudes will be clearer if we consider them in relation to the objects and the emotionally toned objects which are appropriately called values. Here also there is evident some confusion, but the question is really not difficult. For the attitude is toward something to which the attitude is related. When equilibrium has been disturbed and a conscious and deliberate act results, one effect is the formation in experience of a new object, and the attitude or residue is the correlate of the object. At the party Romeo meets Juliet, and very shortly the girl becomes to him a beloved object, a value. We can speak of the attitude of Romeo toward the object Juliet. They are correlative terms, arising simultaneously in experience. When the object changes, the attitude changes, pari passu. But it should not be difficult to distinguish my hatred from my enemy who is the object of the hatred. Until men become hopelessly unable to distinguish hunger from beefsteak there should be no difficulty in telling the difference between a value or object and an attitude.
It must be observed, however, that objects belong to experience, not necessarily to nature. Psychology is not concerned with what the object is, but with what it is experienced as. For we live in a world of "cultural reality," and the whole furniture of earth and choir of heaven are to be described and discussed as they are conceived by men. Caviar is not a delicacy to the general. Cows are not food to the Hindu. Mohammed is not the prophet of God to me. To an atheist God is not God at all. Objects are not passively received or automatically reacted to; rather is it true that objects are the result of a successful attempt to organize experience, and the externalized aspect of the organization is the object of value; the internal or subjective tendency toward it is the attitude. Let it be said again, the name by which this aspect of human nature is referred to is absolutely irrelevant. The essential point is that tendency, predisposition, organized inclination is centrally important, and that corresponding to this aspect of the experience of the person there is an externalized object of the tendency to which men give the name object or value.[15]
Values thus become definite and important data for social psychology. We are not concerned with them as is the student of social ethics. In ethics the problem is to evaluate various values themselves in their social setting. Rather we must take values into account in the analysis of social behavior as a part of the whole complex of anticipatory behavior which determines the meaning of our reactions to our fellows. Attitudes and
( 141) values are linked together in a very definite set of patterns, the former representing the habitual reaction tendencies, the latter the objects or situations toward which these tendencies are directed. But the relation of value and attitude is not always understood.
Attitudes and values are built up unconsciously in so many instances that we are at a loss to understand their significance. When confronted with the demand of our fellows, or ourselves, to explain our conduct, we are more or less habitually forced to seek out some conscious motive for our behavior. Very often these reasons are not the genuine ones, but merely those explanations which are socially accepted by our fellows and hence by ourselves. The real motives or bases of our conduct are frequently quite otherwise than we imagine. These socially-acceptable, assumed reasons, or motivations, we term rationalizations.
4. Rationalization.— Rationalization, then, is a term used to describe the giving of good reasons in place of the real reasons for our conduct. By "good" reasons we mean those which pass current in our particular social group. Here is an instance of rationalization following post-hypnotic suggestion:
A teacher was told during hypnotic trance that at a certain hour she would remove a wooden cone from her desk and place it upon the flat top of the schoolroom stove. She did so, but when asked her reason for this somewhat unusual act, replied that the cone was in her way and that she needed her desk cleared for certain papers which she wished to examine.[16]
Social and cultural conditioning furnish us with acceptable labels for our behavior. The "real" reasons are often quite hidden from us or only vaguely sensed at best, and when even marginally recognized they are quickly inhibited by the appearance, usually in verbal form, of culturally conditioned patterns which have been built up in us from past experience. Actually, social pressure is so evident in most situations that the man who frankly admits that he does somewhat unconventional things because these acts represent to him his inner desires is looked upon as out of place.
It has often been implied and even openly stated that rationalization is a pathological and somewhat "evil" type of behavior. Really, however, this device serves man admirably in soothing his conscience, or his socially
(142) conditioned sense of right or wrong. It provides a defense reaction against the exposure of violent, anti-social, or unethical motives. The genuine motives can often be brought to light only by careful analysis of past behavior and most frequently only by other persons sufficiently outside one's social picture to manifest objectivity about one's conduct. Rationalizations, at least those acceptable to our group, make for smooth and uninhibited behavior. It is hard to live in the world of our fellows, to participate in social life, if we are constantly aware of even some of the true or actual foundations of our conduct. In truth, any interpretation of one's own conduct or of one's own culture is likely to turn out to be an elaborate rationalization. James Harvey Robinson believes that most philosophy as well as most historical interpretation is just this. In contrast with the ordinary, every-day garden variety of rationalization, which in toto has little rhyme or reason to it, the more systematic but ethnocentric explanation of one's own culture Robinson calls "secondary rationalization."
