Social Psychology: An Analysis of Social Behavior
Chapter 11: Personality and Early Social Conditioning
Kimball Young
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A. Personality and Social Participation.
1. Individual and Person.— It was once customary to describe the personality of an individual as if he lived in a vacuum and were made up only of biological characteristics and mental processes. The personality is more than a mere biological organism which comes into being through procreation and carries with it certain fundamental biological traits. True enough, the biological characteristics form the bases upon which the personality is predicated. The organism at the outset consists, as we have seen, of physical structures and functions operating at a biological level. The content of one's reactions, the meaning of these for oneself and for others, grows up with one's participation in social life. That is to say, there is no really human and social behavior without interaction of members of various groups. This participation begins at birth and continues till death. Participation means the constant conditioning to other persons, and through them, in addition, the conditioning to standard ways of acting which we know as culture patterns. This interplay of organism and other social beings with their culture fashions the personality. In other words, the biological organism possesses from birth and maturation the mechanisms of behavior. This is the how, the manner, the means of our activities. What we do, the direction of our behavior, the content, the meaning, is determined by personal-social and cultural influences. From the angle of a cross-sectional analysis we may say that the individual's personality is made up of physical traits, mentality, emotional attitudes in reference to car in orientation to social beings around him and in reference to his role with these people as he conceives it. The organism from the side of mechanism is the subject-matter of biology and psychology. The organism as it is affected by social and cultural conditionings is the subject-matter of social psychology. Too frequently, in the past, the psychologist has neglected the fact that the personality must be regarded in reference to its social envi-
(234) -ronment. Park and Burgess have recognized this important fact in their differentiation of individual and person. The former is the object of study by psychology. Measures of the individual concern his physique, mentality, emotions, feelings, volitions, and temperament. The person, on the other hand, is the individual with social status, that is, with a position or series of positions in reference to a group or a number of groups. As Park puts it:
The person is an individual who has status. We come into the world as individuals. We acquire status, and become persons. Status means position in society. The individual inevitably has some status in every social group of which he is a member. In a given group the status of every member is determined by his relation to every other member of that group. The individual's self-consciousness— his conception of his rôle in society, his "self," is based on his status in the social group or groups of which he is a member.[1]
Now one's status is determined very largely by the reactions of other persons to oneself, and the manner in which these affect one's conduct. James remarks that a man has as many selves as there are persons who recognize him and carry an image of him in their minds. This is another way of stating the same thing. In more behavioristic terms we might say that the person possesses as many varying habit systems as there are people, in group relations, who have distinctive response systems, covert and overt, toward him. The manner of statement is not perhaps so important as the fact that the person, as over against the mere individual organism, is a combination of relationships to others, in terms of his images, ideas, habits, and attitudes.
2. Motivation and Participation.— It would be a mistake to think of personality only in terms of the social and cultural environment. It is true, as Child has lucidly pointed out, that all organisms, not excepting man, can be understood only in terms of their adjustments to the environment, both internal and external. Hence in the study of man's behavior we must take into account his internal as well as his external stimuli. As we have noted above, the beginning of much of our behavior rests upon internal changes connected with food, drink, bodily care, and sexual activities. After all the conditioning which the world outside can give, there still remain the internal drives to be taken into account.
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In Chapters VI and VII we discussed the modification in the internal factors which determined attention and overt action. In fact, in some circles there has been a distinct swing away from undue concern with the external environment. This has become apparent in much modern biographical writing following the rise of psychoanalytic methods. Ludwig states in these words:
After a period which attempted to define man in terms of descent and breeding, we enter upon an era totally alien to the Darwinian mentality; once again we turn our attention to the personality per se, the personality almost devoid of temporal coördinates, considering the volume, intensity, and resistance of its vital forces, the restless fluid of its emotional configuration, and the balance between its impulse towards action and its repression through precept. Whereas our fathers asked, "How did the individual harmonize with his world?" our first question is, "hoes he harmonize with himself?" Questions of success and responsibility have been shifted from the environment back to the individual, so that the analysis which was formerly expended upon the milieu now seeks to penetrate within .[2]The modern behavioristic movement in psychology and the so-called objective methods of the social sciences, with their emphasis upon measurable quantities, still puts much weight upon the environment. Psychoanalysis, in spite of its misleading concepts, has doubtless been of value in revealing to us more clearly the place of the internal factors. Social psychology has not been unaffected by the work of Freud, Jung, and Adler. Thomas, in his analysis of his rich collection of human documents, was probably somewhat influenced by his early contact with Freud's work, although he did not accept the Freudian single-track explanations of behavior. Rather he developed his schema of wishes as basic motives to conduct from analysis of his own data. These wishes are: (1) The desire for security and safety exemplified in habits of maintaining the social status quo, of not changing the ways of living, in seeking shelter, physically and socially, in not leaving home, in voting the conservative ticket, in looking back upon the past as the good old days which should continue. (2) The opposite of this, the desire for new experience or adventure, which is shown in habits of migration, of seeking new lands to conquer, in reaching new areas of invention or scientific discovery, or in exploiting the emotions and feelings
( 236) for the sake of thrill in romanticism and day-dreaming. (3) The desire for intimate response, in which the person builds up habits of comradeship, of seeking close face-to-face relations, perhaps with just one other person or, at best, with but few persons. This is basic to love-making, but has wider reaches in intimate companionships of all sorts. (4) The desire for prestige or social power, in which habits of domination, of success, of exhibition of prowess before others are indulged in for the social approval they give.
Now in all of these four desires Thomas makes clear that certain internal factors of the person are involved. In spite of the fact that other persons come distinctly to affect all of the desires, the foundations lie inside rather than outside the individual organism. It should not be imagined that these desires or wishes are innate. They are conceptual formulations based on observation of more mature behavior. These wishes arise by conditioning from social participation. They find expression in various forms of social intercourse. Thus desire for security finds its consummation in activity in stable and tried frames of behavior. The wish for new adventure, in contrast, finds its outlet in participation with strangers, or with acquaintances in new social configurations. The desire for intimate response has a narrow but familiar congenial and uninhibited outlet in close contact, while the wish for prestige is conditioned to a public or larger less intimate group. Dunlap has also tried to formulate desire as the basis for interpreting personality and social behavior. He lists nine desires, three of them distinctly physiological— "alimentary" and "excretory" desires, and desire for rest; three partially physiological but doubtless much conditioned— viz., desire for activity, amatory desire, and desire for shelter; the balance largely socially produced: desire for preëminence, desire for conformity, and parental desire.[3]
In short, it is absolutely necessary to take these internal factors into account. There we find the whole range of values and meanings which constitute the sine qua non of social behavior. Yet the full picture is not given by this alone. To the present writer it seems that the individual and his internal drives or desires must be correlated at all times with the situational complexes outside him toward which he responds. Thus the Thomas or Dunlap lists of wishes, or the arrangement of personalities in terms of schizophrenic, of cyclic or manic-depressive, and of epileptoid patterns,
( 237) or as introverts and extroverts, or as syntropes or idiotropes, means little without the corresponding categories of environment: other persons in group configurations involving both cultural and non-cultural influences. Thomas' schema, which reveals great insight, might be recast to cover the personality in terms of wishes in reference to certain social situations.[4] Certainly we must at all times recognize the objects or situations toward which the person is oriented.
B. Early Development of the Personality.
We may view personality, then, as a compound emergent product made up of psycho-biological tensions and mechanisms, involving both the central and the autonomic nervous systems, modified and elaborated by personal-social experience and by culture norms so as to permit one to live with one's fellows. The most important conditionings are those produced in infancy and early childhood. These early experiences predetermine everything else that follows upon them. It is now generally recognized that one's major characteristics of personality are usually determined before one is five years old, and some writers say as early as two or three. The child begins in the first year, no doubt, to form rudimentary habits, and certainly in the second year the mechanism of conditioned response is well under way. The acquisition of new stimuli-response associations goes on with great rapidity.
1. Influence o f Family on Personality.— At the outset the infant is thrown upon the care of his family. The family is the basic social group. In it the biological, psychological, and sociological forces meet in giving the individual his start in life. The family is more than a legal formulation. Functionally considered, it is "a unity of interacting personalities." As Burgess remarks:
The actual unity of family life has its existence, not in any legal conception, nor in any formal contract, but in the interaction of its members. For the family does not depend for its survival on the harmonious relations of its members, nor does it necessarily disintegrate as a result of conflicts between its members.
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The family lives as long as interaction is taking place and only dies when it ceases. [5]
The relations of members of the family, therefore, may be described in terms of habits, attitudes, values, and various reorganizations of these into wishes or desires. Now the values and conceptions of the rôle of members in the family differ with variations in culture standards and personalsocial experience. Because of chaotic cultural norms as to the place and function of the family today, doubtless the personality organization differs from what it was in other societies. Under polyandry or polygyny, under the patriarchal or matriarchal forms of the family, personality inevitably differed from that found under present-day monogamy.
