Social Psychology
Kimball Young
I. INTRODUCTION
To delimit the fields of the newer social sciences is much more difficult than to locate the boundaries among the older natural sciences. Social psychology, since it touches both psychology and sociology, is experiencing some especial difficulties in the definition of its scope and method.
We may, at the outset, define psychology as the science of behavior and of associated conscious processes. Psychology has advanced remarkably since it was defined as the "science of consciousness" only. To-day this science takes into account the whole response system of the individual and has even extended its study to include the fertile field of motive that lies outside the focus of attention, that which is often called the unconscious. Psychology persists, however, in remaining fundamentally concerned with the individual as the unit of its observation and experimentation.
Sociology, on the other hand, has dealt with larger units, men in groups : family, clan, class, state, religious or industrial organizations. It has traced the interrelations of institutions, their rise, maturity and decay. In order to accomplish this it has resorted to biology, psychology and philosophy for aid. Even Comte, the father of formal sociology, while he denied psychology a special place in the category of the sciences, made use of feeling as an important principle to explain social advancement, and his notion of a rational society based on positive science is a psychological one at root.
In large part in fact, sociology, up to recent date, has been founded either on biology, as with Spencer and Schaeffle, or upon psychology as with Ward, Giddings, Tarde, Small, Sumner and others. For instance, the "Consciousness of Kind" theory of Giddings, and Tarde's emphasis on imitation are decidedly psychological. Certainly Small's doctrine of interests and Ward's social telesis are psychological at base, while Sumner's insistence upon impulses and instincts as pri-
( 157) -mary in the formation of mores and folkways puts his system, whatever we may say of it, under the interpretation of psychology. Aside from Ellwood's social psychology, which has obvious connection with our problem here, we shall not deal with the psychological interpretations of systematic sociology. We-shall concern ourselves for the most part with a topical survey of the pertinent theories and viewpoints of social psychology. We shall only incidentally touch in the content of our field : crowd phenomena, prejudice, psychology of leadership, public opinion and the like. Rather we are concerned with indicating the standpoints of social psychology, on the one hand, and with the contributions of psychology to the social sciences on the other. In a final section the writer will attempt to give his own viewpoint and to make suggestions for particular reorientations.
What, then, is social psychology? The reader, to answer this fully, must await the final discussion. At the outset we may say that social psychology employs psychological concepts in explaining the life of individuals in groups or of individuals as affected by other persons, or themselves affecting these persons. The approach to the field is really twofold. The one takes its lead from group behavior. This deals with the actions of crowds, assemblies, sects, castes, classes and nations conceived as units. The individual is lost in the mass. Yet such psychological concepts as suggestion, imitation, feeling, habit, reasoning and will are applied to the action of the total ensemble. The other approach has for its basis the individual but indicates how he is affected by the presence or absence of other persons, or how he affects these others. It traces the social influence upon the direction of his attention, upon the formation of his habits, sentiments and attitudes. In short, it is concerned with individual processes under the modification of stimuli of other members of one's group. The first treats, really, sociological data, the second, the psychological. Both, it must be noted, make use of the concepts of psychology. The first angle is represented by the work of Sighele, Le .Bon, Durkheim, Ross and Ellwood ; the latter approach is typified by the writings of Baldwin, Cooley, Thomas, McDougall and others.
If there is any conflict about the proper locus of social psychology, whether in sociology or as a phase of general psychology, it is to be understood only in terms of this background. Both sociologists and psychologists have touched the field, and both in a sense lay claim to it. Whether social psychology should be allocated to psychology or to sociology is largely an academic question. Its function above all else is to form a nexus between psychology and the various social sciences.
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If we look into the history of man we find that he exists only in groups, not in isolation. Man possesses a true simian tendency to run in herds or groups, to hunt or to fight in common with others. Moreover, in man, as with the higher anthropoid apes, the family is the true matrix of society. Certainly, when we study the life of the most primitive peoples we find them living in small blood-related groups. Throughout all anthropology social life is everywhere an accepted fact.
It is perfectly natural, therefore, that when, under the stimulus of advanced cultures, men began to think about themselves, one of the first questions to which they addressed themselves was how they came to live in groups, under custom or government. Certainly Aristotle had the notion of an instinct of sociability as well as the idea of social contract in society. So too, sympathy, as held by Polybius and later by Spinoza, Hume, and Adam Smith is decidedly an attempt to understand social life by means of psychology.[1] One could expand the instances at length. The vital point for us is that men have long recognized that men living in groups are under the influence of factors which do not control them when alone and that the action of men in groups is quite different at times from individual actions. This lays a basis, then, for a psychological interpretation of society which is the crux of the social psychology problem from the angle of the group. This basis is attempted in the theory of the "Social Mind."
II. LEADING PROBLEMS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
1. THE SOCIAL MIND THEORY
Although Lazarus and Steinthal touched on the social mind concept in discussing the province of folk psychology in their journal which they established in 1860 for the study of Völkerpsychologie, these writers have only indirectly affected the main current of what is now known as social psychology and need not be considered here. Students of society, however, had long pondered over the curious actions of mobs, crowds and assemblies under the sway of emotion. The im-
( 159) -portant work of French medical psychology, after 1850, under Bernheim, Charcot and Binet, upon hypnotism and suggestion, furnished certain clews to the explanation of this sort of crowd behavior which the sociologist might make use of.
The first development of the social mind thesis which is connected with the history we are tracing came during the nineties when under Scipio Sighele, Gustave Le Bon and Émile Durkheim the continental school of "collective psychology"was developed. Sighele claims to have been the first to attempt to study the crowd from the standpoint of psychologie collective which term he borrowed from his teacher, E. Ferri, who had used it in 1891. Following Sighele, who wrote in 1893, Le Bon began writing on similar topics in 1894.[2] Both these men had an organic view of the crowd, a view quite as biological as psychological so far as analogy goes. Sighele remarked of the crowd that it is the "primitive social protoplasm" from which sects, castes, classes and nations arise.
Le Bon seems to have caught the implication of a relation between the crowd mind of Sighele and his own earlier idea of a folk "soul." He writes of the crowd, however, much as one would of a psychiatric patient. The crowd is very primitive and under the sway of instincts and emotions of the most direct sort. This makes the crowd, like the insane patient, cruel, chaotic, irrational and untrustworthy. Not only is the crowd thus emotionally unstable, it is in most instances marked by "a singularly inferior mentality." While Le Bon does not seem to consider the crowd as possessing a super-individual mind, and while the crowd does not possess the permanent "soul" of a nation, still his whole treatment of the crowd as a mental entity, places him definitely among those who adhere to the social mind concept. The best exposition of his materials for the English reader is his The Crowd (1897).
It is Emile Drukheim who has carried the notion of collective psychology to the greatest length. To understand his theory of the group mind, one must review his individual psychology, a psychology decidedly intellectualistic and structural in form. Sensations, he holds, are surely correlated with neural processes, but then sensations compound themselves into higher units which are not explainable in neurological terms. These compounds are images which in turn pro-duce concepts. These two latter exist therefore sui generis and are
( 160) not subsumable under the laws of biology or physiological psychology. They are not mere additive affairs but actually novel syntheses growing out of this act of fusion. These higher units of mind are called "representations." [3]
These representations do not stop with the individual image and concept, however. When the person is gathered with others of his kind into a crowd or aggregation for some purpose a further elaboration of these representations takes place. Thus under the emotional stress, the schwarmerei of religious ritual, e. g., the korroborree of the Australian natives, the "social" representation is born. Durkheim writes :
"Collective representations are the result of an immense coöperation; ... to make them, a multitude of minds have associated, united and combined their ideas and sentiments.... A special intellectual activity is ... concentrated in them which is infinitely richer and complexes than that of the individual." .. .
We are thus able to extend beyond the limits of individual experience into that of the social entity. Moreover, this capacity he implies is cumulative in a group over generations. This notion seems akin to a belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. This whole process is not due to any mysterious power, says Durkheim, but to the fact that
"There are two beings in him [man] : an individual being which has its foundation in the organism and the circle of whose activities is therefore strictly limited, and a social being which represents the highest reality in the intellectual and moral order that we can know by observation—I mean society." [4]
Thus the social representation, the highest reality, is only experienced in collective behavior. Society only makes itself felt in action,, and it is only in action when the persons composing it are assembled and "act in common." For this very reason the cult is important in all social life, not only religious but secular. Gehlke, who has given us a good account of Durkheim's thesis, presents a schema which is of great service in understanding the psychology upon which this whole fabric of "socio-psychical" reality rests.
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SCHEMA OF DURKHEIM'S PSYCHOLOGY [5]
WITHIN THE INDIVIDUAL MIND
Many brain cells produce (by interaction) a sensation.
Many sensations produce (by their interaction and combination) a concept.
Many concepts produce (by interaction and combination) a representation.
WITHIN THE SOCIAL MIND
Many representations produce (by interaction and combination) a social representation.
Many social representations produce (by interaction and combination) a social representation of a higher, more purely social kind.
These phenomena within the social mind possess the characteristics of "exteriority," that is, they seem outside the individual mind. While modern psychology would interpret this as a projection of a highly charged emotional perception, Durkheim did not so conceive the matter. This very "exteriority" is what gives the experience its sanction. This authority and the force of constraint developed by the group to protect it are considered by him as the chief criteria of social data. Gehlke quotes him as saying :
"The group thinks, acts and feels quite differently than its members would, were they isolated. . . . By aggregating, inter-penetrating, fusing, the individual minds give birth to a being, psychic if you will, but which constitutes a psychic individuality of a new sort."
This is simply an elaboration of the dual consciousness of which we have already taken note.
The principal difficulty with this whole theory arises first from a metaphysical extension of a structural psychology which lacks verification. Its mystical terminology is peculiarly misleading. On the other hand, the whole thesis of Durkheim has done very much to stimulate a study of the action of the group, as a whole. And he has given us excellent concrete analyses of the emotional experiences of men and women under the control of religious ideas.
The collective psychology of the continent has been carried over to this country chiefly through the writings of Ross. For him "social psychology . . . studies the psychic planes and currents that come
( 162) into existence among men in consequence of their association." [6] While this idea is more dynamic than Durkheim's and hence more valid, nowhere does Ross go into minute and detailed analysis of the psychological factors. He also draws heavily upon the notions of imitation and suggestion as found in Tarde. In concrete material, Ross makes use of Le Bon's methods and matter. Ross has affected the theory of the social mind only indirectly. His system of sociology, however, comes under the rubric of "psychological sociology."
Of American sociologists, Charles Abram Ellwood has developed the notion of the social mind most consistently and significantly. Cognizant of the faults of the continental school, he attempted to develop a theory of social psychology on a dynamic basis. In his Some Prolegomena to Social Psychology (1901) he developed the theory that social psychology is concerned primarily with giving an explanation of social phenomena in psychological terms. He thought to apply the concepts instinct, imitation, suggestion, habit, and attention to this problem. He felt sure in 1901 that the phrase "social psychology" could not be used to describe merely the "behavior of an individual in the presence of another of its own species." Such description was merely a branch of individual psychology. For him "social psychology" was concerned with group or collective action, using functional terms so to describe it. It is "the science of the mechanism ... of socio-psychical processes."
Ellwood is concerned with an organic view of society and for him the social mind is a valuable concept to express just the fact that "society is an organic functional unity." Yet he fully recognized that the individual consciousness "not the social group is ... the center of experience." The social mind is, however, "immanent in the individual mind, and both are aspects of a single reality."T his last statement is clearly related to the dual aspect of mind of Durkheim.
A careful reading of his systematic writings on sociology convinces one that Ellwood's original thesis is another brand of the psychological interpretation of society. In fact, in 1901, he uses the phrases "psychological sociology" as synonymous with "social psychology" although in his Sociology in its Psychological Aspects (1914), which is apparently a continuation of his "Prolegomena," he has become convinced that these two phrases are not identical in meaning. He writes (1914) :
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"'Social psychology' ... is a term which had better be confined to the psychology of the social phases of individual consciousness and of the social tendencies of individual human nature; . while what sociologists have called `social psychology' (a psychological theory of society) had better be styled a `psychological sociology' or `psycho-sociology,' and recognize it as including all the psychological aspects of sociology."
