Social Psychology

The Study of Human Interaction

Theodore M. Newcomb, Ralph H. Turner, Philip E. Converse

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317519751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Combining the efforts of sociologists and psychologists, this work, originally published in 1952 and revised in 1966, embraces these two disciplines to show how social-psychological problems must be viewed in individual as well as general terms. Human interaction is, therefore, the main theme of this authoritative and rewarding volume, which offers a more comprehensive viewpoint than texts written from with a strictly psychological or a strictly sociological approach. Whenever it can be shown that interaction intervenes between individual and group variables, the authors carefully note the manner in which this occurs.

Well written yet succinct, the chapters are closely integrated to present continuously developing concepts of the time. Research illustrations are set off typographically but skilfully woven into the related text. Three appendixes, one on the measurement of individual attitudes, a second on survey research, and a third on Bale's interaction process analysis, may be consulted without interrupting the flow of the other chapters.

CHAPTER 1
Observing and Understanding Human Interaction

THE STUDY OF HOW PEOPLE THINK, FEEL, AND BEHAVE TOWARD ONE ANOTHER —like the study of anything else that is both important and complex—begins to get exciting when we find that there are some general rules we can depend on to help us understand things that are not, on the surface, self-explanatory. Such rules, or principles, in their most helpful form are statements of order and regularity that go beyond mere descriptions of what can be directly observed. It is easy, on the basis of one's own experience—and with the aid of accumulated folk wisdom—to describe frequently observed regularities in people's behavior toward each other. For example, you have probably heard that "anger breeds anger," or that "a soft answer turneth away wrath." You may not have heard this one: people who spend a good deal of time together are apt to come to like each other. The first two of these statements are of the form: behavior X on the part of one person is likely to be followed by behavior Y on the part of another. The third is of the form: behavior X on the part of several people toward one another is likely to be followed by behavior Y on the part of those same people toward one another.

As a matter of fact, there is a good deal of truth in all three statements. Very commonly, however—as in these instances—such descriptive rules-of-thumb are subject to a good many exceptions. The trick is to account for what we observe in ways that will handle the exception as well as the rule. If it is often true, for example, that anger breeds anger, we need to go on and ask why—not just because we enjoy speculating but because we want to understand the conditions under which this particular sequence of behaviors is likely to occur, and when it is not. Answers to why questions generally break down into statements of conditions under which something is most or least likely to happen. And these conditions—in social psychology as in physiology or physics—often turn out not to be self-evident.

Here is an actual example of how a common observation led to some unexpected and far from self-evident statements of conditions. As described in more detail in Research Illustration 5.1 (page 122), about the time of World War II some psychologists at the University of California became interested in problems of racial, religious, and ethnic prejudice, and particularly those of anti-Semitism. They had observed, as had other students of the problem, that many Americans who were noticeably anti-Semitic also tended to be anti-Negro, anti-Mexican, anti-Turkish—in fact, quite generally prejudiced. But this generalization simply did not apply to everyone: some persons, for example, were prejudiced against Negroes but not against Jews, or vice versa. Thus it became necessary to try to understand the kinds of people who are prejudiced-in-particular, as well as those prejudiced-in-general. The California psychologists found, as others had before them, that the generally prejudiced people whom they studied felt about the same way toward certain groups regardless of whether they had had any direct contact with them, and so they pursued the hypothesis that this kind of generalized prejudice could be traced to some rather deeply ingrained personality characteristics. As reported in The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950) they found a good deal of support for this hypothesis, which we shall later report more fully.

Subsequent evidence has indicated that many cases of specialized prejudice stem from personal experience—not necessarily by direct contact with the people against whom such persons are prejudiced, but commonly the experience of being members of groups in which certain kinds of prejudice were very prevalent (such as anti-Semitism in certain large cities, and Negro prejudice in some southern communities). Very often, moreover, these "specialists" did not have the same traits of authoritarianism (as that term is used by the California psychologists) that the "generalists" did. Thus a rather commonplace observation eventually led to a two-factor explanation (that is, the personality traits labeled "authoritarian," and the sharing of prejudices common in one's own membership groups) that pretty well accounted both for the observed rule and for the exceptions to it.

As suggested by this illustration, then, we need to be alert to apparent regularities that can be observed, but these should be regarded as the beginning, not the end, of our inquiries. A keen eye for exceptions to these descriptive regularities, together with some curiosity as to what lies behind them, may lead to an understanding of explanatory regularities that account for the initial observation as well as for the exceptions. In this introductory chapter we shall present a selected sample of social-psychological observations. Our primary concern here is not with explanations but with the processes by which they are to be sought.