The family, moreover, does not exist independently of other group arrangements. As Mowrer puts it:
The family also exists in interaction with the larger society of which the family and its members are component parts. The status of the family in the neighborhood, its role as defined in the mores, in public opinion and by law, the changes in the family which result from the play of social forces in the community, are all illustrations of the significance for the family and its members of interaction with society. [6]
The family, then, is the first social group to which the infant i's exposed. His very helplessness and his readiness for learning are significant. He brings with him a huge congeries of reflex patterns, some of which are potentially organized into larger patterns dependent on physiological tensions such as hunger, thirst, rage, fear, withdrawal, sensitive zone reactions, and the rudimentary sex reactions. But the direction which the development of his reflexes shall take is determined in large measure by the nature of the stimulating situations which he meets.
At the outset the whole world revolves around the infant. He arrives out of a physiological state of more or less complete dependence. In early infancy he is carried along in much this same state of dependence. The infant is dominated by what Freud calls, "the pleasure principle," that is, by the biological needs of his body which seek pleasurable reactions and avoid painful ones. The child, in time, must acquire independence and re-
(239) -sponsibility, but he can not do so without the stimulation of his mother, father, brothers and sisters, relatives, and other persons with whom he later comes in contact. It is interesting to note that in the first weeks "the reaction of the new-born baby to noises is far more positive than the reaction to the voice." Yet within a few months responses to various voices are definitely established.
The first object of attachment for the infant is the mother. His reactions to her begin with nursing and with maternal care. Regularity of feeding may cut across the physiological demands of the infant, but this framework of habit is laid down for the child by the stronger and more capable adult in whose power he rests. The fixation on the mother's breast is one of the first forms of conditioning. The Freudian psychologists have made a good deal of this early habit as the basis of sexual attachment and later sexual activity. There is much clinical evidence to connect the sucking and nursing act with later conditionings toward the sexual organs. Yet, at the beginning, the fixation appears dependent upon hunger and thirst more than upon sexual demands. Probably the tactile sensations of the lips upon the breast and the sucking response itself are pleasurable, but that they are, for the child, sexual in any narrow sense is doubtful. On the other hand, so far as the mother is concerned there may be a distinct erotic sensation from nursing the child. This, in turn, may lead the mother to fondle or pet the child while nursing and set up in him secondary reactions to sensitive and erogenous zone stimulations that will later become associated with his sexual activities.
The child's feeding habits, like his other bodily responses, are always conditioned by the mother's ideas, attitudes, and habits. These, in turn, will reflect the culture norms of her society and her own personal-social experience. For example, if the mother is high-strung and easily affected by the whimperings or crying of the baby, she may nurse him at irregular intervals. This may produce difficulties in digestion, but equally as significant may be his conditioning to the mother as the object which satisfies his merest whim. The mother, in addition to nursing him whenever he fusses the least bit, may also walk the floor with him, swinging him gently to and fro in her arms. This pleasurable sensation is associated with the new stimulus and before long the child is crying to be carried and petted rather than because he is hungry. The rapidity with which conditioning to social care arises is illustrated in the case cited by Gesell above (page 187).
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Another step in the process of conditioning and re-conditioning which goes on in the family is seen in the relationships of older to younger children. The state of dependence and full attention from the mother may shift considerably when a second child appears. The first child in a family is usually the object of much attention. The parents concentrate their affection upon him. He is the first-born. He is the outcome of a great love and thus stands as a symbol for the deeper affections of the parents. The mother often is unduly solicitous for the child's welfare and gives him unlimited attention. Then the relatives may come into the picture. The grandmother dotes on her grandson or granddaughter. The aunts and uncles all make a great fuss over the baby. Thus to the mother's care and affection of the child is added that of father and relatives. The child may easily grow up to one or two years of age with habits and attitudes of importance and domination which make it difficult for him to adjust himself to the arrival of a second child. The following is typical of many family situations:
Jane B., a bright and attractive child of three, will have nothing whatever to do with her mother or little brother if she can avoid it. When Jane was 26 months old her mother went to the hospital to have her second child. Jane had seen the mother sewing baby clothes and had been told, in answer .to questions, that the family was hoping for another child. But, Jane, having had no experience, naturally could not know just what it meant to hear her mother say she might have a little baby sister or brother. A day or so after the birth of the second child, a boy, Jane was taken by the father to the hospital to see the new baby. Jane showed considerable interest in the new member of the family and was affectionate toward the mother. During the ten days that the mother was in the hospital, the father and Jane became really acquainted for the first time. The father was called upon for many things that formerly had been done by the mother. Jane saw the baby frequently at the hospital and apparently was not emotionally disturbed in the least. Neither did she seem anything but affectionate toward the mother, who told her that she would soon be home again.
At the end of the ten days, Jane was considerably taken aback to find not only the mother at home, but the baby as well. Jane within a few days realized that a new life had opened for her. The mother gave so much of her time to the baby and so little to her, compared to the past! Jane asked why the baby was not left at the hospital and was told that he would always be with them at home. The older child was upset and became antagonistic to both mother and baby. She turned more and more toward her father. When the baby was a few weeks old, Jane one day discovered him lying on the davenport wrapped up ready to be taken out and she unceremoniously pushed him onto the floor. The
(241) mother rushed in at the first cry of the infant, who was not injured, to find Jane standing over him in a somewhat deliberate manner, and saying "Don't like baby."
As time went on the dislike for the child and the avoidance of the mother grew. The father became more and more the center of Jane's affection. She waited for the father to come home at night to show him things she had made during the day. On one occasion she had a serious temper tantrum when her mother unwittingly showed the father some little crude drawing Jane had made and saved, before the child herself had had the opportunity to display her accomplishment.
When the mother came to consult the writer, Jane had become quite a serious disciplinary problem in the home. She avoided relations with the baby brother and took a distinctly negativistic attitude toward the mother. Toward the father she was deeply affectionate and obedient. The situation was one which tended to condition the child toward the mother, father, and brother in a form upon which the whole subsequent structure of family relations might be built. Unless the child was handled wisely, the resistance to the mother might in time carry over to other women who might serve as surrogate mothers. Dislike and jealousy are not uncommon in families. Sometimes the hatred and avoidance become extreme. Often maturity corrects some of the infantile conditionings, or it may at least offer sublimated forms of reconditioning.
Many mothers are so emotionally conditioned to their babies that they produce in the latter a host of habits which determine the direction of life organization and point of view ever afterward. The sense of dependence on the mother, commencing with feeding and bodily care, spreads, as the child grows, to nearly every relationship which involves him and his social world. The child, toddling about, bumps his head against the table, and the doting mother rushes in at the child's screams to remark: "Did baby get hurt? Naughty table to bump my baby," and so on. She kisses the child, soothes its feelings, and often as not continues scolding the table, even going so far as to strike it with her hand as she blames it for injuring her darling. We `yonder where children and even adults pick up their animistic notions about physical objects. The basis is found in just such simple incidents. The mother's blaming the table, striking it and reacting to it as if it were human and personal, puts on the child the pattern for a like response toward inanimate objects. So, too, we often wonder why grown men and women have such curiously infantile reactions to their
(242) parents, because we do not know the history of their early conditioning. Sometimes psychologists have distinguished between the individual consciousness and reaction to material objects and the social consciousness and reactions to persons, as if these two types of response were fundamentally different. As a matter of fact, our reactions even to the material world around us are conditioned, in part, by the place which other persons have had in this. (Even our concepts of time, space, force, mass, and motion are colored by the cultural patterns which are brought to us from other persons, and in this very teaching often a social quality is added to the entire picture.) So, in this case, the child has both received a fundamental conditioning toward the mother and acquired from her a certain tendency to project blame outward on physical objects. Later the child will be the same in reference to other persons. This dual conditioning— first, the dependence on the parent, and second, the projection of blame and cause of trouble on the outside world— is a combination which may mark a personality for life. The following case summary brings some aspects of this before us:
Julia X is the youngest of five children, three boys and two girls. The father is a self-made man. Having begun business with a popcorn stand and a bushel of popcorn, he is now worth a quarter of a million dollars. The mother is a sweet, lovable and rather efficient woman. The children have had a good deal of leisure and freedom. The lives of the younger ones have been very easy. Not only has the father provided well, but a wealthy uncle left each of the five children an endowment, in trust, which gives each one about one hundred dollars a month.
As a child, Julia was a great favorite. Her mother waited on her at every turn. She was pretty and much spoiled by her family and relatives. Her every wish was satisfied. She never had any little household duties. She slept as long as she wanted. Her mother often brought her breakfast to her bedroom, even when she was twenty-five years of age. In fact, if Julia felt like staying in bed, which she often did, she even had her luncheon in bed as well. Both her father and mother have waited on her since infancy. If she is in bed and wakes at eleven or twelve r. M. and asks for a drink, a sandwich or other favor, she calls out to father or mother who promptly waits on her.