Yet in his An Introduction to Social Psychology (1917) he writes that social psychology is the "psychology of associational processes," not in the sense of individual psychology but in the sense of the "physical interactions of individuals" which lead to an objective view of social, life as a unit. "Social psychology will study the place of psychic factors in these (sociological) problems."
In short, Ellwood has given us in his system what is really a "psychological sociology" to use his 1914 definition rather than a social psychology more strictly speaking. He and Ross typify, perhaps, the most thoroughgoing systematizers of this approach.
Social psychology rather than following the lead of Ellwood and Ross, however, has tended to study individual mental processes and behavior as they are affected by social stimuli. The social mind may be a convenient sociological concept, but for the social psychologist it reduces itself to what Davis calls "amass of common beliefs, sentiments, and determination, possessed by the individuals of a group with the added consciousness that the other members simultaneously cherish them."[7] That is to say, we have a uniformity of mental con-tent to which is added the important fact that these contents are "realized as common" by the separate members of the group. Looked at otherwise, the concept, social mind, may be considered a "feeling of identity" of the person with other persons. Gault, in a recent criticism of the group mind theory, holds that the individuals upon the basis of habit-complexes possess a "sense of social unity, or of belonging together" which explains for psychology this idea. This sense of unity, however, is not highly rational and fully conscious. It lies in large part in the field of attitude and feeling.[8]
We must conclude, therefore, that while the use of the concept "social mind" may be defensible upon the purely sociological level, it offers little for psychology which deals with interrelations of individuals with each other.
It strikes the present writer that Le Bon, Durkheim, Ellwood and
( 164) Ross are feeling their way methodologically toward a theory of society which employs its own terms for its own mechanisms. Though not obvious at first glance, is not the standpoint of Graebner, Boas, Lowie, Rivers, Goldenweiser, Kroeber, and other anthropologists simply an advance over this thesis of a social mind? These men maintain that sociology should develop its own concepts and its own descriptions of social phenomena in cultural terms and discontinue trying to couch its methods in those of psychology. Durkheim seems to have taken a decided step in this direction. May not the social mind theory and the psychological sociology of Ellwood and Ross also be considered as phases of this same tendency.[9] The anthropologists have simply gone on to use their own terms and concepts, avoiding the concepts, in turn, of psychology, which they maintain do not fit the situation of comparing and studying groups as such.
For our purposes, then, let us turn to trace that line of development of social psychology which revolves around the individual. This important development has taken on three phases : first, that concerned with the doctrine of social instincts ; second, that concerned with studying social habits and attitudes ; and third, that concerned with the social personality.
2. THE DOCTRINE OF SOCIAL INSTINCTS
The preliminary stages of this approach to our subject are to be found in the writings of Walter Bagehot and Gabriel Tarde. Bagehot's famous essay, Physics and Politics (1873), devotes considerable space to a discussion of the rôle of imitation in man's social, especially his political, life. His use of the term was very general and applied quite as much to the broad phases of one custom resembling another as to one individual doing similar acts to another. Independently of Bagehot, the French jurist, Tarde, in the early seventies began a series of brilliant papers in which he explained crime waves, common customs, fashion and other features of social behavior through imitation, counter-imitation (resistance to imitation) and invention. In these terms, in short, he explained the growth of culture. He, like Bagehot, had little precise knowledge of psychology and
( 165) used the terms in a broad general sense. Tarde is sometimes linked up with the French school of collective psychology, but he seems rather to have opposed the notion of group mind which this other theory implies.[10]
The principal value of this early writing was the insistence that man's instinctive, original nature was important in understanding his social behavior. It remained for others to put the whole matter in objective form, but these writers were significant indicators of the breakdown of the rationalism which still controlled political and sociological thinking in the early nineteenth century.
In tracing the development of the standpoint of social instincts one finds that much of the material overlaps that dealing with the other two phases : habit and personality.
The publication in 1890 of William James's Principles of Psychology was the first large step toward functional psychology in this country.[11] For the psychology of function, the instincts, the emotions, habit and will become important concepts. The direct contribution to social psychology by James is just this insistence that the instincts and the temperament furnish the foundations upon which the social habits and the social self grow. He defines an instinct "as a faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends, without foresight of the ends, and without previous education in the performance." For him the instincts run the gamut from definite reflex mechanisms like sucking, biting, clasping up to complicated acts such as vocalization, pugnacious behavior and sociability. The principal instincts which bear upon man's social life are : imitation, rivalry, pugnacity, anger, sympathy, "hunting instinct," fear, acquisitiveness, constructiveness, play, curiosity and love, with its aspects of jealousy and parental affection.
Upon the basis of these instincts and the habits which develop from them the self is constructed. The self, in fact, is the center of all our habits, the unifying feature of our being. James divides the self, however, into the material self, the social self, the spiritual self and the pure ego. It is largely with the second that we are concerned.
The social self is predetermined by our social instincts developing
( 166) under contact with other persons. As James succinctly remarks : "A man's Social Self is the recognition which he gets from his mates," and further, "a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind." We live, indeed, very largely in the reflection which other people cast back to us about ourselves, hence the tremendous importance of social status in social behavior. Cooley may have caught his notion of the place of face-to-face contacts in social control and in the rise of personality from James's comment that "what may be called `club opinion' is one of the very strongest forces in life." Again James writes :
"Our social self-seeking . . . is carried on directly through our amativeness and friendliness, our desire to please and attract notice and admiration, our emulation and jealousy, our love of glory, influence and power, and in-directly through whichever of the material self-seeking impulses prove serviceable as a means to social ends."
James's service to his fellow psychologists and to sociologists has been very great indeed. Ellwood got the notion of his functional psychology from him, in part. Cooley, Dewey, Mead and others have drawn heavily upon his writings. Thorndike's work, to be discussed shortly, got direct stimulation from him. While James did not write extensively upon purely socio-psychological topics, his paper, "Great .Men and Their Environment" (1880) showed remark-able insight into the relations of leaders to masses and thence to socialprogress. In social theory his views have affected political thinkers greatly. Giddings's "pluralistic behavior" is borrowed from the general thesis of pluralism, while Barnes has well remarked that James's treatment of the social self, especially his insistence that one'sattitudes are largely determined by those of one's group, "leads directly to the social-psychological political theories of Léon Duguit, J. N. Figgis, G. D. H. Cole and H. J. Laski."[12]
James's notion of instincts was loose, yet extremely suggestive Significant too, is his giving place to a wide congeries of native trends, rather than pinning his faith to one or two, for example, imitation and suggestion as did Baldwin.
It is to William McDougall, however, that we owe most in giving us a direct approach to social psychology through a schema of instincts. There is no single book in this entire field which has had such widespread influence as his An Introduction to Social Psychol-
( 167) ogy (1908). The volume has in sixteen years run to nearly an equal number of editions.
The core of McDougall's system is a logical arrangement of instincts and emotions in definite relations to each other. His definition of instinct reveals this :
"We may, then, define an instinct as an inherited or innate psycho-physical disposition which determines its possessor to perceive, and to pay attention to, objects of a certain class, to experience an emotional excitement of a particular quality upon perceiving such an object, and to act in regard to it in a particular manner, or at least, to experience an impulse to such action."
Thus the instinct-emotion combination has a distinct hereditary back-ground. The structural basis is of long-standing biological history, and, therefore, not greatly affected by chance forces of the environment. The emotion is the core of the instinct and its distinguishing characteristic. The chief instincts with their emotions are as follows :
1. Instinct of flight and emotion of fear.
2. Instinct of repulsion and emotion of disgust.
3. Instinct of curiosity and emotion of wonder.
4. Instinct of pugnacity and emotion of anger.
5. Instinct of self-abasement and emotion of subjection.
6. Instinct of self-assertion and emotion of elation.
7. Parental instinct and "tender emotion."
There are also a number of "less well defined" instincts and emotions which the author includes in an additional list. The instinctive features of these are much more distinct than are the emotional characteristics which accompany them. These are : instinct of reproduction with sexual jealousy and female coyness connected therewith, the gregarious instinct, the instincts of acquisition and construction. There are also a number of "general or nonspecific innate tendencies" : sympathy, suggestion, imitation, play and temperament.
Through the process of experience the various emotions combine together into more complicated forms. It is these "complex emotions" which we meet in our daily lives. When the complex emotions have a relatively stable object about which they are organized, we have the birth of the sentiment. Complex emotions are exampled in admiration, which is a combination of wonder and negative self-feeling, and in scorn, which is a compound of disgust and anger. Hate and love are typical sentiments formed from a number of rudimentary emotions.
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On the basis of complex emotions and sentiments the self arises. Here the particular form which it takes is greatly affected by the social background. Character of consistent sort grows up by relating the instincts, and the emotions and habits developed from them, to a goal or ideal. Will plays a part here. Will is decidedly related to the field of social action. Will is largely concerned with keeping the goal which we have mentioned in the focus of attention and thus serving to direct the sentiments and complex emotions toward it. Will is, moreover, not so much a negative factor, an inhibitor of action, as a positive controller of action. This puts the problems of morals upon a definitely social psychological level and points the way to future developments of social conduct. The sentiments and habits, therefore, should be positive and directive rather than negative and prohibitory. The highest form of character is constructed around the self-regarding sentiment which directs conduct into higher channels. Since this sentiment is so dependent upon the stimulation one gets from his fellows, it reflects precisely the social environment. Thus the moral aims of society cannot rise higher than those determined by the education, direct and indirect, of the group elders who control it, whether they be the old men of an Australian Arunta tribe, the theologians of the Middle Ages, the legislative assemblies of modern democracy, or the local school board.
While McDougall's rigid schema of instincts has come in for some criticism, as we shall note subsequently, the contribution which he has made to the mechanical basis of a social psychology is important. His 1908 work he termed "An Introduction." When his next volume appeared, The Group Mind (1921), it is found to be given over to a discussion, in large part, of related problems of racial and national psychology. There is in this book little of the consistent elaboration of his theory of instincts and emotions which one might expect.
There began at the opening of the present century a series of experimental studies upon the original nature of man and his closely related species which was to go far in answering many of the important questions of innate nature which enter into social relations, education and group behavior generally. Many of the older concepts —imitation, social instincts, and the related matter of learning—were for the first time objectively studied. The two most important workers in this field were Thorndike and Watson. From their activities and such related work as McDougall's and Hobhouse's in England, Graham Wallas was to make his noteworthy contribution to political science by his books: Human Nature in Politics (1908) and The Great Society (1914). Following his lead, Carlton Parker,
( 169) W. C. Mitchell, W. F. Ogburn and others were to make use of psychology in their treatment of current problems, economic, social and political. To-day we find a use of psychology in the social sciences which had been thought impossible two decades before. Without the brilliant work of experimental psychology of an objective sort, this application of psychology would hardly have been so fruitful.
Although his contribution is by no means final, the work of Edward Lee Thorndike must be given primary consideration in this newer movement. During the first decade of the present century he began a number of significant studies upon animal and human intelligence. Among other matters he attacked the problem of the "instinct of imitation" which had been made so much of in pedagogy and in sociology. He showed rather conclusively by a number of experiments on higher animals, cats, dogs and monkeys, that the "abridgment of the learning process," to use Watson's apt phrase, does not take place by any inborn instinct of imitation. He indicated that neither doing the act in front of the untutored animal yourself nor letting the novitiate see the act performed by a trained animal helped shorten the learning process, except as it might direct attention of the learner toward the stimulus. Furthermore, with infants, he tested certain of the earlier assumptions of Preyer concerning the human tendency to imitation with negative results. The whole process called imitative is highly complex. The term, imitation, is used to describe reactions running all the way from reflex mimicry to any loose similarity in elaborate social behavior of two or more individuals. Thorn-dike, however, in 1913, was not willing to dispense entirely with the term any more than McDougall was in 1908, when the latter retained it as a "general innate tendency." Writing in his "Original Nature of Man" (Educational Psychology, Vol. I) Thorndike holds that there are certain tendencies to action aroused by the action of other persons, such as —
"smiling when smiled at, laughing when others laugh, yelling when others yell, looking at what others observe, listening when others listen, running with or after people who are running in the same direction, running from the focus whence others scatter, jabbering when others jabber and becoming silent as they become silent, crouching when others crouch, chasing, attacking and rending what others hunt, and seizing whatever object another seizes."