Some Observable Forms of Interaction

There are interactional processes that cannot be directly observed, but can only be inferred from what is observed—interpersonal perception, for example, as outlined in Chapter 6. But for the present we shall use the term "interaction" to refer to any set of observable behaviors on the part of two or more individuals when there is reason to assume that in some part those persons are responding to each other. What all these observable forms of interaction have in common is a sequence of behaviors on the part of two or more persons. That is, some observable behavior on the part of one person (such as saying "Good morning") or on the part of some group (such as a challenge by one sports team to another) is followed by some observable behavior on the part of another person or group. There are also instances, as we shall see, where people are simultaneously interacting with one another, as when two people dance together; the analysis of this kind of interaction is more complex, but it can still be regarded as a form of behavior sequence.

There follow a few examples of some important forms of observable interaction with which we shall be concerned throughout this book.

Interpersonal Influence: Unilateral Effects

In one sense, any response by one person to another—even the recognition of a casual greeting—is an instance of influence upon the responder. In this sense one may be said to be influencing a person to respond to the question "What time is it?" simply by asking the question. More extreme examples would include these: a person who is generally regarded as miserly is persuaded to make a large contribution to charity; an adolescent girl suddenly changes her makeup to resemble that of a movie actress; or a man who is ordinarily indifferent to music finds himself joining a concert audience in vigorous applause. These are all instances in which one or more persons are primarily the source of influence and another person is primarily affected by it.

One kind of such a unilateral influence process, imitation, has long been of interest to social psychologists, though emphasized more in earlier than in later years. Each of the first two books carrying the title Social Psychology (by E. A. Ross and by William McDougall, both published in 1908) offered imitation as an explanation of many forms of social or interpersonal behavior. From our present point of view, however, they seem to have confused description with explanation. At the former level, imitation may be defined quite simply as the occurrence of behavior on the part of a person that is in some way a consequence of the same behavior on the part of another person (sometimes referred to as the model). Imitative behavior may or may not be a deliberate attempt to copy another, and may even occur without the imitator's being aware that his own behavior follows and resembles another person's. Viewed simply as a descriptive label for a sequence of similar behaviors by different persons, imitation does not need to be defined in terms of intentions, awareness, or other psychological states.

It is easy to find illustrations, either from textbooks or from everyday experience, of individual behavior that follows and resembles another person's behavior. But it is also easy to find illustrations of failures to imitate—as many a parent, teacher, and supervisor has discovered. And so, if we are interested in explanation, that is, in finding a basis for orderliness and regularity in this kind of interaction, we must ask about the conditions under which one person is most likely to imitate another. One set of conditions has to do with the kinds of persons who are likely to be imitated. A summary of the characteristics of "models" (Miller and Dollard, 1941) concludes that they tend to be superior to imitators in one or more of these ways: in age, in social status, in intelligence, or in other kinds of competence. The observation that persons who are imitated often have these advantages over their imitators is common enough, but it is easy to think of exceptions. For example, school children who are closely alike in age, social status, and ability often imitate one another. Thus it is not enough to say that, behaviorally speaking, models have something that imitators want. Imitation, when it does occur, is an outcome of at least two psychological processes: wanting something, and perceiving that another's behavior points the way to getting it. And so we need to inquire about the ways in which such processes jointly operate. (Research Illustration 9.2, on page 275, points to one kind of answer.)

Both individual and social psychology, as a matter of fact, deal with what might be called rules of combination of psychological states. If we are interested in a single individual it is often useful to discover how his states of motivation, perception, thinking, and feeling are organized in relation to anything that he recognizes as important in his world. Such organizations of psychological states are known as attitudes. Social psychology, which deals with relationships among people, also uses attitudes as explanatory concepts, but in characteristic ways of its own. Not only the attitudes of interacting persons toward one another but also the relationships among different persons' attitudes toward the same things will be of prime concern in this book.

If we are to understand just how it is that the attitudes of interacting persons become jointly involved in a relationship, we must take a further step. One person cannot be directly influenced by another's attitudes as they "really" are, but only as he perceives them. Thus it is necessary to consider the attitudes that each of a set of interacting persons attributes to the others, and the relationships among these attributions. Relationships of mutual friendliness, for example, of competition, or of dominance and submission are all associated with what the interacting persons assume to be one another's attitudes. Or, to revert to our previous illustration of unilateral effects, a person who imitates another is making assumptions about the other's motives and attitudes—perhaps very general ones (such as the kinds of values he has) or specific ones about what he is trying to do and why he chooses a particular way of doing it. If the potential imitator attributes to the "model" goals that are like his own, or attitudes that he himself approves of, he is likely to become an actual imitator.