Today Julia, at twenty-six, has been married for six months. tier husband's mother, who was widowed when Julia's husband was nine years of. age, is a delightful and efficient woman who kept her family of three boys together until they were grown. Julia's husband began at nine years of age to earn his own ,living and has always been a steady worker. Julia still sleeps from ten to twelve hours a day. She does not get up to prepare her husband's breakfast and he
( 243) frequently finds her still in bed at noon. She has no sense of money values. She has always spent her stipends, from her own family and from her uncle's estate, on her clothes without any regard to need or future. Mere whim determines her actions. She once spent twenty dollars for cold creams and cosmetics and eighty-six dollars for a couple of dresses when she had a wardrobe full of clothes, some of which had not even been worn. Her reaction to responsibilities is distinctly childish. She can not stand any sort of physical discomfort or the slightest pain. She whines at any inconvenience while traveling. And yet she is negative and stubborn where her own wishes are involved. She is quite lacking in mutuality even with her own family. She never gives any of her clothes away, even when she does not want them. For example, she recently had three pairs of white silk hose which she had worn but little, and she did not care for them, but her sister did. She sold them to her for the price she paid for them.
Her husband is working at a moderate salary and wishes to advance in his firm. She offers him no coöperation and has no interest or concern with housekeeping. She will do nothing which she does not want .to do. The young man so far has been patient, but has attempted to get her to change her habits. There is no evidence that she has any insight into her personality and without insight there seems no likelihood of alteration. Just recently she has felt so miserable that she has gone to a general practitioner who has told her that she must rest because she has nervous exhaustion. But she even refuses to take the tonic he prescribed because it "tastes nasty."
This is not an altogether unusual picture of people born into these circumstances. The father has risen from poverty and has no desire to see his children suffer. All three of Julia's brothers are irresponsible young married men, with little or no sense of money, essentially infantile in many of their traits. Her divorced sister, whose former husband is recently deceased, has had nothing to do with the rearing of her two children. She has left it all to her mother, who has borne the burden gladly. The mother, on her part, loves her children and grandchildren and likes "to sacrifice" and "do" for them. The full background of the mother's own history is not at hand. Her reactions to her children can be understood only in terms of her own personal-social and cultural conditioning. Julia is a grown-up baby and her marriage to a man of different economic status, with some business ambitions, is fraught with great uncertainly. It is decidedly questionable whether their marriage will be successful.
The following case illustrates a very different parent-child relationship. Here there is revolt from the parent— a rebellion determined, in part, by a sense of inferiority.
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In the N. family are two girls and three boys. The daughters are twenty months apart in age; the boys are much younger. The mother is a dominating type of woman. The father is relatively indifferent to the more intimate relations of .the children to one another. Z., the older girl, made a very brilliant record in high school and college. Her mother talked a great deal about this, both in the home and out. She spoke of her professional promise, of how proud they all were of her. It was "Z did this," and "Look at your sister, Z." She identified herself very distinctly with her older daughter. A., the younger girl, who was two years behind her sister in school, was a mediocre student. She was not interested in books. Her mother was constantly comparing her unfavorably with her abler sister.
The older girl was rather well integrated to the family life. She got along well with the neighbors, and was generally popular. The younger daughter, in contrast, developed into a quick-tempered, rebellious person. She defied her mother about hours of recreation. She sulked at home or was sharp-tongued when she did talk. She could not be aroused to do better work by being compared with her brighter sister. In fact, this unfavorable comparison only made her angry.
Both girls graduated from college. A. conformed outwardly to the family scheme so long as she was in school. Soon after she completed her course, she left home. She married after a few months in a large city where she went to work. She says she will absolutely have nothing more to do with her family in any intimate way.
Throughout the complex of early habits run the strands of social influences. Other persons form definite configurations to which one responds. The demands or concessions of others are the matrix of socialization. Identification and projection may produce dependence or its opposite. Harsh treatment affects one child in one way, another differently. Sayles cites the case of the five Osborn brothers who responded very differently to their parental influences, particularly to severe treatment from a father:
We have here, in one family, clear-cut illustrations of the leading types of reaction to the domineering father: where one child is able to withstand the pressure and hold his own, learning self-command and attaining a degree of maturity in the process, another may be terrorized into submission and dependence, and a third driven to rebellion and lawlessness.[7]
The following case of two brothers illustrates this same principle:
We have been interested in the study of two brothers. One, at two years, is vivacious, active, and pugnacious, striking and slapping his brother or play-
(245) -mates to gain his ends and domineering over his brother two years older. He is responsive and friendly, readily drawing adults to him because of his cheeriness and air of bravado. The other, at four years, is quiet and retiring. He gives way at once to his little brother's demands, making no effort to assert his rights, is shy and unresponsive and inclined to be fretful.
The marriage of the parents has proved fundamentally unhappy. When the older boy was a year old, the parents separated, but after several months, the mother allowed her husband to return because of her anxiety over the youngster, who had been devoted to his father and was apparently grieving for him. The children's earliest recollections must have been of constant quarreling. The family was lined up, with the mother and younger boy opposed to the father and older boy, each parent defending the special favorite against punishment and discipline by the other. This continued until the father left home for good about a year ago. His going did away with much of the friction, but left the older lad without his champion. After a few attempts to assert himself, he sank to his present state of letting things go without a struggle. He lives in an atmosphere of discouragement and discontent. He is the object of faultfinding, scolding, and blame, and he feels inadequate and discriminated against.
The younger one, on the other hand, receives praise and kindly interest and is buoyant and aggressive. He has the backing of his mother, who turned her affections to him when unhappy with her husband. The mother and her relatives are unconsciously but steadily exaggerating and making permanent the markedly different personality traits of these two boys, who are living in the same physical surroundings.[8]
Again, in sleeping arrangements, frequently habits of dependence are built up. For example, stories of fearsome animals lead a child to demand that the door into the hallway where a light burns be kept open. Moreover, the unfortunate habit of a parent or an older person sleeping with a child may so condition him that he is ever uncomfortable without some sleeping companion. At times even more serious personal consequences follow this sort of thing.
The mother, a highly emotional, badly organized person herself, sleeps with her fifteen year old son. The father and mother are divorced, but the wife is well-provided for. She still gives the boy his bath every day, rubbing him and drying him as might a Professional masseuse. hilt with additional motherly affection. A doctor friend of the fan oily not long since attempted, in a gentle, kindly way, to suggest that this sort of thing ought not to be done "now that George was growing up." The mother sensed at once that any such change would cut across her own emotional balance and resented it fearfully. The boy
(246) is selfish, spoiled, and distinctly infantile. The mother is very evidently getting considerable substitute emotional satisfaction from this in view of her failure as a wife. From what we know of similar cases, one does not predict a very satisfactory life for this boy and for those women who come into his life.
These overdependent personalities never completely separate themselves from parental influences. They may be called the tied-to-mother's-apron-strings type. It must be noted that the father as well as the mother may be the object of the undue fixation. Clearly the desire for security may have its roots in these infantile fixations of dependence upon parents and other members of intimate groups. Later this sense of dependence may spread to other groups. Sometimes these dependent persons are petty and spoiled in all of their reactions. They always want their own way. And if it is not forthcoming they resort to whining, crying, temper tantrums, or other symptomatic actions to gain attention. Later their technique for securing attention may change, but the sense of dependence remains unaltered.
Another personality organization of opposite sort may arise from family conditioning. The efforts to impress authority and regularity upon the child may result in negative responses on his part toward the mother and the regimen. This may happen in nursing, but at the outset its more common locus is in the excretory functions, and, after the period of nursing has passed, in eating. The extremes of behavior of this sort come to be called negativism. It furnishes the foundation for the revolt-from-authority sort of personality. The following case illustrates the method by which negative responses are set up in children:
Mrs. V. is a highly efficient, executive type of woman. She is large in stature, aggressive in manner, with a fine, stately carriage. She is well read in the physiology of child training and is over-anxious for the health of her family, which has in spite of her concern been given to ill-health. The second child, a boy of three and a half, was bothered by constipation at the time the observation was made. He was also developing a good deal of fussiness about his meals. At mealtime his mother stood over him literally morning after morning until he ate his cereal. Then promptly at 8:30 every morning he was taken to the toilet to stool. "And I make him do II," She remarked proudly to a friend.
"Why just yesterday I made him sit there until 9:30 but I'll tell you I did not let him get up until he had finished."
