Social Psychology and Human Values

M. Brewster Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351489690
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

Reflecting the contributions of M. Brewster Smith to social psychology and personality study, this selection includes not only his best known essays but also previously unpublished material. Professor Smith's consistent striving for a psychology both scientific and humane unifies the collection; it is a valid and valuable overview of the relevance of social psychology to human experience and societal problems by a man at the midstream of his career.An introductory essay traces the major themes in Professor Smith's work. Part I discusses the interdisciplinary relations of social psychology with other behavioral sciences; it shows that social psychology, standing at the crossroads of the social sciences, must articulate its contributions with those of the other disciplines, and it delineates the problems involved in this articulation. Part II presents the author's principal contributions to the social psychology of attitudes and values, a central topic in the field, in which he is a major proponent of the functional approach. Part III is devoted to the broader issues of personality theory, focusing on the "self" as the object of personal attitudes and including a classic paper on the phenomenological approach.Parts IV and V probe human effectiveness and "mental health, " consider the social development of personal competence, and examine from a social psychological perspective a variety of social problems -foreign students and cross-cultural education, population growth, ethnic prejudice, and student protest. The final group of essays deals with perennial human concerns: the nature of rationality, the ethics of behavioral research, the psychology of literature, and the problems of evil.

1

Social Psychology and Human Values

Of course social psychology must grapple with human experience in society; of course it is inextricably concerned with human values—or so I have always thought. That is why I was originally attracted to the field and began to think of myself as a would-be social psychologist when, still an undergraduate, I had only the dimmest idea of what social psychology was really about. Before I could at all understand it, I had read with mixed fascination and disbelief J. F. Brown’s unorthodox text (1936), which combined extremely orthodox commitments to the doctrines of Marx, Freud, and Kurt Lewin—the last just then becoming visible on the American psychological scene. To a young psychologist who was also exploring a tentative identity as a young radical, this was heady stuff that proposed big answers to big questions, even if these theoretical lions seemed most unlikely to lie peacefully with one another. Social psychology, I decided, was psychology that was committed, in the jargon of the 1930’s, to “social significance.” That was what I wanted, and I settled into a social-psychologist identity without, for a long time, much command of the content to back it up.

As I began to get acquainted with this odd field that on the flimsiest basis I had decided was mine, I could not be entirely happy with the identity that I had acquired. I soon discovered that social psychology was then really two disciplines, not one: an important branch of sociology, on the one hand, and a somewhat marginal application of psychology, on the other. (Matters stayed that way through most of the first half of the century.) Sociologist-social psychologists, beginning with G. H. Mead (1934) and C. H. Cooley (1902), had created an important body of theory concerning the processes of “symbolic interaction” through which the biological raw materials of human potentiality are transmuted into human nature to provide the psychological basis for organized society. But they were slow to refine and test these ideas in empirical research. Generally innocent of theory, their psychologist contemporaries concerned themselves with quantitative studies: measuring attitudes and experimenting on how individual performance is affected by the presence of others.

It was this rather unpromising subfield of psychology in which I found myself: first of all, I was a psychologist. After Floyd Allport’s ambitious early attempt (1924) at theoretical synthesis in the framework of Watsonian behaviorism, psychological social psychologists lost their theoretical bearings. They mainly based their shaky claim to the prestigious status of scientist on increasing elegance of measurement (though it was crude enough). It was L. L. Thurstone (1928) who started a long line of research in this vein with his article, “Attitudes Can Be Measured.” And indeed, attitudes were measured, but mostly on samples of ever available college sophomores, to no great theoretical or practical end. The appearance of social significance was simulated by measuring such attitudes as radicalism-conservatism and the like and correlating them with other indices. But the psychologist’s social psychology of the 1930’s had really very little to offer the understanding of man’s social experience or to the clarification of his social problems.

Neither did it welcome intellectual contact with speculative social psychology of the sociological variety. The popular view was F. H. Allport’s doctrinaire individualism (1933), which sought to debunk the “group fallacy” of attributing reality to groups and social institutions, the stock-in-trade of sociologists. Only the individual and his behavior were “real."

To be sure, there were glimmerings of a new day. Muzafer Sherif’s minor classic, The Psychology of Social Norms (1936), sought to legitimize the concept of social norms by demonstrating that behavioral norms can be created in the psychological laboratory. The fact that Sherif worked with the perceptual autokinetic phenomenon, a favorite of experimental psychologists, made his case the more appealing, but it was long before his contribution was really assimilated into the thinking of psychological social psychologists.

Most important, there was the emigré Kurt Lewin (see Lewin, 1951), who impressed American psychologists and sociologists alike with his ingenious experiments that brought social reality into the laboratory ("What is ’real’ is what has effects") and set a notable example of research on group structure and processes that was at once empirical, theoretical, and practical ("there is nothing so practical as a good theory"). As it turned out, Lewin was a brisk, fructifying wind that began the transformation of social psychology into an intellectually challenging endeavor in vital touch with human experience and social action.