On the whole, however, these so-called imitative acts which are made much of in the social sciences are really —
"not original tendencies to respond to behavior seen by duplicating it in the same mechanical way that one responds to light by contracting the pupil,
( 170) but must be explained as the results of the arousal, by the behavior of other men, of either special instinctive responses or ideas and impulses which have formed, in the course of experience, connections with that sort of behavior."
Now these factors upon which social intercourse rests are the social instincts. To these Thorndike devotes considerable attention.
Socially one of the most important instincts is the motherly response in the presence of infants and children. The maternal instinct is the basis, according to Thorndike, of much of our sympathetic behavior and from it develop habits of tenderness and protection. The male aspect of this, the paternal instinct, is much weaker, but is a factor in paternal and filial relations.
There is also a distinct tendency to gregariousness, operating to form habits of response to the presence of crowds. People attend football, baseball and other games not alone to witness the prowess and skill of the players and thus to participate vicariously in the actions involved in the games, but also because of the presence of others of one's kind. So too, people congregate on the streets, at resorts, and in audiences, partially because of the instinctive responses here mentioned.
Connected with gregariousness is the tendency to pay attention to the behavior of others, to watch their facial and bodily gestures and to listen to their speech. Especially too, there are innate responses "to the presence, approval and scorn of men." Admiration of others and admiration by others are of vast consequence in group life, from the simple family circle up to more complex conditions. "These forces of approval and disapproval in appropriate form from those above and those below us in mastery-status, are and have been potent social controls."Thus connected with approval and its opposite we have the double-headed tendency to submission and mastery. "Every human being thus tends by original nature," he writes, "to arrive at a status of mastery or submission toward every other human being, and even under the more intelligent customs of civilized life some-what of the tendency persists in many men." He also believes there is a true sex difference here, for he remarks, "Women in general are thus by original nature submissive to men in general."
This whole gregarious and status-building constellation is of pre-dominant importance in social organization and social control. Connected with it are other features, innate at base, such as display, which is of significance in fashion, fads and prestige-following. Veblen has made much of the economic implications of conspicuous consumption wherein the display element enters.
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Other important social instincts are : sex tendencies, rivalry, co-operation, suggestibility, opposition, envy and jealousy, greed, owner-ship, kindliness, teasing, bullying and tormenting.
Our sex behavior is greatly overlaid with a deep coat of habit and sentiment, built up under social stimulation. Yet, it must be taken into account in considering social interrelations. Certainly it is connected with the family, that matrix of so much that is social in our living. Rivalry is peculiarly related both to sheer vigor, prowess and mastery-tendency and to acquisitiveness. Thorndike writes :
"Original emulation or rivalry is, in the first place, a group of tendencies to respond more vigorously in trying to get some one's attention upon perceiving a fellow creature's attempts to get it, in chasing some animal upon perceiving a fellow creature chasing it, in pulling toward one's self a thing when a fellow creature is pulling it toward himself, in running toward an object toward which he runs, and the like."
Failure to succeed in these efforts ends in annoyance and even in anger and pugnacious acts.
Rivalry, mastery and kindred trends fall, in short, into a general hunting type of mind which Dewey earlier had discussed in another connection. This hunting pattern [13] of mind is an extremely useful concept because it goes far in explaining the modifications of pursuit and capture, rivalry and mastery which we find in modern society, which the older "intellectualistic" position of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did not take into account. Even coöperation is related to this general pattern. It comes into prominence in hunting with others, fighting and in mastery on the larger scale of group conflict. Of course, coöperation is also related to more pacific reactions : those connected with family and.clan life, agriculture and the practical arts.
It should not be supposed that the hunting type of mind refers to the whole general make-up of mind. This thesis, defended by Carveth Read in his The Origin of Man and of His Superstitions (1921), is too one-sided. Certainly, however, Thorndike's analysis has lent support to its place in the totality of mind and action.
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Rivalry and resistance (opposition), coupled with acquisitiveness, are important in understanding innate roots of ownership and property-getting. So, too, closely allied to rivalry and the hunting trends are teasing, tormenting and bullying. Thorndike remarks :
"Teasing, tormenting and bullying are the most notable inborn exceptionsto a childish kindliness. They are due, I judge, to the competing tendencies to manipulation and curiosity, hunting, scorn and mastery. Manipulation and curiosity develop into teasing."
As he further remarks, "civilization does not so much create kindness and repress cruelty as merely redirect them."
Many instinctive features in social life are also found in reactions to physical objects and the material world. Skills, habits and attitudes overlap both fields of endeavor. For instance, curiosity and manipulation are definitely related to sexual exploration. Certainly they are related to creative art and to science. So too anger and hunting "are fundamentals of social life as well as of adaptation to the rest of nature." [14]
While Thorndike has been criticized for extending the list of original tendencies too greatly, and while it is true that many of the responses he calls innate are combinations of simpler responses made through the learning process, nevertheless the fact remains that he has made a very pertinent addition to education and the social sciences. He has offered objective data for understanding much of man's social conduct, much of his fundamental motive.
Contemporaneously with Thorndike's work on imitation and other alleged instincts, other researches were being carried on. The most valuable of this work has been summarized by John Broadus Watson in his Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (1914). His chapter which reviews the current experiments on imitation is particularly worth while for the social sciences. Watson on the basis of a number of studies goes even beyond Thorndike in denying an "instinct of imitation." What are called imitative acts are, by and large, understandable on more objective grounds : attention getting, trial and error learning, conditioned responses.
In spite of the strictures of Thorndike and Watson upon imitation, it continues to be used by some social scientists in the loose and unsatisfactory manner of Tarde and Bagehot. For instance, as late as 1917, Ellwood uses the term to describe a sociological mechanism of the spread of culture and also as a process of conscious attention to the action of an individual by another and the consequent duplica-
( 173) -tion of the act. He even uses it in the simpler sense of reflex duplication of one person's action by another.
On the whole, however, the gradual infiltration of behaviorism into psychology and thence into the social sciences has gone far to dissipate much of the mystery which surrounded the alleged instincts in social life and especially the place of so-called imitation. Particularly important in this change have been the investigations showing the dominant influence of early learning upon original nature. The most significant single principle in this learning is that of the conditioned reflex (response) introduced into this country from the work of Pavlov in Russia by Yerkes and Watson in psychology and by W. H. Burnham in education and mental hygiene.[15] The significance of this principle is just now being realized by social scientists. At last, we have a principle which assists, beyond anything we have had, in explaining social behavior without recourse to mystical terminology.
A good example of the use of this principle in dealing with social behavior is found in Humphrey's papers in which he explains imitation, sympathy and other older concepts largely in terms of conditioned reflex. The random acts of the child get organized by being associated with particular stimuli and particular responses. Often the substitution of a stimulus serves, furthermore, to set off native responses. Thus a child being hungry may cry. This is followed by feeding and rocking. The association of mother and rocking may be formed so that thereafter the presence of the mother sets up the crying, not from hunger, but from learned association of acts which follow, taking up by mother and rocking. So too, on higher levels, with the rise of imagery, one image may become associated with another. The child, for instance, may come to play the rôle of another which becomes important for the rise of his skills and attitudes. So too, running when others run, peering into objects be-cause others do, etc., may be explained by this principle. Thus many of the activities which Thornidke imagined might be classified in a general way as imitative become upon specific examination to be
( 174) really acquired by the method of conditioning. So also, sympathy, suffering with one, is the result of substitute stimuli built up early in infanthood.[16]
In order to study original nature one should have recourse to observation and experiment with infants and small children. The older literature of child study is full of reports on the child based, for the most part, upon questionnaires and crude observation. It remained for Watson to commence the most valuable research upon infants which we possess. Upon the ground of careful experimentation on a number of cases, he reports at least three fundamental and unlearned reaction patterns of emotional nature : those concerned (1) with fear responses, (2) with love and affection, and (3) with anger and rage. Among the reaction tendencies, in addition, there are a host of random and exploratory movements made by the arms, legs, fingers, hands and general body which are directed by the sensory receptors : eyes, ears and tactile senses for the most part. There are, of course, those large reflex patterns which maintain bodily nutrition and metabolism.
For social psychology the most significant thing shown by Watson's investigation is the rapidity with which these native reflexes and random movements are integrated into learned reactions. -Thus upon definite innate basis, one set of habits is constructed on another until the personality with its gamut of skills and attitudes is at hand. For example, he has shown how quickly fear is associated (conditioned) to artificial stimuli: darkness, furry objects (dogs, cats, etc.), and by implication to imaginary objects. Fear, we all recognize, has great social control value. It is the basis of taboo and the great inhibitor of action. It is easily associated with the stimuli laid down by those about us. Thus the native is taught by his group elders to fear all sorts of actions and objects, and is kept thereby in the proper frame of behavior. Likewise, anger, while originally connected with restraint of free muscular movement, becomes associated through social experience with ideas (images) of social restraint. There is here furnished a basis for understanding an individual's dislike for authority, his craving for freedom and perhaps his efforts to break down taboos which the group puts upon him. We can, in this manner, understand violence in revolution when people destroy institutional inhibitions. On a higher level there is a good deal of this same tendency witnessed in "righteous indignation" at social injustices.
( 175)
Love, too, is capable of extended elaborations and attenuations by the same method. It may spread from the wife and family to the neighborhood, to the community and to the state, where it becomes the basis of modern patriotism. It is also capable of mal-development both in the individual relations of more intimate sort and in the secondary social contacts. Thus some men never move out of the stage of love of family ; for them the community is fair game for exploitation.
From this principle of conditioning we may pass on to study the rise of social habits and attitudes, but before doing so we. must mention certain studies of animal behavior which bear on the instinct hypothesis and mention also the systematic attacks upon the adherents of the doctrine of social instincts in social psychology.
Modern study of animal life has revealed to us the place of trial and error learning and conditioning in building up many of the activities even of the lower animals which earlier writers imagined dominated completely by inborn factors. Whitman and Craig, studying pigeons, indicated the place that environment and learning play in the sex behavior of these birds. Swindle showed that the nesting of birds is not the infallible series of actions so often imagined, but full of errors, mistakes and random, wasteful learning. Even the alleged instinctive perfection of insects is open to question when observers report the enormous inefficiency of their actions under certain circumstances. Certainly for man, it has become increasingly evident, from experimental grounds, that not only was imitation an inadequate principle upon which to interpret his social relations, but also that social psychology cannot rest its case alone upon a congeries of social instincts, but must go on to study habits and their integrations.
The instinct theory developed by McDougall and his followers came in for particular criticism since the schema was a logical rather than an experimental arrangement. One of the first attacks upon the dominance of this plan, which had so impressed many writers on social questions, was from Knight Dunlap whose paper, "Are There Any Instincts?" (1919) raised the whole issue of using such a classification as McDougall's whatsoever. While the list might be useful for certain special purposes, it could hardly be said to have experimental validity. For the science of psychology, he concluded that "there are no instincts." Then followed a paper by Kantor in 1920 in which he criticized the whole McDougall position for its crude metaphysical implications. Moreover, he objected to the logical inter-relation of instincts and emotions in view of experimental and obser-
( 176) -vational facts to the contrary. In this year also, Hunter published an important paper, which still maintained a thesis for original instinctive tendencies, but showed very well the place of early learning in modifying the form and content of instinctive reactions when they did appear. Especially was this noteworthy in the sex and social instincts which come to fruition in adolescence.