The boy is intelligent, alert to the world around him, but developing a whole set of escapes from the mother's severity and one negativism piled on another. He is still too weak and young to use physical force in resistance, but one won-
(247) ders what lies ahead of him. As he grows older the mother's domination, in which both the grandmother who lives there and the father, often conspire with the mother, will probably spread from one activity to another.
One does not mean to discount the very important matter of proper bodily habits. The technique of habit formation is not the simple matter which parents imagine. As one is training the child in regularity, one is also training him in patterns of response to other persons in authority. As he grows up and this authority spreads from one situation to another, there gradually arises a general attitude of resistance to all forms of authority.
There is a very brilliant but erratic man whose attitudes of criticism of the present social, political and economic order seem distinctly conditioned by his early childhood experiences. His mother was an efficient, fanatically religious woman, full of the notions of sin so dominant in the older generations. The boy was brought up under the most rigid discipline. His curiosity about sex, for example, was completely squelched by his horrified mother. As he lived on a farm he learned a great deal by observation and was colossally misinformed and given a highly colored picture of sex from the vile mouths of hired men. He was forced to attend Sunday school and church every Sunday. Any infractions of the Puritan code about Sunday amusements were punished. He could not go walking in the woods nearby. He could not go swimming, hunting, or fishing. Later, in adolescence, he had above all else to keep away from girls. The domination of his moral attitudes by his mother, without any opportunity to learn of life and make some of his own judgments, the discipline of his conduct within such strict Puritan rules, the gradual growth of perception and idea based on observation of others and contact with groups outside the family, led in the end, to a tremendous revolt. With his study in college it took on particular violence in reference to all forms of organized religion. From this it spread later to radicalism in the field of politics and economics. And the critical ability of this man has kept pace with this development. Yet in spite of this intellectualization of the process, the man has retained a good many rather childish traits.
The revolt-from-authority pattern is seen at various levels. It doubtless exists in the ne'er-do-well and hobo, in many criminals, in radicals of all sorts, of both the emotional and the intellectual kind, to use Root's differentiation. There is some reason to believe that the wish for new adventure is often correlated with negativism and revolt from authority. The seeking of new stimulation in drink, drugs, travel, artistic, scientific or philosophic activities, may be an expression of distaste for and disgust with
( 248) authoritarian forms. Avoidance of, or escape from, culturally determine(, responsibilities is merely another aspect of the same thing. Thus, the desertion of a family by the husband may be rooted in negativistic attitudes built up toward financial and emotional responses expected of one by the culture standards of the community.
Another familiar sort of personality development which begins at home is found in the show-off child. As a rule the undue attention to the young child by his parents gives rise to attitudes and habits on the child's part that carry over into all sorts of social situations. The repeated telling of girls that they are pretty and sweet, or of boys or girls that they are smart and clever, the parading of the child's foibles and abilities before adults— all are methods by which the exhibitionism of the child is built up. Ever in the eye of parents, brothers and sisters, relatives and friends, the child comes to believe that he is unsurpassable.
The case of James A. illustrates the exhibitionist. This child, who is in the third grade, must take the lead in everything. If he is not first in line of march, not first in some little school performance, if he does not have a part on every room program, he has an emotional storm. He talks about it to the teacher, his fellow pupils, and to all who will listen to him. He has been made so much of at home that as a psychologist remarked, he imagines he should be "head man in every show." Because of lack of parental coöperation he is proving a very difficult school problem.
The writer has seen some insufferable children develop from being informed by teachers and parents that they had very superior mental ability as determined by intelligence tests. Some families produce in their children attitudes of superior performance, so that later the children meet competition very emotionally and ineffectively, as happened in the case just cited. Not infrequently one sees the results of such early training in college students. A girl or boy has been made so much of by the family, neighbors, and school authorities in a small town that in college the orientation to a new world of competition without parental and other support produces maladjustment.
Closely correlated with the exhibitionist child is the dominating, aggressive sort. Certain children by virtue of physical, mental, and emotional maturity, coupled with early personal-social training, lead in all sorts of social situations. This commanding behavior may be observed in the very earliest activities of children. Some children dominate others at home. In
( 249) fact, from the outset children sometimes dominate even their parents rather completely. The following report of an experiment carried on at the Minnesota Institute of Child Welfare illustrates how divergent the behavior of young children of the same age may be in their relations with their fellows. Fourteen children, seven girls and seven boys, were observed.
The children were taken to the room, two at a time, and told that there would be some particularly exciting toy there. Everything was done to arouse their anticipation, and great efforts made to have this anticipation realized through having the toys of an interesting and unusual sort. The two children were left alone with one toy in the room. This situation, two children and one toy, no adults around, was designed to produce conflict. The unseen observer recorded the behavior, in specified categories, every five seconds during a six-minute period. A record was made for each child in terms of his behavior as directed toward securing the toy— whether he screamed, pleaded, bargained, threatened, pulled it away deliberately, slapped, pinched or pulled the other child, or relinquished the toy passively; in terms of the type of domination of the successful child, after the outcome of the conflict, i. e., whether he played with the toy alone, controlled it but let the other child participate, or controlled it but let the other child have his turn or share it, and in terms of the unsuccessful child's reactions; in terms of the subsequent behavior of both children— whether the dominant child relinquished the toy, and, if so, whether he still directed the activity, whether either child made a suggestion, and whether it was accepted or rejected by the other child . . . .
In two behavior charts it is shown that one of these children used pleading as behavior directed towards securing the toy over two hundred times, the other child not ten times, but the latter child used commanding about as often as the former used pleading. When we consider the great number of combinations from which these computations came, the consistency of behavior is amazing. The pleading child pleaded consistently, whatever other child he happened to be with; the commanding child commanded all other children."[9]
Later, on the playground, in the classroom, and so on throughout life, some children will step forward to perform the social functions which the situation seems to call for. Others, in contrast, will hold back and follow the lead of others. The aggressive type secure their wishes by commanding and in a sense remaking the situation, or at least by getting it in their own hands. The docile type may employ pleading or other techniques to secure what they want, or they may passively accept the situations which develop around them. Adler has shown how the kinds of social reactions of chil-
( 250) -dren of different ages in the family make for differences in aggressiveness. He believes that the second child replaces the first in parental affection. This produces in the first child a feeling of inferiority which may lead to aggressiveness and revolt or to undue docility. Goodenough and Leahy have made some enlightening observations on this point:
It has been shown that in the kindergarten group, those children who were the oldest in their families showed a significant tendency toward lack of aggressiveness, and that in at least one case out of every five, this lack of aggression was manifested to a rather extreme degree. These children are also rated low in self-confidence; they are lacking in qualities of leadership, are easily modified by suggestion, and very gullible. They are somewhat more likely to be seclusive, and their attention is likely to be of the introverted type,
The "middle" child also shows some tendency toward lack of aggression, but this characteristic is far less marked than in the case of the oldest child. He is rather easily influenced by suggestion, and is likely to display more than the usual craving for physical demonstration of affection. He is, as a rule, gregarious in his social attitudes, but individuals showing marked divergence toward the opposite extreme are also common among the group. Instances of extreme unpopularity with other children are more frequent in this group than in any other. His attention is likely to 'be flighty and easily distracted from the thing at hand.
The kindergarten children who are the youngest in their families show no really outstanding characteristics in their ratings. In general they scatter quite symmetrically on either side of the ideal norm, without marked tendencies toward either extreme. In total proportion of extreme ratings they rank the lowest of the four groups.
The only children in the kindergarten group are rated as more aggressive and more self-confident than any of the other groups. They show the greatest proportion of cases of extreme fondness for physical demonstration of affection and are highly gregarious in their social interests. They are more than ordinarily likely to show some instability of mood, are easily excited, and their attention tends to be flighty and distractible.
In our present state of ignorance with regard to the etiological basis for behavior, attempts to account for differences such as have been described can be but little better than pure conjecture. It has been shown that in the group of kindergarten children studied, those children who were the oldest in families of more than one showed the greatest proportion of extreme deviations from the ideal norm, and this finding is in accordance with the data which have been reported for delinquent groups and for the habit clinic children. At least three possible causative factors suggest themselves: the comparative inexperience of the parents in the case of the first born child, possible over-strain as a result of the many small tasks, including care of the' younger children, which often
( 251) fall to the lot of the oldest child in a rapidly growing family, and more especially the difficult adjustment which is involved in the change from the "only child" to the "not only child" situation. One might also speculate as to a possible connection between the slightly greater tendency toward over-demonstrativeness found among the "middle" group of kindergarten children and the greater frequency of sex offenses in the corresponding group of clinic cases, raising the question of a possible association with unsatisfied desire for attention from parents who are preoccupied with the more immediately pressing demands of the younger and older children. Such speculation is a useful starting point for further investigation; it cannot take the place of objective evidence.