Rationalization, then, is most in evidence where the person expresses some thought or performs some act that runs counter to what one's group expects. A man with a salary of five thousand dollars a year may fail to marry and explain the failure to his friends on the ground that he can not support a wife and family. Most men marry on much less than this, and the man in question may have some distinct resistances to women or the current schema of marriage of which he is quite unaware. Yet his group may accept his "reasoning" just the same. Another example is offered in the following comment on love by a spinster in explaining why she had never married:
Love is the magic which makes a woman work twenty-four hours a day for rather poor board and just sufficient clothing to keep her from being arrested, that throws a glamour over some poor worm which disguises him as a young god, and that causes a woman to pity all the rest of womankind because there is only one of these gods to be had.[17]
Again, a great employer whose labor policy has been a laissez-faire, cruel, arid violent one, faced by a strike of his men, pray fail to analyze the reality of long hours, low wages, and frequent unemployment, and raise the bugaboo of Bolshevism or anarchism as a reason for the strike. This enables him to fight the efforts of the employees for betterment of
( 143) their conditions while at the same time winning the approval of his fellow employers as a defender of the political state and the status quo in the economic order. In the field of prejudice, class struggles, competition, and international conflicts rationalizations are an ever-present stock in trade.
As a matter of fact, it is difficult to tell where rationalization leaves off and genuine, realistic thinking about our motives begins. In handling natural phenomena, through the natural sciences, we have made great progress in the study of causal relations. It is doubtful if we have advanced very far toward an objective analysis of our own culture. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, fanciful, emotional thinking has so ingratiated itself into the behavior framework of our culture and our personal-social experience that we are loath to look at the foundations of our conduct in a realistic manner. Yet modern psychology and social science are uncovering some features of social conduct which should assist us in moving toward a more objective understanding of our society.
To conclude this chapter, we need but reëmphasize two points. First, the older explanations of behavior in terms of imitation, like the newer explanations in terms of compensation, sublimation, identification, and projection, may all be regarded as phases of internal changes in the person through conditioning to the social-cultural world around him. These conditionings form the basis for the field of anticipatory response, which, taking place within the organism, makes possible differential and socially acceptable overt responses. Secondly, the basic features of this anticipatory system constitute the images, ideas, attitudes, and values through which the person interprets or defines his world and his behavior. Social conduct of individuals can not be explained by recourse to a study of the external environment alone, or by attention to the observable overt reactions of the person. Further on we shall examine in detail some aspects of the content of this field of internal, anticipatory behavior, to discover just what it is that makes us behave as we do
CLASS ASSIGNMENTS
A. Further Reading: Source Book for Social Psychology, Chapters XI, pp. 242-65; and XII, Section D, pp. 290-94.
B. Questions and Exercises.
1. Discuss questions and exercises in assignment in Source Book, Chapters XI, pp. 265-66; XII, p. 295, nos. 11-13.
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2. How may imitation and suggestion be considered, in part, phases of anticipatory behavior?
3. Does one have to have precisely the same experience as another in order to sympathize with the other?
4. Distinguish between identification and projection.
5. Distinguish between attitudes and values. Psychologically are values to be separated from the anticipatory field, even though in sociology they may be considered part of the cultural framework?
6. Illustrate how rationalizations may become group-standardized or, culturized.
C. Topics for Class Reports and Longer Written Papers.
1. See assignments for reports and longer papers in Source Book, Chapter XI, pp. 266-67.
2. Report on Travis, "The Effect of a Small Audience upon Eye-Hand Coordination," Journal of Abnormal & Social Psychology, 1925, vol. XX, pp. 142-46; and Cason, "Influence of Suggestion on Imagery in a Group Situation," ibid., 1925, vol. XX, pp. 292-99, as illustrations of attempts to study suggestion experimentally.
3. Review pertinent sections in Jung, Psychological Types, on identification and projection from a psychoanalytic point of view.
4. Analysis of cases of culturalized rationalization in modern society.