In the next year there were a number of papers led off by L. L. Bernard on "The Misuse of Instinct in the Social Sciences'' and followed by Kuo's paper, "Giving Up the Instincts in Psychology" and by Faris's succinct discussion, "Are Instincts Data or Hypotheses?"T here were other papers some in defense, some in attack upon the doctrine of instincts. The majority of these articles, while not denying the very great place that innate tendencies play in man, held that the whole logical arrangement of instincts as if they were absolutes, given once and for all time, and as if they combined in purely additive fashion into sentiments and complexities, was fallacious and misleading. Careful study was showing that man was made up of extremely complicated trends, attitudes and habits. No simple formula of instincts would unravel his personality. The whole schema was, in short, artificial and unverifiable.[17] A more extended attack upon the whole matter of instincts in social psychology and the social sciences was made by Josey in his The Social Philosophy of Instinct (1922). This book is a denial of any importance whatsoever to the concept and is by far the most radical departure from the standpoint of the present psychological attitude, which, however it might criticize the logical listing of instincts à la McDougall, would not deny the importance of the inborn equipment.
McDougall has recently made an answer to his critics [18] The essentials of his early treatment of instinct was the connection of specific motor mechanism with a drive or "hormic" urge behind it. At present he seems to be willing to give up the motor mechanism phase as crucial. The drive may take place through any mechanism, innate or acquired. He does rest his case solidly on the ground of
( 177) drives, urges or appetites, which express this deep dynamic phase of all living. In the course of our race history some of these drives have developed tendencies in certain directions : the so-called instincts. To deny this hereditary basis to our living would be to go back to the tabula rasa mind of Locke and to deny the forward stride we have made in the comprehension of man's social living since psychology has shown us the place of man's inherited nature.
A phase of this entire problem of inheritance in mental life and behavior has been touched on by Robert Sessions Woodworth in his Dynamic Psychology (1918). Here he has tried to keep distinct the problem of the mechanism, which may be both innate and acquired, and the "drive"which* is that which "induces us to do"a certain thing. That is to say, the "drive" is concerned with the "why" of human behavior, for as Woodworth remarks, "Certainly the motives and springs of action of human life are of so much importance as to justify special attention to them." The drive for Woodworth, how-ever, is not some vitalistic principle, but is itself a mechanism or set of mechanisms which releases or leads to a mechanism involved in the final action of a particular pattern. Thus the preparatory reactions leading to the final food-taking act are drives; so, too, habitual reactions which are pertinent to some consummatory action serve as drives and predetermine, through the changes wrought in the neuromuscular system, the direction of present stimuli toward the final response. There is no place where these "drives" or motives are more important than in social life. In his chapter, "Drive and Mechanism in Social Behavior" Woodworth has given us an excellent summary of present-day social psychology with especial reference to the theory of imitation and the doctrine of instincts of the McDougall sort. His principal criticism of the latter's works is its general logical arrangement and secondly its lack of completeness. To Wood-worth one of the most important social motives is that which makes for congeniality and intimate relations of a face-to-face sort, to apply Cooley's term. This "social motive," in fact, is basic to the higher aspects of social behavior, yet it is not the only foundation of social life. The following paragraph summarizes his standpoint very adequately :
"Many drives combine to produce social activity. The fear motive drives men together in times of insecurity; the pugnacity motive bands them together for group combat; the economic motive brings industrial coöperation and organization; the self-assertive and submissive tendencies bring emulation as well as obedience; the expansion of the self to cover one's family, one's clique, one's class, one's country contributes to loyalty; while the
( 178) parental instinct, expanding its scope to cover others besides children who are helpless, leads to self-sacrifice and altruism. But besides all these there is the social motive proper, the tendency toward group activity, which is not only found by experience to be beneficial, but, what is more important psychologically, is interesting in itself to creatures that have a native capacity for that sort of action."
Woodworth's concepts and analysis have recently had a powerful influence on F. H. Giddings, who has in part reconstructed his psychology of society along this line in his concept of pluralistic behavior. See his Studies in the History and Theory of Human Society (1923).
This tendency to group activity for its own sake, in other words the gregariousness of mankind, has been again brought to prominence by Wilfred Trotter in his Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916, new and expanded edition, 1915). This book, while it adds nothing to the objective understanding of social relations, and while, in reality, it is phrased in loose and outworn terminology, is very valuable in its concrete treatment of this instinctive trend in man. Its appearance during the recent World War was timely, as this period was one of immense coöperation and gregariousness as well as of conflict.
We should not dismiss the field of instinct theorists without mentioning Sigmund Freud. His work touches on that of the drive phase of instincts and also upon the problems in the two following sections. It is sufficient to indicate at this point that although American psychologists and social scientists recognize the narrowness of the original view of Freud which would reduce all motives to one connected with sex, they have, on the other hand, come to take cognizance -of his contribution. to the understanding of human motives. Thus Parker's crucial paper, "Motives in Economic Life," delivered be-fore the American Economic Association in 1915, based its contention upon the work of behavioristic psychology abetted by Freud's thesis. In this discussion Parker attempted to chart unknown seas of human conduct. The "balked disposition" or instinct became the key for Parker and after him, Tead and others, to the maladjustment of the transient laborer, to the understanding of many of the problems of the I. W. W. and other unadjusted laborers. Certainly this use of modern psychology was epoch-making, for most economists, even those of the so-called psychological school, then as now knew very little of modern psychology and its contribution to the study of man in his economic environment.
The psychiatrist, Southard, has shown the place that repression, fear and inferiority-complexes play in the radical labor movement,
( 179) His phrase "psychiatry in industry" caught the notion of many social workers and his influence on psychiatric social work is distinctive.[19]
Many American psychiatrists who had come to accept some of the fundamental theories of Freud still felt that his viewpoint was too narrow. This view is evident in a symposium which Glueck, Brown, Campbell, and McCurdy delivered at the "American Psycho-pathological Association"in 1921. [20] This set of papers points the way to a much broader basis for considering the instinctive drive theories from the psychoanalytic viewpoint. There is here an honest attempt to link up the herd instinct notion of Trotter and the self-assertive (ego) notion of McDougall with the sex instinct of Freud. This general thesis has been expanded by one of the writers, J. T. MacCurdy, in his Problems in Dynamic Psychology (1923). This volume, although written for psychopathologists, has much valuable material for the psychologist and social scientist. Conflict between the individual and society (group standards), which is a pertinent problem in social control, is explained by the contrasted trends : those of sex and ego in competition with the herd instinct, that is, with that tendency which makes for conformity to moral standards. So too, other conflicts may be explained, such as in family and sex relationships, in terms of herd, sex and ego trends. While the psychiatrists are open to criticism for the loose use of subjective terms, their general thesis is important for the social psychologist and no system which does not take their work into account can hope to hold its place among the social sciences.
To summarize briefly the whole contribution of instinct theory to our subject, we may say that it marks the first attempt to get away from the vagaries of "group mind" and "collective psychology." Even the loose use of imitation by the earlier writers Tarde, Bagehot, and Baldwin had the virtue of talking in relatively objective concepts. The contributions of McDougall, Thorndike and Watson are of great importance. Their work put the whole matter of the inherited versus the acquired into the field of scientific psychology. Even McDougall's logical arrangement had much in fact to support it. That is to say, concrete analysis of behavior revealed many of these trends at work. Above all else, the theory of instincts offered social
( 180) psychology and through it the social sciences dynamic principles with which to interpret man's social living. The older rationalistic interpretation of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had broken down. As Wallas remarks in his opening chapter to Human Nature and Politics the older standpoint was apt to assume "that every human action is the result of an intellectual process, by which a man first thinks of some end which he desires, and then calculates the means by which that end can be attained." This thesis must be given up in view of the whole dynamic, instinctive basis of human nature. Only by taking into account man's fears, his sociability, his tendency to follow the lead of others, or to take the lead in affairs can we understand his life. So too, his anger, his rivalry, his acquisitiveness must be brought into the picture of his world. Likewise play, manipulation, sexual trends, exploration have a large place in his intimate social life and on up to his creative activities in art and science.
Nevertheless, the extremist in the school of instinct theorists is likely to ignore the very important modifications and combinations of trends which go on in the development of life. Thus the conditioned reflex, the trial and error learning, the play of imagination in man's personality and habits must be considered. Motives are not born with us, out of whole cloth, as it were, but are the resultant of a merging together of the innate and the elaborations of learning. The next step in social psychology developed out of an approach which, not ignoring the place of instinctive trends, was to lay its emphasis upon the modifications and acquirements of the organism as it grew to maturity. We come thus to the second standpoint under the rubric of an approach to social psychology from the angle of the individual.
3. THE DOCTRINE OF SOCIAL ATTITUDES AND SOCIAL HABITS
While James gave important place to the instincts as cores of human behavior, he also found habits scarcely less significant. The latter are outgrowths of the former and represent the second stage in the rise of the self. We have already reviewed his general contribution to the whole field of social psychology. It suffices at this point to quote from him one paragraph which stands out as indicating his clear perception of the tremendous part that habit plays in our social life :
"Habit is . . . the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.. . . It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. . . It dooms us
(181) all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveler, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counselor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the `shop,' in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best that he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again." [21]
Dewey's influence upon social psychology in this country has been much more direct than that of James. Following the same functional, pragmatic approach to psychology, Dewey gathered around him during the nineties at the University of Chicago a group of men as instructors and students who were to impress this standpoint upon education, sociology, ethics and the whole gamut of social sciences. Among these men are J. R. Angell, Mead, Thomas, Tufts, and following in Angell's wake, Watson. Angell's viewpoint, expressed in his Psychology (1904) was an aggressive functionalism, the key-note of which is found in this sentence from his preface : "It is mental activity, rather than mental structure, which has immediate significance for thought and conduct. "This dynamic viewpoint became basic to social psychologists and sociologists of the "Chicago School."
The most direct contribution to the social psychology which bases its approach on attitude and habit was the paper of William Isaac Thomas at the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences in 1904 on "The Province of Social Psychology." [22] Thomas was certain that a social psychology could not be written which ignored the relation of the group and the individual. Both these factors must be taken into account ; one cannot be understood apart from the other. For him social psychology was considered to be a study of "the individual mental processes in so far as they are conditioned by society, and the social processes in so far as they are conditioned by society, and the social processes in so far as they are conditioned by states of consciousness. The province of social psychology is the examination of the interaction of individual consciousness and society, and the effect of the interaction on individual consciousness on the one hand and on society on the other."
( 182)
For Thomas, the most important concepts of functional psychology of use for social psychology are : attention, habit, sympathy, suggestion, attitudes, and emotion. He adds a valuable idea in his word "crisis," which he conceives of as those alterations in the environment and in the individual which demand adjustment. Many of these crises are social, that is, imply the existence of entire groups. Such are pestilence, famine, flood, defeat in battle, or still other crises involving smaller groups, like puberty, marriage, births, etc. So too, any behavior on the part of one's self or others which destroys confidence and property (that is, antisocial acts) calls for attention and consequent rules of action. Therefore out of crises develop methods of handling problems of conduct : habits and modes of attention and attitude (social custom and taboos) often with emotional sets attaching. Further certain vocations are set off through crises ; specialization begins, and classes and castes grow up. For social psychology the study of crises in reference to the individual is quite as legitimate as it is for sociology or history.
Thomas touched upon the matter of leadership in social life. The cultural growth of any nation is due, in part, to the rôle played by the outstanding persons of any time or place. Thus social psychology must take into account the entire theory of individual differences in reference to social change and social progression. The problem of race differences is likewise related to our field. Thomas throws out the interesting suggestion that perhaps the most marked differences among races is rather that of temperament than of sheer intellectual capacity. Here too, one raises the issue of the subtle interplay of cultural background and the thinking capacity of any race or class. This problem touches social psychology because this problem is, in large measure, the crux of the whole matter of the relation of nurture to nature.
In Thomas's Source Book of Social Origins (1909) we have a further contribution to social psychology. Through the medium of discussional summaries and introductions the author put forward his thesis of coupling up the materials of anthropology with the social sciences by means of what is essentially his social psychology. Attention, habit, crises, great leaders, state of culture—these become the important concepts for defining the growth of social control. Thus too, for the matter of racial or group differences, he makes it clear that no comparisons may be made until we take into account (1) the presence of men of exceptional ability in the group; (2) the level of culture of the group ; and (3) the character of the ideas, habits and run of attention of the members of the group.