Nevertheless the data which have been presented appear to justify certain practical, if tentative, conclusions. It is not simply the only child who, by reason of the family relationships most frequently existent under those circumstances, is in danger of developing undesirable personality traits. There is probably no position in the family circle which does not involve, as a consequence of its own peculiar nature, certain special problems of adjustment. It is our task to study these problems, to ascertain the nature of the conditions under which each is likely to develop, and to find means for modifying these conditions in accordance with individual needs. That under circumstances commonly prevailing, the oldest child in the family is likely to be subjected to conditions which render satisfactory adjustment particularly difficult is strongly indicated by the facts which have been presented herein, and the need for special study with view to modification of these conditions through suitable parental education is suggested.[10]
To discover the social interactions among children, Anderson observed carefully the relationships of each child to the other children in the spontaneously formed nursery school play-groups. He writes:
The most significant fact which comes out of these observations is the fact that if we take a particular child and record his relationship to the group, we find that in 95 per cent of the situations with which he is presented in the play situation, he is the dominating or the leading individual, whereas another child under the same conditions is found to be in the dominating or leading position only 5 per cent of the time.[11]
The significance of these differences in practice in situations of domination and submission is obvious. If such differences are found at two, three, and four years, imagine what five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years of additional practice may mean in the development of these patterns.
(252) Not only are personal life-organizations built up on the basis of early practice in dominance or subordination, but these patterns of behavior may come to be a part of the cultural framework of a given class or society. The Oriental ethos is marked in part by a certain passivity and submissiveness which strikes the Occidentalist with some amazement. The blind acceptance of class or caste, of disease, of hardship or luxury, the belief in the inevitability of social environment, all seem to the aggressive Westerner not a little strange. In our American life we have coined such phrases as "Go-getter," "He-man," "Never say die," and the like, as evidence of our complete belief in the social importance of aggressiveness. Sherwood Anderson makes the following comment on the attitudes which he found prevalent in his home community. They indicate how the rather indolent, passive behavior of the father and sons was looked upon by the "up and coming" town in which they lived:
A new kind of hero, tarnished somewhat later, filled the popular eye. As we boys went about in the main street of our town, citizens, feeling a kindly interest in the motherless sons, continually stopped us. Everyone was singing a new little song;
"Get on. Make money. Get to the top. A penny saved is a penny earned. Money makes the Mare go." . . .One went into a factory, did his work with care and skill, became a foreman, superintendent, part owner, married the banker's daughter, got rich and went off to Paris to sin the sins neglected during so busy a youth and early manhood.
It sounded reasonable and possible. Learning a craft was slow business and one was in a hurry, "Hurry" was the battle cry of the day.[12]
These attitudes, being a part of our culture, are projected upon children from the earliest age. Masterful success is held up as an ideal. Our magazines herald it. Preachers, public speakers, and teachers proclaim the necessity of aggressive success. The families and individuals who do not conform to pattern are looked upon askance. Frequently as a part of this desire for dominance and prestige, one finds that the parents project upon their children their own thwarted and secret ambitions which they have themselves not been able to fulfil.
Both the exhibitionist and the dominating types very likely find their
(253) satisfaction in public notice. These personalities may, in fact, be rather consistently controlled by the desire for public recognition or power. There are persons who never forego an opportunity to lead a movement, no matter how insignificant, if it will but lead to notice in the press or other medium of communication. There are men in business and the professions who are constantly seeking group recognition. The nouveau riche may wish a place on the social register. The writer or artist may enjoy favorable reviews of his work. The business man craves prestige in his community. Other men may simply wish to be known as "jolly good fellows," and so on, through the range of prestige-giving situations. The inception of this sense of power or control of attention frequently goes back to the home and other elementary group experiences.
As we noted above, the effects of other people upon the child are of two sorts. First there is direct personal-social contact in which culture norms or folkways play little part, comprising such things as sheer domination of strength, temperamental reactions of mother to child, and so on. Then there are those contacts which are particularly colored by the culture patterns of the group or community into which the child is born. Naturally, it is not easy to segregate from one another the two sorts of environmental influences. Both must be recognized. The whole process of socialization, as it is called, begins in these early contacts with other people. Anderson's comments, based on his observations of nursery school children, are interesting:
The following principles have come out of our study so far: In the first place, the individual is presented with a continuous series of situations involving persons to whom he must make reactions. Intrinsically, persons have greater value as stimulus objects than do inanimate things. He reacts to these persons in terms of his inherited makeup and his acquired equipment. He has the benefit of having before him during his early years demonstrations of the manner in which other persons react to one another and to him. He is presented with an inconstant and shifting social environment to which he reacts with variable behavior, the nature of which is determined partially by his equipment, partially by the examples set before him, and partially by the fact that some of his responses to persons are rewarded and hence facilitated and other of his responses to persons are punished and hence inhibited. With all, he gets a tremendous amount of practice in concrete situations in dealing with his fellowmen. Because of the inconstant and variable nature of the stimulation given him by other persons, there is apt not to be a cleancut elimination of certain types of response. Through random acts, he may fix upon particular modes of response which are not desirable from the standpoint of adjustment and which persist
(254) and become written into his behavior system through much practice. Likewise, he may hit upon very desirable modes of adjustment in the same fashion . . . . By virtue of the organization of certain types of behavior, the individual is blocked off from organizing other types of behavior; in other words, the development of particular modes of response in social situations, while advantageous in certain respects, is attained at the price of versatility and variable reaction. This is analogous to what occurs biologically in the phylogenetic series.[13]
Finally, two features seem to be evident. First, the interaction of the child and other persons— parents, siblings, relatives, and others— directs the modification and elaboration of behavior trends which exist at birth and which arise with maturity. Out of these develop certain internal sets of behavior— anticipatory mechanisms— which come to characterize the personality. Associated with these are typical, somewhat stereotyped, forms of behavior. True enough, these internal sets or motives and the corresponding habit systems vary with social situations. Still we must remember that in any situation the person is attempting to move toward a complete or consummatory reaction which will be satisfying and pleasant to the organism as a whole. Failure to attain this goal is perhaps the major cause of personal-social maladjustment. The various types of life-organization and the forms of wishes connected with them indicate the person's efforts to balance internal and external adjustments in his group relations.
The second interesting feature of early social conditioning is the fact that as adults we fail to realize how deeply imbedded in us are our infantile experiences. So much of our behavior is motivated by earlier habits quite outside our consciousness that we fail to understand rationally either ourselves or others. Again we quote from Anderson:
One final question concerns itself with the manner in which the social reactions of the young child condition the later behavior of the human being. Long before the child enters school, long before we ordinarily think of the social behavior of the child, we find that he has been meeting numerous specific social situations and has been developing modes of reaction to them. Starting at a variable level, under the influence of external stimulation, driven internally with much perturbation on the part of the individual, these modes of reaction reduce themselves in the course of time by virtue of much practice to a semi-automatic partially conscious level and become in a true sense unconscious determiners of conduct. The advance of psychology in the last two generations
(255) has demonstrated quite clearly the irrationality of much of our conduct, previously looked upon as rational. Conduct, however inexplicable in its final stages, is from the standpoint of its development both explicable and logica1.[14]
C. Play Life and Socialization.The family furnishes naturally the first group to which the child is exposed in his adventure into the social world. Soon, however, he comes into contact with other children more or less of his own age, and a new set of experiences is in store for him. The relation of parent to child may be described as a vertical one, in which the mother or father, or both, stand above the child in the position of omnipotence and omniscience— they have the authority of force and the authority of knowledge. The parent-child relation is a correlation of domination and submission. The relation of older to younger children in a family, moreover, tends to take on this same pattern— the older children dominating the younger in a kind of miniature parent-child relationship. Older sisters or brothers may scold the younger children not only in the words but in the very tones of the mother. The telling of tales on one another to parents by children is simply another phase of identification in which they invoke the authority of adults to accomplish certain social ends for themselves. In child play the contacts are more nearly spontaneous unless, as is too frequently the case, the adults interfere. The whole relation of personality to personality, in play, may be described as a horizontal one, so far as age, knowledge, and authority go. In some instances, of course, even in the play of children the vertical relations of domination and submission appear. One possesses more insight, knowledge, or intelligence than another, and may become an authority. But by and large the play-group is important in giving a new configuration to the social stimuli in essentially a horizontal form. Even the vertical relations which ensue are more spontaneous, although the parental treatment of children does carry over into the treatment which children accord to each other. On the whole, the play relations of children to one another tend to be determined by more natural relations than by highly-developed cultural norms. While the particular games and types of play arc culturally determined, the spontaneous personal-social relations are relatively dominant.
Philosophers and educators have attempted many analyses of the play
(256) impulses. In modern times whole theories of education have rested upon assumptions about play. The current insistence on following the child's own interest in education is rooted essentially in a belief that the spontaneous play-life of the child gives the best clue to his later development. Only brief reference need, be made here to the theories of play. More important is the recognition that play gives a picture of the natural socialization of the individual.