Thus it is the relationship between one's own and another's attitudes, as one perceives the latter, that counts. Principles of this kind, like most others designed to account for the presence or absence of an observed phenomenon, are stated in terms that are not themselves directly observable, but that have been derived from observed behavior in order to account for its variations under different conditions. In Part One, which is mostly devoted to the concept of attitudes because of its importance to social psychology, we shall find such principles emerging.

Interpersonal Influence: Reciprocal Effects

Another kind of interpersonal behavior that has intrigued social psychologists since the earliest writing on the subject has to do with the simultaneous effects of two or more persons upon each other. As early as 1895 the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon devoted a whole book—of polemical rather than scientific nature, by modern standards—to what he regarded as the unfortunate fact that groups of people ("crowds," as he called them) often thought, felt, and acted in extreme ways (mob scenes, crowd hysteria, for example, or uncritical acceptance or rejection of ideas) that would never occur if their individual members were alone. Contemporary students of such phenomena, who are more interested in understanding them than in condemning them, examine them in terms of reciprocal influence of group members upon each other.

At about the same time, an American psychologist (Triplett, 1897) reported one of the first experiments in social psychology bearing on the same problem. To forty children, ten to twelve years of age, he assigned the task of winding up fishing reels as fast as possible; each child alternately worked alone and in small groups. Triplett found that twenty of the children worked faster in groups than alone, whereas only ten of them worked more slowly, and the remaining ten did not differ in the two situations. Later, and for the most part more carefully planned experiments (e.g., Allport's and Dashiell's, pages 281-4), yielded rather similar results, which have usually been interpreted as showing that energy expended and sheer quantity of output tend to increase when people work at the same or similar task together. Quality of output may suffer, but there are a good many individual exceptions.

Allport labeled this phenomenon social facilitation; whatever it is called, its explanation turns out to be very complex. Allport attributed such energizing effects to "the sight and sound of others doing the same thing," with the cumulative effect of increasing the intensity of stimulation that impinges on each person. But interaction under these conditions does not necessarily have energizing effects; the continued sight and sound of others doing the same thing may, for example, become boring or distracting; or, as in the case of occasional work groups, there may be common understandings that result in restricted output (cf. Coch and French, 1948). Under "natural" as contrasted with experimental situations, perhaps the most striking instances of the energizing effects of the sight and sound of others doing the same thing are to be seen in the "spiraling" excitement of certain crowds, especially in crisislike situations (some of which are described in Chapter 14). If, as occurs at a fire in a theater, all members of the crowd have the same motive (to escape), then the observable (and, in this case, excited) expressions of the common motive are indeed likely to have energizing effects.

Another source of complexity in the phenomena of social facilitation is that, when it does occur, it often involves attitudes of rivalry, or competition. Allport attempted, in his experiments, to eliminate such effects but, as shown in later experiments by Dashiell (Research Illustration 9.3, page 279), without much success. Dashiell found that energizing effects were most pronounced when competitive attitudes were strongest, not when they were weakest, so that the effects could not be attributed merely to heightened stimulation through sights and sounds.

Thus we are led, again, to ask about the conditions under which reciprocal energizing effects occur. As our several illustrations have suggested, and as we shall further note in Chapters 9 and 14, the critical conditions include the attitudes of the interacting persons and also their attributions of attitudes to one another. These are the same conclusions to which we were led in our earlier consideration of unilateral influence. And this is as it should be: an integrated social-psychological theory does not call upon one set of principles to explain unilateral influence and a different set to explain reciprocal influence. Rather, it shows how the same set of principles works in different ways under different circumstances.

This brief consideration of one special form of reciprocal influence, labeled "social facilitation," has not, of course, yielded an all-inclusive set of principles, but has only illustrated one kind of social-psychological problem. Other forms of reciprocal influence and other explanatory principles will emerge in other chapters.

Mutual Adaptation

"Influence," as we have seen, is an inclusive term that may refer to effects that are either persisting or transitory, either unilateral or reciprocal. We shall now use "mutual adaptation" in a more limited sense, as referring to the processes by which each of two persons (or, for that matter, more than two) simultaneously affects and is affected by the other in relatively enduring ways. It often happens that different people, whether they are behaving in similar or in different ways, adapt more or less neatly to each other's behavior. You can easily think of many such instances—such as the clockwork intermeshing of throwing, catching, running on the part of the members of a professional baseball team, or the smooth integration of the movements of a pair of good dancers. Or consider this illustration.

The following characteristic behavior was observed in a two-year-old. He would always go to the right-hand side of his high chair when ready for a meal, holding himself in a characteristic position ready to be picked up. When he had been lifted into the chair he would duck his head sideways, for the tray to be swung over his head; then he would lift his chin for the bib to be put under it, then bow his head down on the tray so the bib could be tied around his neck. He was obviously prepared for a particular sequence of actions by his mother. He was utterly confused ...