( 183)
The next step in Thomas's own thinking came when he took a cue from Freud's notion of the wish and expanded it to cover the motives of social behavior as he observed it among immigrant groups, among negroes, and in social life of urban and rural centers where his rich experience had led him. Coupled with this theory of wishes was his doctrine of social attitudes. The wishes form the conscious or habitual (nonconscious) motives to conduct, the attitudes are concrete reaction tendencies, mental sets, sentiments organized around specific situations in the environment. Through the attitudes and behavior, the wishes come to light in concrete manner. The first published note on his scheme of attitudes and wishes was in paper, "The Persistence of Primary-Group Norms in Present-day Society" in 1917.[28] He has subsequently modified his arrangement slightly, but the following four fundamental wishes are conceived as convenient categories of motives: (1)The wish for security and safety, which is basic to property rights, conservatism, stable government and maintenance of the status quo. (2) The wish or desire for new experience, for novelty, which is basic to adventure, exploration, scientific and artistic creation. (3) The desire or wish for power or recognition of one's self by others, which is basic in prestige-seeking and in the whole attempt to secure superior status as mentioned by James, Thorndike, McDougall and other writers. (4) The desire for response, that is, the wish for companionship, for intimate face-to-face response from others, which is basic to the love life and to the solidarity of small congenial groups. The classification is purely tentative, but has grown out of an effort to organize a great deal of material bearing on social habits and attitudes.
The attitudes which express these wishes concretely are related to the objects and situations in the environment which possess value for the individual. That is to say, emotional, sentimental imagery and attitude are projected into these situations or persons and the attitude cannot be understood without taking into account the factor of value. Thus Thomas maintains that social psychology must take into consideration both the social attitude and the valuational feature of the situation or object toward which the attitude is directed. [24]
While the work of Freud has gained many adherents in this country
( 184) and has thereby brought to the social scientists many new concepts, the fact remains that the conventional academic psychologists have very little sympathy for psychoanalysis as a scientific methodology. For them the concepts, unconscious, libido, regression, infantilism, autoeroticism, etc., are too subjective and vague to be of real merit in psychological analysis. Not all psychologists, however, feel this way, and E. B. Holt in his The Freudian Wish (1915) has tried to make a nexus between the concepts of psychoanalysis and those of behavioristic psychology. He abandoned the terminology of Freud in large part, but did take hold of the dynamic notion of the wish and attempted to show how it could furnish an interpretative principle for modern psychology. Space prohibits more than passing mention of his work here, but Holt indicated that the wish may be thought of in purely objective terms as "a course of action which some mechanism of the body is set to carry out, whether it actually does so or does not." It is dependent upon "motor attitude." The wish may thus be connected with any specific response system and is not connected with one only, as the echt Freudians would have it. While Holt's own interest was in relating the idea to the problem of ethics, the whole theory which he has laid down connects with Thomas's use of the terms wish and attitude. In fact, Park and Burgess in their Introduction to the Study of Sociology (1921) have combined the discussion of Thomas with that of Holt very successfully. Holt, in his book, also threw light on the problem of integration of wishes and attitudes, to which we shall refer subsequently.
Dewey's paper "The Need for Social Psychology" before the American Psychological Association in 1916 was a frank effort to indicate to the psychological guild in this country their continued avoidance of one of their most fundamental and most fruitful fields. [25] He shows in his opening paragraphs the failure of the older social psychologists to attain working principles because of the unnatural separation between individual psychology and its social phases. The workers in the experimental and systematic fields of psychology are equally at fault.
He remarks that for social psychology the two most important developments of recent years are the application of statistical method to group phenomena and the rise of behavioristic psychology. The former gives a method of testing social trends and making correlations of data which are not amenable to the experimental methods of
( 185) the stricter sciences. The latter, by its emphasis upon objectivity, upon the study of stimulus and response, especially its reference to instincts, emotions, habit-formations and integrations is far more pertinent for social psychology than the older emphasis upon the study of elements of consciousness as such. The learning process, which is conditioned first by the innate structure of the organism and secondly by the environmental stimuli, is the key to the building up of social habits, attitudes and modes of action. This process is basic to our institutional life and to our complex civilization. The newer approach, in short, does away with the concepts, also, of any collective psychology and any super-individual group mind :
"It transfers attention from vague generalities regarding social consciousness and social mind to the specific processes of interaction which take place among human beings, and to the details of group-behaviour. It emphasizes the importance of knowledge of the primary activities of human nature, and of the modifications and reorganizations they undergo in association with the activities of others. It radically simplifies the whole problem by making it clear that social institutions and arrangements, including the whole apparatus of tradition and transmission, represent simply the acquired transformations of original human endowments."
Unfortunately what these original endowments are Dewey does not say. While he rests his schema upon original impulses, his greatest stress is put upon the learning capacity. For social behavior the modifications which go under the mediation of other persons is obviously the most significant. In short, he holds that :
"Anything which may properly be called mind or intelligence is not an original possession, but is a consequence of the manifestation of instincts under the conditions supplied by associated life in the family, the school, the market-place and the forum." .. .
Dewey's whole thesis is that environment is the great conditioner of mind, that this conditioning occurs only under social stimulation, and that the core of social control is the development of methods of investigating human behavior in groups with an eye to control through predetermining the environment. "The kind of mind," he writes, "they (the instincts) become depends upon the kind of objects of attention and affection which the specific social conditions supply." Thus social psychology passes directly over into the heart of every social problem and leads thence directly to a social ethics.
The future of social psychology depends, therefore, upon the estab-
( 186) -lishment of the experimental method in the social sciences as well as in the study of human behavior. When we learn to observe, correlate and deduce laws of social phenomena, we shall be able to construct a consciously controlled society.
The latter implication of his paper of 1916 was expanded in his West Memorial Lectures, Human Nature and Conduct, delivered at Stanford University in 1918 (published 1922). This book is an elaboration of the social psychology of habit and attitude into social ethics. The three aspects of mind which come into social conduct are impulses, habits, and intelligence. The first are original and untamed. For man while the impulse is primary in fact, in conduct it is secondary to habit, which is more stable, since it is organized out of rather chaotic impulses into specific form revolving around specific situations. Now habit is modified under crisis and it is just here that intelligence or deliberation comes into play. Thus, for Dewey, to social habit and social attitude, there must be added man's capacity for remaking his social conduct by intelligence. This seems to come about more by the changes wrought in the environment, thus directing the formation and reformation of habits and attitudes, rather than by suppressing and crushing out by the sheer weight of will the original and habitual impulses. Social psychology must lend itself to the study of how this sort of change has been brought about and how it may in the future be accomplished. The place of the intellect comes quite as much into the field of social psychology as the place of habits and attitudes.
By far the most ambitious attempt of recent years to apply the social psychology of attitudes, habits and dispositions to the concrete matters of the various social sciences is the work of J. M. Williams. Two volumes, The Foundations of Social Science (1920) and The Principles of Social Psychology (1922), have already been published. Four other volumes are scheduled to appear. This writer purposes to set forth a complete system of social psychology as it touches political science, economics, history, sociology, literature, art and morals.
According to Williams, "Social psychology deals with the motives of the individuals who participate in these institutional (social) relations."Upon inspection these motives are found to be complexes of instincts and habits called dispositions. The most important dispositions for social psychology are the rivalrous, aggressive and dominating; the acquisitive and the egotistic; the sexual, sympathetic, altruistic and intellectual. The last three are particularly important, since a more wholesome social order will arise when these come into
( 187) the ascendency. The dispositions, as he well states, are "apt not to be so clearly conscious as the ways of acting that have developed for their satisfaction." The disposition, moreover, at base is determined by hedonistic selection : avoidance of pain and the persistence of satisfying reactions. The fundamentals of social living are found in the terms "conflict" and coöperation," two concepts which remind us much of Patten's thesis.[28]
The motives which form the essentials of Williams's system are either conscious, subconscious, or entirely unconscious. By subconscious he means that one is partially aware of one's motives. By unconscious he means that the roots of the motive are lost to the individual, lying apparently in the field of instinct or very early conditioning. He does not seem to make any extensive use of a theory of the unconscious mind in the Freudian sense.
In the two volumes already at hand, Williams has dealt with social psychological phases of jurisprudence, economic motives, and political systems. He has presented an excellent account of the conflict in the spheres of economic relations, political relations, and in the professional, artistic and educational fields. He has also traced the influence of modern industrialism upon the breakdown of the family and upon the production of conflict in the individual. He has drawn somewhat upon the psychoanalytic school for material on suppressed impulses and his whole thesis of habits and dispositions leads at once to a theory of personality. He has, in fact, promised us a volume which will expand his thesis of dispositions to take into account the problems of social personality.
While this writer has added little perhaps to the systematic, theoretical side of social psychology, he has demonstrated once and for. all, on a large scale, the applicability of social psychology to the problems of the special social sciences. Using the work of Thorn-dike, Watson, McDougall and others he has made an attack upon the concrete social problems. He belongs to the group discussed in this section because of his consistent insistence that a mere schema of instincts will not serve the purposes of social psychology.. For him these forces must be understood rather through the medium of habits and dispositions.
Before passing on to the next section we must note' that Dunlap has continued his attack upon the futility and incompleteness of basing social psychology upon a classification of instincts by positing a number of desires or wishes which he believes lie at the basis of all
( 188) behavior. These wishes furnish him a set of dynamic principles. They are :
"The alimentary desire, execretory desire, desire for rest, desire for activity, desire for shelter, amatory desire, parental desire, desire for pre-eminence, and desire for conformity.[27]
It is an interesting coincidence that Dunlap, approaching social psychology from the angle of the systematist, should have seen the significance of the theory of wishes in much the same light as Thomas, whose angle of approach is so different. "Preeminence" is another way of stating wish for power or prestige; "conformity" is akin to security and safety; desire for love and parental desires are closely related to the desire for intimate response; and certainly Thomas's wish for new adventure has much in common with the desire for activity. For Dunlap too, the affective-emotional processes are closely bound up with the desires. Thomas's notion of hedonistic selection is likewise related to the field of feeling and emotion. This recognition of desire by a systematic psychologist is another evidence of the coming rapprochement of modern dynamic psychology with the older experimental and systematic accounts.
While the present writer is sympathetic with the theory of wishes as developed by Thomas, Holt and Dunlap, there is no doubt that the term "wish"or "desire" connotes a too high degree of awareness on the part of the individual in question to cover the meaning implied. The word, as here used, refers to a habitual reaction pattern which is constructed on the basis of innate reflex patterns. Unless carefully understood in the sense in which Holt defines it, the term "wish" may better be avoided and some such phrase as "fundamental trend" or "fundamental action-pattern"be employed.
Recently R. H. Gault has given us a treatise, Social Psychology (1922), which denies the efficacy of instincts of the McDougall sort and frankly bases his social psychology upon habit-complexes and social attitudes (that is, attitudes in the individual which have social reference or projection). So too, A. D. Weeks, in his The Control of the Social Mind (1923), while resorting to some use of the social mindconcept, has really framed his definition of the latter in terms of social habits and attitudes. His book follows the general thesis of Dewey in its concrete treatment of political and social ethics.
More recently still, Bogardus has presented his conception of social psychology in his book Fundamentals of Social Psychology (1924).
( 189) His principal emphasis is upon social attitudes and the spread of these through social interstimulation. He writes of the province of the field :
"It (social psychology) treats of the processes of intersocial stimulation and their products in the form of social attitudes and values. It obtains its data by analyzing personal experiences."
Bogardus has drawn heavily upon the standpoint and approach of Thomas. His terminology is at times somewhat loose, as for example, his continued employment of the word "imitation" in a very broad and vague way. The book is principally valuable for the nexus it makes between the sociological data and social psychology, and for its pedagogical utility.
In the present and previous sections we have traced the treatment of social psychology from the angle of the individual. We reviewed the attempt to base the field upon the unfolding of the social instincts : first upon imitation, then, upon the rigid classification of McDougall, and latterly, in more empirical terms by Thorndike and Watson. Thereafter we saw that Dewey, Thomas and others, feeling that the schema of instincts and emotions was not sufficient, went on to indicate the place of learning in building up habits and attitudes. These latter revolve around persons and situations in the environment and any theory of social psychology which ignores the interplay of individual and environment is futile.