Schiller first and later Herbert Spencer maintained that play arose as the expression of excess energy in the growing child. While it seems to the casual observer that children have superabundant energy and, moreover, that spontaneous play bespeaks excessive activity, there is the counter fact that children often play when fatigued and that much play does not serve any such purpose as the discharge of marked energy.
Groos held that play was a kind of preparatory training for the serious business of life. Thus the play of animals takes on the nature of hunting food, fighting, and the gestures of mating. It is true, of course, that play serves as a valuable training-ground in socialization. Children learn the give-and-take of life; they acquire attitudes of fair play, of rivalry and emulation, of group loyalty and group antagonism. They identify themselves with adult behavior in play. They act out first one rôle and then another as their interest fluctuates. This identification process is highly important because it means that new patterns other than those of the family come into the child's life and serve to widen the range of his attention and thus of his activities. But play is no more preparatory for later life than the activities of today prepare for those of tomorrow. There is much misunderstanding of the play-life of children on the part of adults, because with adults playtime is rather distinctly separated from the business of the day. With adults much ritual must be indulged in, in getting ready to play: arrangements for a foursome or tennis match are made days in advance; there are special clothes, times and places, fees, memberships, and training. It is highly self-conscious in its determination. It is deliberately cut off from other aspects of living. With children, so far as adults do not interfere, play is all of life. It is preparation in a sense, but more than that it is child life. Furthermore, the alleged playfulness of play in children is somewhat mistaken. A child's play is not nearly so consciously make-believe as many adults imagine. Some play is make-believe, but most children are quite serious about it.
( 257)
Another familiar theory of play was given much currency in this country by G. Stanley Hall, who connected play with his theory of recapitulation. He thought that children in play repeated the evolutionary history of the race. Today no one believes that the activities of an individual rehearse any stage or level of behavior of past generations. The unhampered play-life of children does reveal much of the natural reactions of immature individuals to one another; but it is hard to believe that it exposes the nature of primitive man's actions. Primitive peoples can scarcely be called child or adolescent races, as Hall maintained.
Play may be considered a general descriptive term for the more or less natural unhampered life of children when thrown into contact with objects or other children. It is not uninfluenced by older persons-parents, teachers, and older children who teach younger ones "how to play." Certainly it could not be described as an instinct, in the same sense in which hunger reactions might be. Nothing is gained by attempting to explain play in terms of instincts. Yet it is a natural aspect of growth in children. It is to be thought of as rooted in biological urges of the maturing child. Certainly social suggestion of others is a factor in the direction which it takes; truly what the child plays is even set down by culture patterns. Still, no one would deny that there are biological roots to play activities. Rather than attempt to explain play by recourse to theory, let us note some facts in the play-life of children.
At the outset the play of the child is individualistic. Here we have the baby in his crib playing with the toy:John is lying on his back. In front of him is a brightly colored celluloid rattle swinging off a string tied across the crib. He strikes this over and over again with his hand or foot and as it swings, it makes a noise and the ball glitters in the bright sunshine. Head and eyes keep a crude rhythm with the swinging noisy object. Later as John graduates from crib to floor he tosses the toys about, he pounds them on the table or floor. He is interested in noises, tactile sensations and color. Another child may play with toys nearby and so long as the second child does not interfere— reach for or take his own toy— John is relatively indifferent.
This individualistic play continues until the children begin to play in groups, but still as individuals. A group of small boys are playing in a nursery school. Each imagines that he is a steam-engine. Each goes scuffing his feet across the floor, tooting away, and having a jolly time as a loco-
(257) -motive. There are no rules here, no cooperation, no group unity, but merely a congeries of individuals who are doing similar things because someone suggested it. And yet there is the beginning of some social stimulation: not only may a dominant boy start the particular kind of play, but the children watch each other and tend to follow each other in making certain kinds of noises, manual and facial gestures, and general bodily reactions. At this early stage of play we already see sex differences arising both in capacity to follow social suggestion and in time given to particular activities. The following note from an observational study of three-year-old children indicates this:
The results of this brief study of the occupational interests of ten three-year-old children indicate the strong appeal of the Montessori cylinders, color matching and building with large bricks to this aged child. A slight sex difference in choice of occupation is also demonstrated. The boys apparently prefer an active occupation requiring movement of the larger arm, leg and trunk muscles, while the girls prefer an occupation for which they can sit at the table and one involving finger manipulation rather than larger body movements. The boys, moreover, prefer an occupation calling for invention, one allowing freedom of expression such as building with large bricks, while the girls follow instructions more readily and prefer routine activity such as fitting cylinders and pairing colors. Their interests, however, are somewhat more diverse than the boys.
The length of time a three-year-olds interest in an occupation usually lasts is about eight minutes, though it may last on occasion for half an hour to an hour. The boys in this study stayed at one occupation about seven minutes, while the girls stayed usually about nine minutes. The girls showed slightly more variation in the amount of time they gave to their work than did the boys.[15]
Marked sex differences in types of play interest appear later, as we shall see.This type of play gives way to other types in which there is rudimentary cooperation and with it some division of function. One group of boys may construct a boat or an airplane, or play at teaming. Some boys, in the latter, may be the horses, others the teamsters; and if there is not some joint arrangement of activity, the whole play breaks up. Often at this age, after four or five, and on for some years, one gets games of playing house involving child's duplication of family life. Some children play the rôles of
(259) parents, others are aunts, uncles, children, nurses, hired men, or serving maids. What the child imagines rests, finally, upon what he has experienced. In all this there is a great deal of identification, dramatization, and much compensatory make-believe. If dishes are not forthcoming, paper will serve as a satisfactory substitute. In place of real but miniature houses, spaces are marked off on the lawn or playground. But the play is serious and heartily indulged in by most children. They are not disturbed by the creations of their own fancy, but play through the various parts for hours with no apparent sense of any conflict with reality, until the interference of older persons or fatigue cuts across the day-dream.
As the child matures, his social contacts, and hence his social consciousness, widen. He begins to be aware of himself as part of a group. Thus begins group rivalry in which one group is pitted against another. Such games as "cat and mouse," "drop the handkerchief," "run sheep run," and "pomp pomp pullaway" occupy his attention. This type of game or play is called the double group, and is preliminary to the development of rivalry in formalized athletic games. Often in these early forms of group rivalries, the individual, rather than his cooperation, is still important. For example, in pitching quoits, each person on a "side" matches his prowess against his opponent, and true teamwork is hardly possible.
Real team games come later with pre-adolescence and especially with adolescence. These team games are coincident with the further development of social (ejective) consciousness. Here the numbers on each side are limited, the rules of play are definite, the success of the team depends on division of labor and cooperation with the team as a unit.
It should not be imagined for a moment that the lines between these types of play are sharp, or that one type does not carry over to another. There are many adult games, such as chess and golf, in which individual skill is pitted against individual skill, and there are games like quoits or cards in which the individuals playing are merely added to one another as partners. But in "doubles" in tennis, in football, basketball, and baseball, the cooperation of all for a common purpose is absolutely essential.
The congeniality group, which we shall discuss in a subsequent chapter, comes into the play-life of children after the sixth or eighth year of life, and later, especially with boys, these congenial groups often develop into gangs or athletic clubs. Play-life is principally tied to the group participation of the individual, and is not to be understood without reference to it.
(260) Before leaving the discussion of play-life, we shall review some recent work on the types of play activities.
Perhaps the most extensive survey of types of play, and of sex, community, and racial differences in play, was made in 1926 by Lehman and Witty. More than ten thousand children above the age of eight and a half were given a test in which approximately two hundred kinds of play were listed. The children were asked to check the kinds of play which they enjoyed and to furnish other data. Two important facts were brought out: the continuity of play from early childhood on; and the fact that there are no sharply divided periods in types of play, but rather an enormous overlapping. While there were great individual differences, on the whole the younger children indulged in about twice as many kinds of play as the older. Certain children were markedly deficient in play experience— the marginal children whose socialization is much restricted. The older children tended to be slightly less social than the eight-year-olds in their play. Lehman and Witty, in fact, believe that no age can be designated as particularly social or individualistic. Among the younger children especially, two items stand out: first, the drive to participate in adult social life, helping parents or older persons to "do things"; and second, the frequent evidence of play as an expression of the desire for new experience.
Some writers have made a good deal of sex differences in play, but Lehman and Witty found them less significant than is ordinarily imagined. Boys' games were a bit more vigorous, a bit more competitive and usually better organized, while those of the girls were more restricted in range and more sedentary. Community differences appeared: rural children, while less repressed in play, are less sophisticated and less well organized than city children. Especially is this the case with the older groups. Environmental determinants are evidently the bases of these divergences.