Even among these latter writers, however, there has been a growing tendency to expand the theory of social attitudes and habits into the study of the social personality. Already Williams and Thomas have caught the trend and Holt's theory of the wish leads directly into a theory of personality integrated toward the varying phases of the environment. Thus we must turn now to examine the next step in social psychology, that which attacks the problems from the angle of personality.
4. PERSONALITY AND SOCIETY : PARTS OF AN ORGANIC WHOLE
Just as James's classic chapter on the self was the fruitful root of much in the doctrine of instincts and in the doctrine of habit, so too, in the approach to social psychology through the study of the personality, his chapter becomes fundamental even if his treatment is only sketchily put forth. The "Social Self," with which he dealt, leads directly to a study of personality as an outgrowth of the play of instincts and habits against the environment, an environment
( 190) largely of other persons. We shall not repeat our review of James. It is only necessary to bear in mind his insistence that the self is the unitary, organized core of all habits and attitudes. Its integration and its interrelation with society is the key to social psychology.
We owe much to the work of James Mark Baldwin during the nine-ties and during the first decade after 1900 in indicating some of the intimate relations of society to the rise of the self. To him the individual and the group are part and parcel of a greater whole. The alleged dichotomy of the person and society is not found in reality. He writes in his The Individual and Society (1911) :
"Society and the individual are not two entities, two forces acting separately, two enemies making forced and grudging concessions to each other. On the contrary, they are the two sides of a growing organic whole, in which the welfare and advance of the one minister to the welfare and progress of the other."
Upon a theory of imitation, suggestion and habit (accommodation) Baldwin traces the development of the individual. The matrix of this development is the "give and take between the individual and his fellows," the "dialectic of personal growth" as he called it. Growing out of a preliminary basis which is largely one of reflexes and on a purely pain-pleasure level, there are four stages to this development of the self. (1)The objective stage wherein, through the processes of perception, memory, imitation, defensive action and instinct, other persons, as well as material objects, are reacted to as impersonal things. (2) The projective stage, wherein the child gradually begins to note relationships between persons, projected out from himself. He comes to distinguish between inanimate objects and persons. The latter are arbitrary, active, capable of giving or denying, which makes for a growing "sense of uncertainty" in dealing with them. In short, their behavior is unpredictable. (3)Under suggestion and the more complicated forms of imitation, circular-response or self-imitation begins. It is based upon imagery of the child's own actions in reference to others, and imagery of their actions in regard to himself. This is called the subjective phase. It is here that the child becomes aware of himself, and this awareness is in great measure determined by the images he has caught up from the conduct of others toward himself. In brief, his own personality is a reflection of those about him quite as much as it is any distinctive growth from within. (4) The last development is that in which the individual, through more extensive imagery and thinking, comes to recognize that other persons have experiences similar to his own,
( 191) "that is, other people's bodies," says the child to himself, "have experiences in them such as mine has." [28] This stage Baldwin called the ejective. It is here that the moral, ethical self is born. Through the enlargement of the last stage, human sympathy, cooperation and rational social conduct are made possible.
While Baldwin's whole system implies a too logical and rational unfolding of the self under the social stimulation, and while his use of imitation is far too broad for the facts, his early work was fundamental to the development of social psychology. His influence on Cooley and Mead is particularly to be noted. While Baldwin does not devote himself extensively to the sociological implications of his thesis, he does give some attention to the matter in his numerous writings. Barnes has summarized his contribution here as follows :
"The natural and pedagogical institutions of society reduce to a large degree the extreme egoistic and individualistic tendencies, advance socialization and prepare mankind for coöperative endeavor. Yet some form of external constraint is necessary for the most effective group cooperation and to curb the disintegrative tendencies of imperfectly socialized individuals. Government constitutes the only agency adequate to insure the most complete degree of collective activity through cooperative endeavor. Yet political constraint is but the means to an end, and administration of collective interests rather than constraint is the chief function of government. Government is not created by a contract; it is an agreement which implies social self-consciousness and the recognition of the necessity of an adequate institution for furthering and perfecting group coöperation.
"The significance of Baldwin's work for social and political theory is that he severely challenges the conventional doctrine that social and political institutions are erected at the expense of individuality and that the problem in the situation is to discover a compromise between two distinct sets of interests. . . . Further, he offers a mechanism, however imperfect, for explaining the reciprocal development of the individual personality and social and political institutions." [29]
From the sociological side Charles Horton Cooley of Michigan has made the most important addition to the theory of personality in relation to society. His major contributions appear in three books, the titles of which indicate in a manner their content : Human Nature and the Social Order (1902) ; Social Organization, a Study of the Larger Mind (1909) ; and Social Process (1918). Cooley owes his
( 192) standpoint to several sources. From Baldwin he may have caught the implication of the dialogue between the growing self and other selves ; from James, no doubt, he got many clews as to the social de-termination of attitudes. It must not be imagined, however, that Cooley is lacking in originality. He brought to the subject a wealth of observation, reading and thought which makes his own contribution unsurpassed. His first book, written over twenty years ago, still contains one of the most suggestive analyses of human nature yet available. No one ever so clearly saw or more clearly expressed the subtle interplay between the social environment and the social self.
In truth, the chief thesis of this writer is the inseparable connection between the individual and society. This view, implicit at best in Baldwin's concrete treatment, becomes clearly explicit and fundamental to the whole of Cooley's work. The person and society are parts of a total on-going process. The two are complementary in the most intimate sense. The child's idea of himself is the reflection of others about him. Even intelligence is largely socially conditioned. While not denying the thesis of individual differences in capacity, he remarks, "There is nothing exclusively individual about intelligence. . . . The growth of intelligence and the growth of a differentiated social system are inseparable." The mistake of traditional psychology is to segregate the individual from his social and material environment and to study him as an isolated atom. The mistake of the social sciences, on the contrary, is to give complete attention to institutions and social mechanisms without taking into account the complexities of personalities involved in social life. Cooley's treatment avoids most of this unnatural separation. He begins his presentation with a genetic description of the rise of human nature, which is to him decidedly "social" in aspect. His observation of children, coupled with his penetrating interpretation, makes his picture of the rise of self-consciousness far more valuable than much of the material collected by more formal questionnaire method on the minds of children a generation ago.
The psychological roots of personality are for him, first of all, a sort of instinctive self-feeling or ego-tendency, then the suggestibility and sympathetic trends. Especially important are the tendencies to play, to emulate others and to communicate. While he recognizes original inventiveness, he believes social stimulation of others plays a prominent place in this. Above all else the child in his early learning is under the domination of the family, the playground group and the neighborhood elders. These primary face-to-face groups are the matrix of all of one's attitudes and social habits, the breeding ground
( 193) of ideas of honor, honesty, virtue,— in truth, the whole gamut of moral reactions and standpoints. Likewise the primary group forms the background on which one's skills and later vocational or professional choices depend.
_ The second volume of Cooley's series is largely concerned with tracing the influence of social organizations upon personality. He incisively points out the tremendous changes which impend for human nature, due to the modern industrial age with its specialization of labor, its urbanization of population, its rapid communication and its class conflicts : that is, the great alteration in the lives of peoples due to the breakdown of the primary face-to-face groups, those natural sources of personality.
The third volume is largely a defense of the theory of considering the individual and society as an organic whole.
In brief, Cooley's contribution to social psychology is threefold : First, he well describes the effect of the social group upon the rise of personality, in other words he shows that one lives largely in the frames of behavior laid down by those about him. Second, he ex-plains the interplay of social organization upon the personality and vice versa. Third, he makes an eloquent defense of a theory of personality and society as an organic entity which will operate best under the aegis of democracy. Changes in personality take place, pari passu, with alterations in the social environment. One cannot advance without the other. Culture and progress thus are dependent upon the neat balance of these two forces operating in harmony.
George H. Mead of Chicago has made a number of important contributions to the theoretical side of social psychology. For our purposes here, we can only mention briefly some concrete ideas of his which throw light on the mechanisms of self-consciousness and of behavior under social stimulation.
From the notion of circular-response developed by Baldwin he has gone on to indicate more objectively just how the whole mechanism of self-stimulation and other-stimulation is really alike. His most important principle may be illustrated thus :
The child or person tends by virtue of complex organization of neuro-muscular arcs to respond to his own response as well as to the response which the other person offers him. This backwash of kinæsthesis is extremely important in the rise of self-awareness. The whole field of gesture illustrates this well, either gesture of face, arm, general torso, or vocal gesture (language). Suppose two boys are boxing. The one (A) leads to the face of the other (B) with a left hook. B responds to this by withdrawing, throwing up his guard or
( 194) otherwise. Now not only does B respond outwardly to the oncoming movement of A, but he reacts himself to his own movement of throwing up a guard, etc. In fact, it is only by so reacting to his own response that he is able to alter the course of his action in reference to A. On more complicated levels, imagery comes to serve in place of direct motor response. Language is all-important here of course. We talk to ourselves as others would and respond or tend to respond to our own speech. Suppose, in another example, that A sees an acquaintance, B, who is a person of superior social status and whom he knows only slightly. He wishes to greet this man with a handshake, but hesitates between the imagery (verbal or other) of being rebuffed, and the imagery of being smiled upon. He determines upon the first reaction and this tendency (really a reaction) brings a suffusion of emotional-affective toning that is pleasant. That is, A is responding here to his own imagery even before his complete response of greeting B is in operation. Imagine, further, that B does not take the proffered hand, but turns aside to "snub" A. The other process of avoidance and unpleasant toning comes in to inhibit the incipient response of A (which was pleasant) and A's whole attitude and imagery are changed to the opposite sort. If sensitive, A may now respond to himself as inferior and deficient, or he may develop an intense dislike of B.
By this same mechanism the child comes to have toward himself much the attitude which the superior person, mother, father, or nurse, or later the gang-leader, has toward him. So, too, through the medium of imagery and language the child comes to talk to himself, playing the rôle of others in ever-changing mood.
While language is important in this process of self-stimulation, the meaning is after all dependent upon the original reactions which the wards signify. Thus the labor representative and the employer in dispute will understand each other much better if each has had some-what identical experiences : as laborer and as employer. If they have had no common experience, their words do not bring appropriate images and appropriate common responses to their own words, in themselves, and thus they cannot agree and may fall into conflict wherein employers and laborers both understand the gestures (of fighting) since these are much more primitive patterns.
The determinative thing for social control is that the attitudes toward the self and toward others be largely alike. Then the language or other gesture may set off responses in other persons common to your own. This gives us a clew to the great place that the cult
( 195) and the common ritual have in social organization. It gives us literally a universe of discourse in the group. The primary group fulfills this function. To-day when the primary group is disappearing we see why it is essential to give the entire citizenry in a democracy the same type of education in attitudes and conduct, why the laboratory method has become so necessary as a common training ground, since specialization so quickly segregates out our activities and hence enhances the possibilities of our misunderstanding each other.
Mead's analysis is particularly valuable. He has given us a clew to the meaning of the circular-response. He has shown us the play of language and attitude in developing the personality : both in the interaction of person on person and in the dramatic imagery of playing the rôle of others. He has, in fact, given us in objective terms - the mechanism by which personality grows up.[30]
Moreover, on theoretical grounds, Mead has insisted that the whole problem of knowledge is not to be divorced from the study of the interstimulation of selves. Thought in its essence is socially deter-mined. Under the stimulus of Professor Dewey, Balz, in his The Basis of Social Theory (1924), has treated this whole thesis at length. Balz maintains that the older dichotomy of "individual" and "social" features of psychology must be given up and that "the data of psychology in its basic form (and the basic form of psychology is social psychology) are social facts." And a "social fact" he de-fines, "as any fact that could not come to be at all, save within a group or congregate form of life.[31] That is to say, all those features of mental life, language, thought, etc., which we look upon as essential to human nature are fundamentally part and parcel of social "living-togetherness." Without group life there would be no human nature, no nature which we study under the rubric "psychology." Cooley has long insisted on this same fact, although he has not given the notion the epistemological form as has Balz.
Miss Calkins has recently indicated that a self-psychology may consistently throw much light upon social psychology. For her, psychology is concerned with studying "the totally integrated individual
( 196) in the attitudes with which it confronts its environment." [32] While Miss Calkins has affected the main current of social psychology but slightly, we are indebted to her for indicating from the systematic angle the need for studying the integrated personality in terms of its attitudes towards its self and its environment. This view of integrated personality we shall note in the subsequent section more fully.
We cannot leave the present section without pointing out the effect which psychoanalysis has had upon the study of personality and thence upon social psychology. We have already noted the influence of Freud on the work of Holt and Thomas. Here we shall review very sketchily the coming of psychoanalysis into the field of social psychology and the social sciences more directly.
Freud's Totem and Taboo (1918) is frankly an effort to account for the origin of society and of religion in terms of his concepts. Otto Rank in his The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1914) and in other writings has examined myth and fable in primitive peoples in the light of Freud's principles. Latterly Freud has traced the basis of authority back to the early relations of child and parent in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922). He has shown how the patterns of authority in social groups have their foundations in infanthood. Flügel has tried to trace the whole history of the family life in psychoanalytic terms in his Psychoanalytic Study of the Family (1921). There is a mass of psychoanalytical materials from Freud, Jung and Adler and their followers too extensive to mention here.
This work, in turn, has begun to influence historians and biographers in their treatment of historical persons. Among American writers who have drawn upon Freud and his contemporaries are G. Stanley Hall, H. E. Barnes, L. P. Clark, R. V. Harlow, E. D. Martin, H. O'Higgins, E. R. Groves and W. F. Ogburn. Hall, Barnes, O'Higgins, Clark and Harlow have shown the value of psychoanalytic concepts in understanding the personalities of great men : the play of social milieu, the importance of father or mother, and early associates, the place of regressions, repressions and so on.[33] Martin, in his Be-
( 197) -havior of Crowds (1920), has given us an interpretation of the responses and attitudes of the personality under the stimulus of a crowd. He has shown us the dominant primitivity of the crowd-minded person, his extreme egotism, his sadistic cruelty, his prejudices. The crowd serves to break down the operation of the censor and let loose the impulses, often savage, in the unconscious. He has pictured, moreover, the astounding growth of crowd-minded individuals under the stress of modern industrialism and has indicated the possible dangers for society and for personality of this type of development. In his Mystery of Religion (1924) he has applied the same concepts and technique to an explanation of religion.
While the psychoanalytic treatment is open to criticism for its vague and subjective terminology, it is the conviction of the writer of this chapter that its contribution, when revamped into more objective terms, will be considered the most important single contribution to social psychology in many decades. Wells's Mental Adjustments (1917), and Pleasure and Behavior (1924), will furnish the reader with an excellent account of the fundamental mechanisms of personality without recourse to the unfortunate subjectivity of many of the psychoanalysts proper. Robinson's Mind in the Making (1921) has drawn upon much of this same material in tracing the rise of modern methods of thinking.
Mention should be made also of the work of Galton, Cattell and E. L. Clarke in investigating the character traits of men of fame. These studies, while primarily statistical, did throw into focus the play of social environment upon some of the traits of great men. More recently Hoch and Amsden, Wells and Allport, have attempted schemas for rating personality. These all try to trace the social background of the person.[34] These studies show a growth in objective study of personality and are certain to bring about a closer coördination of this phase of psychology with social psychology.
Recently E. R. Groves in his Personality and Social Adjustment (1923) has set forth the significance of some of the newer aspects of psychoanalysis and behaviorism for the study of the genesis of the
( 198) social personality. And F. H. Allport's Social Psychology (1924) is a thoroughgoing effort to dispense with all the older materials of group mind, social instincts, etc., in favor of an objective social psychology. His standpoint is set forth, in part, in the following extracts:
"Social behavior comprises the stimulations and reactions arising between an individual and the social portion of his environment; that is, between the individual and his fellows. . . . Collective consciousness and behavior are simply the aggregation of those states and reactions of individuals, which owing to similarities of constitution, training and common stimulations, are possessed of a similar character. . . . The influence of one individual upon another is always a matter of behavior. One person stimulates and the other reacts : in this process we have the essence of social psychology. . . . Both the stimulating and the reacting behavior may be at times accompanied by a social type of consciousness in the respective individuals; but there is, so far as we know, no immediate action of the consciousness of one individual upon the consciousness or behavior of another... .
"Social psychology is the science which studies the behavior of the individual in so far as his behavior stimulates other individuals, or is itself a reaction to their behavior; and which describes the consciousness of the individual in so far as it is a consciousness of social objects and social reactions."
This book presents the mechanisms of personality, the interplay of social stimulation and the effects upon the individual when he reacts in the presence of a group. It is questionable, however, if social scientists, generally, will feel that such a treatise, although invaluable, has done more than to lay down in objective terms the modus operandi of individual reaction in the group. It does not typify the whole field of social psychology. There still remains a belief that books like those of Thomas and Williams, which deal with personalities in concrete social situations, as found in political science, economics, history, etc., are also valid social psychology.
Before turning to the final section in which we shall review the whole scope of social psychology and offer some suggestions for a tenable and synthetic standpoint, let us summarize briefly the present section.
We saw that in Baldwin and Cooley the individual and society are thought of as parts of one organic whole. While most of the workers in this field have shown little inclination to follow Cooley into a theory of organic whole, most of them admit implicitly the intimate
( 199) interplay of the individual and the group around him. Mead and Allport, on the other hand, are little concerned with this, but more with the mechanisms by which social personalities interact. The psychiatrists and psychologists who have studied personality and its traits have either given dynamic explanations of their subjects or have offered means of rating the various traits of personality. These schemas often reveal the subtle relation of social environment to personality.
III. SUMMARY AND CONSTRUCTIVE PROPOSALS
Dealing with human beings in concrete situations, as they do, the social sciences have never been able to escape the biological and psychological nature of their materials. Certainly the eighteenth century rationalism was a psychological system, as was the equalitarian, intellectualist doctrine of the Mills. The coming of modern biology threw grave doubts upon theories which maintained man's clear intellectual motives in all things. Under Schaeffle and Spencer we have efforts to frame social philosophies based on biological analogies, on the one hand, or on theories of actual organic growth, on the other. .
Social psychology itself had its inception in the work of Tarde and Bagehot. From these beginnings and from current French psychology Sighele, LeBon, and Durkheim constructed a "collective psychology" which tended on the whole to frame its descriptions of groups in terms of individual psychology. The latter went so far as to posit a collective consciousness. From this collective psychology the "social mind" concept was born. The sociologists in an effort to escape the restrictions of the narrow experimental psychology turned to the dynamic, functional psychology of France and of this country. They tried to treat their group phenomena in the terms by which the individual is described. This led to the "psychological sociology" of Ellwood and is also implicit in the theories of Giddings, Small and others.
To-day under the lead of anthropology and cultural history the sociologists are coming to posit their own social mechanisms without recourse to the concepts of individual psychology. Here institutions, classes, cultures, etc., are discussed in relation to each other on their own level. In practice surely social psychology comes in to furnish some explanations, but there is little tendency to couch the whole sociological system in terms of psychology which can only apply to individual consciousness and behavior. Social psychology, in turn, has come to be more and more the study of the individual as he reacts
( 200) to and in the presence of the group and as he also affects the behavior of others in the group.
The first full-fledged effort to make this study, systematically, from the individual angle, was in McDougall's Social Psychology. McDougall's proposed a rigid classification of instincts and emotions, which built themselves into complex emotions and sentiments, and thence into character. The important contribution of this writer, however, was not his theory of character, but the dynamic schema of instincts which the social scientists might make use of in interpreting their data. Graham Wallas, Mitchell, Parker, Ogburn, Edie and others have drawn heavily upon McDougall's principles.
This rigidity of instincts, however, broke down under the functional analysis and another trend of interest growing out of behavioristic psychology, a psychology concerned with conduct and action, has been gaining ground. This viewpoint is represented by Dewey, Thomas, Gault, Bernard, Faris and Williams. For them the dynamic principles of social psychology are habits, attitudes and dispositions. They do not deny the place of innate instinctive trends, but hold that these are so quickly complicated and overlaid by habits that no interpretative system can be built up from them alone. More recently still the work of Freud, Holt, Wells, and others studying personality from various angles has given us a clew to another approach to social psychology. This is through the study of the personality in relation to its social environment particularly. Here the preliminary work of James and Baldwin upon the rise of the self is important. Here too the sociologist, Cooley, has performed a lasting service in defining the interaction of social environment and human nature. In fact, Baldwin and Cooley propose a theory that the person and the society must be conceived together as a total ongoing process.
In the view of the writer of this chapter all these efforts are incomplete. True enough the last-named view is much nearer the heart of the problem than that of any of the other writers. Most of the writers, especially those of psychological bent, with a few exceptions,[35] fail to recognize the essential problem. In order to make clear my thesis it will be necessary to turn to a short account of the dichotomy between traditional social science and traditional psychology.
The older social sciences tended to deal with those phases of their work which ignored human nature. Economics, for instance, possessed a series of concepts : price, value, commodity ; land, labor and
( 201) capital which ignored the personalities involved. If persons were dealt with at all they were put under the rubric of an "economic man" quite devoid of anything but economic motive derived from an outworn Benthamite psychology. So too, jurisprudence tended to be engrossed in history of cases, procedure, machinery of courts, but the human elements in the problem of law and justice were lost sight of. History gave little place to the analysis of personalities except in a very conventional way. With the exception of sociology, which did take man into account, the older social sciences were so engrossed in organization, institution and form that they ignored the dynamic, human features of their subject matter. On the other side, psychology was handicapped, no less, by being cut off from the institutions and environment (social and material). It dealt with the individual as a psychologic atom, open to self-introspection or to study by brass instruments marking simple reaction times. It was interested in the mechanism of mind, in analogy to the processes of chemistry. It divorced itself from human conduct and from all complications. Its single glory was the investigation of how we think, feel and act under the simplest conditions.
Thus social psychology, coming into the field when these two divergent courses were still being pursued, had to choose between dealing with such units as crowds, mobs, assemblies and such matters as public opinion, war, and institutional effects on groups in terms of individual psychology or dealing with biological analogies as had Schaeffle.
Then came a functional-biological psychology which maintained a classification of specific instincts that in combination account for social living. These concepts were eagerly accepted as accounting for social behavior. Yet this approach was still inadequate for social psychology because it continued the same fallacy of explaining only the how, the mechanisms, of mind. The more recent approach employing the concept of habit and attitude is one in advance, for it puts considerable emphasis upon those environmental situations around which the habits and attitudes develop. So likewise the study of social personality throws light upon the very significant factor of early social contacts in the total reaction system. As yet, social psychology has not caught the meaning of this environmental angle. Cooley is perhaps the only writer who has completely grasped its importance.
It is the writer's view first, that social psychology must be built, on the individual side, around the concepts of the mechanisms of mind. Secondly, social psychology must take into account not only these mechanisms—the how we think, feel and act—but must deal
( 202) with the content of mind, and act with what we think, feel„ and act, as well. To put it differently, we must know not only how the processes of perception, imagery, association, attitude operate, we must know also what the nature of the concrete image is, what the person thinks about as well as the mode of his thought. Personality is understandable actually in what the person images and recalls and what his attitudes are. We do not want to know alone about the mechanized forms of rejection, acceptance, belief and disbelief in studying attitudes, but also the concrete thing or image around which the attitude is built up.
Thus the first aspect of social psychology involves the individual. This phase itself includes two features : one dealing with the mechanism of the organism, the second with the concrete nature of the conscious process and the concrete nature of the attitude. Now the alternate factor in social psychology is the institutional and social situation toward which the organism is oriented. The what of mind of which we have just spoken, can surely only be understood in terms of the institutional and social stimuli of which it is a reflection. More-over, the content, the what, is quite as important for the foundation of social psychology systematically as is the mechanism of mind under social stimulation. Before we can control social behavior we must know not only how people think, feel and act, we must know what they think, feel and act. And in order to do this latter we must also know the specific nature of their environment.