Negro children appear to be more social in their play than the white, but the possible cultural differences between negro and white have not been studied as a background for differences in types of play. Children retarded in school indulge in more social types of play than do those of average or superior ability. On the other hand, there is no evidence that children of superior mentality lack versatility or sociability in their play. The survey revealed seasonal fluctuations in some types of play. The play of boys seems to be more seasonal than that of girls.
( 261)
Play is a most valuable feature of social participation. It affords a method outside the home for the child to come into contact with his social universe. Some children indulge much more readily than others in their opportunities for this participation. A preliminary survey made of certain public school play-groups in a city of 50,000 in 1927-1928 showed that there were five to ten per cent of children who stood about and did not play or played only when constantly urged by adults. These marginal children are inclined to be negativistic and evasive in their social activities. They are missing their opportunity to learn the manner of social participation which will enable them to get through life. Many find their play-life in day-dreaming. It would be interesting to know what percentage of these children run to introverted types of mind and how many of them already display early anti-social trends in their conduct. Practice in social interaction is of great importance in the play-group just as it is in the home and elsewhere. Children who play get enormously greater facility in meeting social situations, in accommodating themselves to other children, than do others who do not or will not play.
D. Differentials in Personality.The differences of behavior are related to class and home influences throughout play and school and in later group contacts. Gesell and Lord studied two groups of children in a nursery school with a view to determining differences, if any, in a number of dimensions of behavior. The following selections from their report are significant:
Nursery School A was attended almost exclusively by children from well-to-do families, whose fathers were occupationally at the professional level. The children of Nursery School B were recruited from homes of poorly favored economic status, in which the mother was usually obliged to work during the day while the child was cared for at the nursery . . . . Physically, the homes of the children in Group A were private residences, or apartments. The homes of the children in Group B were of tenement type. All the children came from English-speaking, "American" homes.
[The children were observed in the Nursery school and then were examined individually, both as to intelligence and as to social traits and interests. There were fifteen items altogether. Age norms were employed but the estimates were expressed in terms of Average (A); High (H); Superior (S); and Low (L)]. The following table gives the summary of the findings:
(262)
Table 13: Showing Differences in Behavior of Two Groups of Children of Divergent Economic Status
| Items ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR | Ratings | ||||
| Group | L | A | H | S | |
| I. Block Construction 2. Form Matching 3. Drawing 4. Comprehension |
A B A A A |
0 5 0 2 0 |
6 1 5 5 5 |
5 4 3 1 1 |
0 1 3 3 5 |
| Total | A B |
2 15 |
21 15 |
10 11 |
11 3 |
| LANGUAGE | |||||
| 5. Vocabulary 6. Conversation 7. Information |
A A A |
0 4 0 0 |
4 5 3 2 |
5 2 8 6 |
2 0 0 3 |
| Total | A B |
0 9 |
9 14 |
19 6 |
5 4 |
| Personal-Social Behavior | |||||
| 8. Spontaneity of Speech
9. Spontaneity of Drawing 10. Play Initiative 11. Persistence 12. Cooperativeness 13. Poise 14. Eating and Sleeping Habits 15. Self Care |
A B A A A A A A A |
0 4 0 0 3 0 0 2 1 |
2 1 8 5 2 2 2 8 8 |
7 3 2 3 4 6 6 1 2 |
2 3 1 3 2 3 3 0 0 |
| Total | A B |
6 33 |
37 25 |
31 21 |
14 9 |
| Grand Total | A B |
8 57 |
67 54 |
60 38 |
30 16 |
| General Development Level | A B |
0 6 |
4 2 |
5 3 |
2 0 |
(General Development Level refers to the rating made up from the total clinical picture. Emphasis is on general intelligence, however.)
The chief purpose of this study was descriptive and exploratory. We were interested to characterize early individual differences. The problem of psycho-
(263) -logical individual differences has been chiefly studied in relation to adults and children of school age. There is still an impression that young children, and surely babies, are very much alike. The corollary is sometimes uncritically drawn that human differences must be largely due to training and to education.
Nursery schools A and B offered without invidiousness an opportunity to make a psycho-clinical comparison of characteristics and capacities present at ages ranging from 30 months to 52 months.
Although sweeping conclusions must be carefully avoided, the clinical estimates and measurements show a definite tendency toward superior mental equipment in Group A. This is surely the statistical drift of the findings. The variation of the individual from this tendency is sufficiently recognized in the individual psychographs. The reader will therefore not draw unqualified generalizations.
In what respects do these two contrasted groups differ? Inspection of the summary table will show that in virtually every field the advantage seems to be with the favored group, whether verbal, practical, or emotional abilities are considered. There is one interesting exception. In Item 15, viz. self care, as shown in washing face and hands, combing hair, brushing teeth, buttoning clothes, lacing and tying shoes, the advantage is evidently with the B Group. With regard to habits of eating and sleeping and adjustment to the nursery school regime in these matters, the A Group makes the better showing. It is possible that self care depends much upon instruction, social suggestion, and motivation. Here the environmental stimulus may be greater in the B homes.
In the remaining personal-social qualities which involve attitudes, emotional vitality and drive, the ratings are rather consistently and, we think, significantly in favor of the A Group. Here we deal with factors which are not so exclusively bound up with training.
In the A Group all the children almost immediately after entrance to the examining room showed by exclamations and comments that they were not inhibited in speech. Restraint and inhibition were more prevalent in the B Group. In the drawing situations there was a similar difference, illustrated by the following comparison of Pair No. 3-(Girl A, Age 35 months, and Girl B, Age 36 months. Girl A drew a scribble, but with definite effort at control and said, "What a funny fellow!", looked at it, added a few more lines, and said again, "Oh, what a funny fellow!" Girl B, her comparison partner, made no spontaneous remark and evinced no pleasure or satisfaction in her work. This kind of gravity was interpreted as meaning a lower degree of "spontaneity." A similar group difference was observed in the reaction to the tree construction play material. It obtained with regard to such qualities as friendliness, cheerfulness, poise.
Giving due recognition to individual exceptions, the difference in spontaneity and expressiveness was one of the most salient discovered. That this difference is relatively fundamental, or pervasive, was brought out by many incidental
( 264) observations made on the two groups as a whole. Three days were spent in each school, so that the children were observed in similar and accustomed situations. The most outstanding net disparity between the two groups consisted in the very noticeable difference in the amount of conversation. For example: at the opening of school, in the A Group there were heard innumerable conversational bits with regard to experiences the children had had (or had not had!) at home. One boy said he was "Tinkle Bell"; a girl brought a crown from home to be King at her birthday; another boy related something very funny,-he had nearly fallen off the seat of the taxi. This funny experience was repeated for the benefit of listeners among the other children. Usually the remarks brought remarks in turn from companions. Contrast the B Group. There were laughter and shouting in the free play period, but only twice were comments comparable in spontaneity, if not in content, heard in the B Group. One boy told his neighbor that his father had given him no supper the night before. Another used his wash basin as a steering wheel and directed himself back to the basin hooks, and explained his dramatization as he went. These very two boys were conspicuously the most spontaneous in the B Group in the examinations, and were given high ratings in the spontaneity items.
It should be added that the atmosphere of Nursery School B is delightful and that there is nothing in the immediate environment to impose restraints on expressiveness, initiative, imagination.
It is idle to ask with regard to these traits to what extent are they hereditarily determined, to what extent are they conditioned? At least our data are not competent to give a quantitative or analytic answer to the question. The data do suggest, however, that the basic factors which will psychologically differentiate these twenty-two children in adult years are already in operation. The winnowing has begun.[16]
Differential social experience in home and elsewhere is of great importance for the later life of the individual. A person who as a child has much practice in performing any particular act, may later in life step automatically into new situations with an assurance and capacity which the doubtful, retiring, and negative persons do not have. People say of the first sort that he is a "born" leader or of the second that he is a "born" follower, but how much is innate at the outset it is hard to say. Just what is innate and what is acquired, even in the actions of small children, is a question, because social-cultural stimulation is omnipresent from birth. Anti the particular sort of behavior which the young child takes up will serve as a determinant for most subsequent behavior. Certainly hundreds of op-
( 265) -portunities for domination have made one a more resourceful and leading type of person than another. Even in play the parental influence is seen. If the mother or father is a dominating type, this sort of reaction may become the child's when he is in the presence of other children; or the docile child may have been conditioned to such reactions by virtue of home influences.
1. Introversion.— The participation of children in family life and in play gives a clue to the development of many dominant features which may mark a personality throughout life. These negative marginal children who do not play with others often show introvertive, substitutive reactions very early. Other children may be much more objective and extroverted almost from the outset of social contact. The introvert is one who cannot make a satisfactory adaptation to his family and others. He develops habits of substituting fantasies or day-dreams for direct social interaction. Instead of making adjustments to his fellows, he compensates in day-dreaming about himself. Woolley describes introverted pupils in a Nursery School:
Of course an introvert does not like a nursery school, that is to be expected. One of them, when he first came in, was very indignant about being there. I happened to be sitting at the table with him the first day he was in the school. He had gotten along very well, ate a fairly good dinner, but taking an afternoon nap with this "gang" was more than he could stand, so when dinner was over he was going home. I tried to persuade him that this was the program and that after his nap he was to go home, and finally said, "When school is out, that will be the time to go home." He looked at me and said, "School is never out. Church is out sometimes, but school is never out."
Now, that child adjusted himself finally. I would say, however, he never became a real good mixer, but he did get to the point where he seemed to enjoy the school moderately and got on much better with the children.
The other child is a more outstanding case and I cannot say we have succeeded. He is even more superior mentally. His grandfather was a man of the world, his father is something of a recluse, so you can take your choice as far as heredity is concerned. This child came to us at less than three. He simply could not endure the presence of the other children. The first day he hit some of them when they approached him. That proved to be very unpopular socially. He also ran away, I think the only child we ever had who ran away. He never really joined in with the group last winter on the playground. He used to wear a rather broad brimmed hat and strut around the outskirts and look unhappy. We called him Napoleon because of his stride and attitude, viewing the scene instead of becoming any part of it.
But here are some interesting things about that youngster. There is a little
(266) mental difficulty in the family. His father is something of a recluse, as I said, an unsuccessful man who has rather fallen back on the members of his family for partial support, this little boy's mother also working. I think the rest of the family felt rather impatient with the father. Both mother and father are devoted to this little boy, the only child, the mother peculiarly so. She is not a woman who makes a mistake in that she does a lot of coddling, but there is a tense emotional substratum and she rather lives for the hours that she will spend with that child. One thing behind his attitude seems to be his resentment at being a little boy. He does not want to be a little boy; he does not care for four-year-olds; he wishes to be any adult. For a while he kept objecting to going to school and wished to go to Sunday-school— Sunday-school was a place where his grown uncle went, that was what he really meant, an adult school, not a baby school. His mother said one day he was sitting in a grown-up's chair and his feet of course did not reach the floor. He tried to stretch down and make his feet reach the floor and slipped off the chair. He kept getting madder and madder about it. Finally his mother suggested that if he would sit in a chair of his own size he could sit back. He utterly refused to accept that solution. He insisted that he must sit in a grown-up's chair, and his feet must touch the floor and nothing else would do and he had a tantrum about it.
On another occasion they were playing "Virginia Reel" and he was his mother's partner. At the place where two people take hold of hands and form an arch to let the rest go under, the mother, of course, stooped down to take his hands. That made him very indignant; he was satisfied with no other solution; he stopped the whole game and had a tantrum because he could not have his hand on a level with his mother's and stand on the floor at the same time.
Now, that child carries out projects; he does excellent buildings with his blocks; he is a very happy child at home; talks a great deal. At school he is silent and worried in expression and usually fails to join in with the other children. The only time at school that I have seen him look very happy and animated was when his mother came and he said good-by. We have had him nearly three years and we have succeeded no better in changing his characteristics and we have made a very great effort to do it. However, as I say, he is the only one in which there has ever been such an outstanding situation and one can see several factors in his background that might account for it. [17]
The desire for new adventure is perhaps associated with day-dreaming at the outset. The present social contacts are unsatisfactory; hence one imagines something better elsewhere. The romantic carrying-out of such day-dreams may be seen in boyhood pranks or truancy from home or school, or in the seeking of fame or fortune in pioneering, soldiering, discovery of new lands, people, or new facts, or the seeking of new experience
( 267) in artistic creation, or the expression of novel ideas in a new philosophy. Carrying of fantasies into action is one method, obviously, of keeping within some framework of social participation. If the action is too remote from cultural norms or common personal-social experience, it is labeled pathological or insane and may lead to some form of group control. Otherwise it may be thought queer or divergent, or else may be ignored or tacitly accepted by the group. If the group turns away from the introvert in his fantasies, he may be driven to even more psychological-social isolation, until in catatonia we find him ordinarily quite out of contact with human affairs.
2. Extroversion.— The extrovert in his capacity to deal with concrete things and social situations may be easier to socialize than is the introvert, whose values lie more within his own imagination and who gets on in his world often by avoidance of social contacts. It is difficult to predict exactly, but there is good reason to believe that the child who shows introverted trends will carry these into adulthood unless some effort is made to direct his attention outward. Yet it is not to be gainsaid that the introvert has a valuable place in society. He is the subjective poet, philosopher, or inventor. It is a question of balancing his trends, and early childhood is a period in which this balance can best be produced. The fantasy life of the introvert to be effective must have some relation to social and material reality, for otherwise it will lead over into schizophrenic or praecox formulations which are so distinctly subjective and personal as to make little or no contact with the social and material universe. Even in childhood these differences in values and attitudes are discernible.
The extrovert is usually sociable. He makes friends easily. He approaches people without embarrassment or self-consciousness. His activities are determined largely by external social stimulation. He is not introspective like the introvert. His interests tend to arise from the environment outside himself. He usually delights in fashionable clothes, is appreciative of externalized art and natural beauty. On the whole, the extrovert, as McDougall remarks, "takes life as it comes" and is not particularly metaphysical about it.
Nevertheless, the extrovert may manifest adjustment problems. He may be rather too completely dominated by the external situations to appreciate the finer sensibilities of other persons. If the introvert tends to flight from external reality, the extrovert inclines to undue flight into the outside en-
( 268) -vironment. Yet, today, the extrovert fits better than the introvert into most social situations in our Occidental world because our whole culture seems to be obsessed with material, objective mechanisms and behavior. Introvertive, subjective values appear to be outworn and useless. In fact, the craze for external stimulation in travel, jazz dancing, and constant personal contact in our modern urban civilization arises partly from an over-attention to extroverted values.
3. Ambiversion— Most people present a certain mixture of both extroverted and introverted attitudes and habits. These persons may be called ambiverted. In some interests they are introverted, as in the matter of recreation; in others they may be extroverted, as in habits of business. Then, too, in some periods of life, such as late adolescence, a person may be full of romantic day-dreams of all sorts, and later in life he may become pretty definitely objectified about love and business. There is a certain amount of substitution or compensation at work in many people. If a dominant culture value leads to extroverted activity, many persons who might otherwise incline to introversion may move in the opposite direction. In this way they may gain wealth and social prestige, and in the leisure secured for them by their extrovert activities, they may even gain the opportunity to indulge their more basic introverted interests.
CLASS ASSIGNMENTS
A. Further Reading: Source Book for Social Psychology, Chapters XIII, Section A, pp. 299-328; XIV, pp. 349-78, and XV, pp. 388-413, only.
B. Questions and Exercises.1. Discuss questions and exercises from assignment in Source Book, Chapters XIII, nos. 1-19, pp. 346-47; XIV, p. 379; XV, nos. 9-20, pp. 413-14.
2. Cite cases of personalities which illustrate, (a) undue mother-attachment; (b) the exhibitionist type; (c) the dominant, aggressive type; (d) inferiority, retiring sort.
3. Cite cases of projection of ambitions of parents on their children.4. Distinguish between the play-group and the family as it influences the development of the personality.
5. What function has play-life in the process of socialization? Illustrate.
6. Criticize pro and con the classification of personality into introverts, extroverts and ambiverts.
C. Topics for Class Reports and Longer Written Papers.1. See appropriate assignments for reports and longer papers in Source Book, Chapters XIII, p. 347; XIV, p. 379; XV, p. 414.
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2. Report on Van Waters, Parents on Probation, Chapters II, IV, VII, VIII. 3. Report on Concerning Parents: A Symposium (edited by Gans), Papers by Woolley, Hollingworth, Thom, Kenworthy, Williams, and Root.
4. Report on Sayles, The Problem Child in the Home (Selected cases.)5. Recent Studies in Relation of Home and Family on the Behavior of Children (including performance on intelligence tests, school grades, psychopathic traits, delinquency, etc.). (Consult Thomas, Child in America, 1929; Weill, The Behavior of Young Children of the Same Family 1928; Foster and Anderson, The Young Child and His Parents, 1928; Sayles, The Problem Child at Home, 1928; Hart, The Science of Social Relations, 1927, Chapter XVIII; Blatz and Bott, The Parent and the Pre-School Child, 1929; and bibliographies in Source Book, Chapter XIV, pp. 379-81; Young, "The Field of Social Psychology," Psychological Bulletin, 1927, vol. XXIV, especially pp. 672-74 and references, and current files of Psychological Abstracts and Social Science Abstracts.)
6. The Development of the Nursery School. (Consult pertinent references cited for no. 5 and current literature.)