Looking more closely at this interplay of organism and social environment, we may say that social psychology is the study of the personality as affected by social and institutional stimuli and as in turn affecting these. The personality, as we have noted, includes both mechanism and content. The distinction between social and institutional stimuli is simply one of convenience. For instance, the worshiper responds to the concrete church and its ritual in socially deter-mined ways quite as much as he does to a direct stimulation from the priest or fellow member. So too, the idea of the state or of God may be responded to with distinctly social implications.
The most important mechanisms by which we may study the inter-action of person on person and of person on institution are those which have been developed by modern behaviorism and physiology. The work of Pavlov and Watson upon conditioned reflexes has given us objective methods of investigating the relation of stimuli and organism. By this mechanism the child is attached to his mother and to his home. Here reactions and attitudes of love and coöperation
( 203) to the in-group are built up. With the human being this process of conditioning extends over into the field of imagination and language and there is almost no end to the process. The whole field of memory and association come under this new concept. It is in the elementary group life, family, play-group and congenial neighborhood, that attitudes toward church, state, religion, morals, toward the foreigner, the Catholic, or Protestant or Jew are developed. The conservatism of habits and attitudes so engendered is the basis for prejudice, for conflict and for many of our present-day social mis-adjustments.
The basic reflexes upon which the conditioning begins are those concerned with survival and have, when combined together, often been called instincts. Thus hunger and feeding mechanisms are present very early ; so too, responses to bright lights, to pain, to loud sounds (by fear reactions), to tickling and patting (by sex or love responses) and shortly to novel or striking objects (by reaching for, turning over and moving toward). In addition there are a number of fairly well organized reflex patterns involved in what are often called random movements. These are related in potentia and are very quickly associated together in growth and by conditioning. It is, therefore, upon these rudimentary reflexes that the learning process begins. The most important single feature for personality is that the crises around which social life is organized all produce, in the person, emotional responses, and naturally these emotional reactions are the core of what is carried over into the conditioning or learning. Then as these conditionings go on, the emotional core be-comes mechanized, attitudes arise (this is the field of meaning) and we have the basis for interpreting the whole gamut, so far, of human behavior.[26]
The principle of conditioned response and its attendant features of inhibition, facilitation, etc., is not sufficient. The epoch-making work of Sherrington must also be taken into account. He has shown the marvelous organizing power of the cortex, the place of various response systems coöperating together to make for integrity of the organism. These principles become valid for the study of personality.
( 204) In fact, for human conduct this principle of integration becomes all-important.[37] Since so much of this integration, that is, the particular level upon which it takes place, is dependent upon, first, the nature of the original reflex patterns and secondly, upon the conditioning which takes place there, the nature of the social and institutional stimuli become significant in comprehending the growth of the full-rounded personality. Sherrington's presidential address before the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1922 on "Some Aspects of Animal Mechanism" is so pertinent here that I quote him at some length : [38]
"The nervous system is that bodily system the special office of which .. . has been more and more to weld together the body's component parts into one consolidated mechanism reacting as a unity to the changeful world about it. . . . It represents the acme of accomplishment of the integration of the animal organism... .
"The normal action of the mind is to make up from its components one unified personality."
Moreover, as he well points out, this integration has gone on till it has touched man in his social living. The community itself may take on a form of integration, a living-togetherness, under the leadership of the human mind. In truth, this is just the "scope and ambit of social psychology." As an illustration of what is meant when it is maintained that the environmental stimuli affect the integration of the personality, Sherrington remarks :
"Not the least interesting and important form of social psychology is the relatively new one, dealing with the stresses and demands that organized industry makes upon the individual as a unit in the community of our dayand with the readjustments it asks from that community."
In fact, the conditioned response and the principle of integration go hand in hand together. Connected with the latter is Peterson's theory of completeness of response in learning. The highest integration of the organism can only take place, in short, when the response systems are harmoniously working together to absorb the total organ-ism. Incomplete response is blocked response and produces emotional stress and disarrangements which are disintegrative.
It should not be imagined that mere conscious seeking for integration and complete response is to be our ideal. After all, as Burnham
( 205) has pointed out, integration and balance come from the general orientation of the person toward some all-absorbing goal or task which is constantly moving ahead of him and which is so located in the world of reality that the person is constantly occupied with useful endeavor in reference to it. Moreover, new crises are constantly arising for the growing personality, hence perfection in the way of mediaeval day-dreaming is not what is meant here. The organism, therefore, must not be running counter to the demands, either of its own trends or to the real world around it. Conflict between organism and environment, conflict between two powerful trends, like those of sex and those which fit into the herd's wishes, produce inefficient living. Hence the aim or goal is a. working hypothesis, never a final absolute sought-for, and once gained dispensed with, in a kind of eternal Nirvana of bliss. [39]
From the second angle of approach social psychology must go into a study of the specific stimuli of persons and objects which affect the personality. The study of crowds, mobs, audiences, crazes, fads, crime, war, propaganda, public opinion is the very center of its problem. These must be phrased and defined in precise situations, and there is little need for appealing to psychological concepts beyond those demanded to explain the interaction of social beings. Likewise, the ideas and sentiments revolving around the great institutions of our society : the family, the church, the city, the state, the nation, the religion, the ` club, our science, art or special economic activity, business, or industry, must be related to the specific nature of the situation in every instance. We lack just this detailed analysis of the stimuli. Beginnings toward this are being made in the work of Thomas, Williams, Park and Faris, and we may expect the social scientists generally to assist in this process once they catch the meaning of social psychology for their own particular fields. The contribution of psychiatry has been just this. It has got at the concrete situation or person that produced the dislike, the phobia, the avoidance or other social attitude and habit. The analysis must be carried into the field of normal relationships. Since the methodology of this whole approach is yet to be devised, literature, both the creative sort and the unintentional, like diaries, letters, communications, etc., are worth much consideration. So too, the suggestion of Dunlap to employ the theater for setting off typical reactions is noteworthy. We need also an expansion of the study of the effect of rivalry, competition, and the pres-
( 206) -ence of other persons upon work and play. Allport has given us an extensive review of past experiments in this problem in his Social Psychology.
In summary, therefore, it is the view of the present writer that social psychology must take into account the organism first of all, both the mechanism of mind and action and the content of the mind : of the imagery and attitude. Mere mechanism alone can never solve the problem of personality and motive, neither can it solve the problem of social psychology. In the second instance, social psychology must examine the specific nature of the environment to which the organism reacts. This environment is either other persons or institutions with social implications. Thus organism and environment must be considered inseparable. This view may lead to an organic concept such as Cooley holds. The individual and society in which he lives are conceivable in one unity. The community becomes the prototype of this organic whole. Certainly as Sherrington has put it, in the address cited above :
"Just as the organization of the cell colony into an animal individual receives its highest contribution from the nervous system, so the further combining of animal individuals into a multi-individual organism, a social community, merging the interests of the individual in the interests of the group, is due to the nervous system's crowning attribute, the mental. That this integration is still in process, still developing, is obvious from the whole course of human prehistory and history."
The present writer does not say that this organic view is one which may with scientific impunity be accepted, but certainly there is much to recommend it. It is surely superior to a view which holds for a "social mind" or a theory which sharply segregates the organism from its social environment. Whatever we may think of the individual and society conceived as an integrated whole, the larger concept must be put into terms which will not confuse it with the problem of the individual integration alone. Otherwise, we return again to the fundamental error in the theory of the "social mind." The social anthropologists of this country may indicate the way to this larger concept in what Kroeber has called a "super-organic" unity. The writer would incline rather to call it the cultural world or reality, which includes both the individual and society and the total product of their interaction—culture.
Finally, one may ask, what are the problems of social psychology? Thomas and Dewey have well defined a number of them in their
( 207) writings. Immediately pressing questions in the view of the present writer are these :
We need a careful study of the effect of the social frames of behavior, laid down by others, upon the growing personality. There is decided need that the "infant psychology" commenced by Watson be carried farther. We ought to test many of the assertions of the psychoanalysts concerning early conditioning of children.. The whole method of Pavlov, Watson and Sherrington should be introduced into the investigations of personality so far as possible. This would allay much of the popular mysticism about Freud and Jung. Then too, observations and descriptions should be made, outside of experimental conditions, of the effects of milieu upon the growing boy or girl. Here too, the social direction of attention, the rise and fall of special talents, could be observed and reported. Some of the current work of Terman upon superior children ought to cast light upon many of these factors. In reality, the whole problem of individual differences touches social psychology here, and there is no more pressing problem than to discover the roots of exceptional ability, since the matter is so fraught with social importance.
Another lead may be followed into the field of the mores and folk-ways. In view of much prevalent talk about social progress and the possibilities of education, the limits of intelligence and conditioning must be gone into. The persistence of certain general patterns of behavior : fear, rage, sex responses, curiosity, manipulation, rationalization, and the universal tendency to explain the world in subjective terms, seem too deep-seated to be broken up by education. So too, the tendency to follow leaders, to give to words and rituals much more attention and emotional attachment than cold reason seems to warrant, the whole appeal of magic-making, myth-making and religious trends ought to be studied carefully. In other words, the limitations of rational control in reference to social living ought to be investigated. Until we know more than at present it is futile to discourse about social reform of widespread application. The writer takes refuge in the well-put statement of Thomas on the matter of sociological investigations and social reform. Thomas writes : [40]
"The example of physical science and material technique should have shown long ago that only a scientific investigation, which is quite free from any dependence on practice can become practically useful in its applications. Of course, this does not mean that the scientist should not select
( 208) for investigation problems whose solution has actual practical importance; the sociologists may study crime or war as the chemist studies dyestuffs. But from the method of the study itself all practical considerations must be excluded if we want the results to be valid."
Concrete studies in the special social sciences should be undertaken to give us a body of objective data on the interplay of person on person and institution on person. The social sciences may retain their own standpoint and concepts and yet lend assistance to social psychology in its field. In practice the social psychological approach overlaps the methods of any special social science in question. From such dual attacks upon social problems we shall come to grips with the nature of social reality and at the same time, abetted by experimental and analytical psychology, to the understanding of the nature of the individual. From this, then, we will be in a fair way to lay down laws for both individual and social becoming. Thus social science goes down into biology and psychology on the individual side and up into the special fields of its own kind on the other, and out of this interrelation the nature of the social reality can be defined.[41] From this, also, we might come nearer solving the problem of so-called "social progress." Is this fact or fiction? Do we mistake change for progress? And how is progress to be defined? Is not the whole matter a relative one? What relation has the idea of progress to our present ethos? What, in short, will be the increasing effect of the idea of progress upon our future? The whole world seems caught up in this notion. The one disgrace to-day for person or nation is not to be going somewhere. Will this very notion, this mental set for progress, come to be a permanent part of our social personality and reflect itself in our institutions? Or are the fundamentals of human nature and the patterns of human mind too constant to be altered, even in ages, to any great extent? Can we form an environment which will actually shift the basis of personality? We are back .to a problem already raised, a moment ago, under another guise. What light can experiment and investigation throw upon the stability of innate, hereditary factors, and upon the stability of institutional forms, and what significance has plasticity and the capacity to make and to break habits upon human life? Social psychology, abetted by biology and general psychology, must assist among other things in solving this problem.
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SELECTED REFERENCES.
F.H. Allport, Social Psychology. J. M. Baldwin, A History of Psychology.
A. G. Balz, The Basis of Social Theory.
H. E. Barnes, The New History and the Social Studies, Chap. iii.
L. L. Bernard, Instinct: a Study in Social Psychology.
E. S. Bogardus, The Fundamentals of Social Psychology.
G.S. Brett, A History of Psychology.
M. M. Davis, Psychological Interpretations of Society.
J. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct.
S. Eldridge, Political Action.
J. T. MacCurdy, Problems in Dynamic Psychology.
W. L. Northridge, Modern Theories of the Unconscious.
W. F. Ogburn, Social Change.
J. H. Robinson, Mind in the Making.
A. D. Weeks, The Control of the Social Mind.
R. S. Woodworth, Dynamic Psychology.
F. Znaniecki, The Laws of Social Psychology.