The full impact of Lewin’s influence in social psychology was not felt until nearly the time of his death in 1947.1 had meanwhile gone to Harvard as a graduate student just before World War II; there I encountered two great psychologists, Henry Murray and Gordon Allport, both mavericks out of sympathy with the mechanistic-behavioristic tradition in American psychology, both theorists in the older grand style, both “personologists,” in Murray’s term (see Murray, 1938; Allport, 1937). Murray had the appeal of the explorer of human depths, Allport that of the exemplar of a Puritan ego ideal. I vacillated in my attachments to each. Like Lewin, Allport was interested in both personality and social psychology, and he saw no sharp boundary between these interests. Like Murray but unlike Lewin, Allport had strong roots in the humanistic tradition. In personal style as in psychological predilections, he was a man of letters as much as—perhaps more than— he was a scientist. His first commitment was fidelity to the unique individuality of human personality; cleanliness of method for its study was a secondary consideration. In social psychology, he was primarily a scholar and teacher rather than a systematist or empirical investigator. But, again like Lewin, his interests in social psychology showed a deep concern with human injustice, especially the evil of ethnic prejudice (Allport, 1954).

I barely had time to be “imprinted” by Allport and, to a lesser extent, by Murray before the draft and the war intervened—for four diverse years. My final army assignment was to the Research Branch of the Morale Services Division (later, Information and Education Division), where I was fortunate to get to know at first hand two new strands of research that, together with Lewin’s legacy and the major tradition of interactionist sociology, underlie the social psychology that we know today. Under Samuel Stouffer, I learned and applied survey research and analysis (see Stouffer, Lumsdaine, Lumsdaine, Williams, Smith, Janis, Star, and Cornell, 1949), the source of much of the substantive content of a social psychology that has since become increasingly preoccupied with abstracted process. And under Carl Hovland, who directed the Experimental Section of the Research Branch, I became acquainted with the experimental study of persuasive communication. The army studies in which I served a brief apprenticeship (Hovland, Lumsdaine, and Sheffield, 1949) were the springboard for the postwar Yale program in communication and attitude change under Hovland’s deft and imaginative leadership, some of the best work in the modern process-oriented vein.

Wartime comradeship on assignment from the Research Branch to North Africa and Italy also served to correct the bias in my hitherto one-sidedly psychological orientation to social psychology. I was teamed with the sociologist Arnold Rose, who was infused with the Chicago symbolic interactionist tradition stemming from G. H. Mead and who had only recently emerged from exciting collaboration on Myrdal’s classic study of American race relations (1944). By incongruous chance, typical of army experience, I was the officer and Rose the enlisted man; but in our running private seminar, it was I who was at the junior end of the log. I learned about sociological social psychology and I learned about race and racism.

I was also learning some less bookish realities of social life. In field artillery basic training my eyes had been opened to appreciate the obscene virtuosity of Texan working-class culture; exposure to the disorderly warmth of South Italy gave me a taste of—and a taste for—larger cultural differences. And in Palermo, Rome, Florence, and Ravenna I was enchanted by the visible relics of gloriously elaborated views of man and the world, part of our cultural history, that differed just as widely from our own.

The war over, I returned to Harvard for my degree; I entered the Department of Social Relations, just organized, and shared in its interdisciplinary enthusiasm. By then, Allport’s psychologism seemed to me the voice of the past—I did not know how deeply I had been influenced by him in more fundamental ways. There were also new sources of influence, especially Jerome Bruner, whose thoroughgoing functionalism was still directed to the study of public opinion, and Robert White, who was already developing his sane brand of ego psychology in the context of broadly psychoanalytic thought: a man like Allport working in Murray’s territory. Fruits of our collaboration are reflected in several essays in this volume. Clyde Kluckhohn in cultural anthropology and Talcott Parsons in sociology, on their part, committed the theoretical resources of their disciplines to a brave if abortive attempt at integration of the human sciences.

But by now a new synthesis of the psychological and sociological versions of social psychology was beginning to emerge; I became firmly identified with it as I came to perceive it with growing clarity. (I had taught social psychology at Harvard and Vassar for at least three years before I felt I had any grasp of my own on the shape of the field: teaching is the best avenue to learning!) According to the synthesis that still prevails, with variations and defections, social psychology is defined, not by boundaries that clearly divide it from other specialties, but by its focal problems, which can be located on two axes, according to whether social behavior is viewed synchronously or across time. From the latter perspective the problems are those of socialization: how by participating in communicative interaction the human animal acquires dispositions that equip him as a member of society and as a carrier of culture. Its synchronic problems, on the other hand, have to do with the interrelations of already socialized persons in social contexts. Here concern centers, at the individual pole, on the learned dispositions (attitudes) that enter into determining a person’s social behavior, and, at the sociocultural pole, on the patterning of group structure, process, and symbolic culture that emerges as persons interact. The heated controversies of former years about the priority of individual versus group seem beside the point when viewed from the newer perspective: after early infancy, the isolated individual as social atom is pure fiction. Persons as we know them embody much of society in microcosm, and these socialized persons in their interrelationships are what is meant by the social order.

Social psychology at midcentury was indeed exciting. Suddenly it had made contact with important nodes of theory in general psychology and in sociology; no longer did it illustrate that frequent anomaly in psychology, an “applied” field out of contact with the basic science that it pretends to be applying. Learning theory, cognitive theory, psychoanalysis, social interactionist theory, structural role theory, all emerged as suggesting relevant questions and concepts for social psychological research. And social psychology no longer depended entirely on theories imported from without: in Fes-tinger’s dissonance theory (1957), for example, it staked out theoretical claims of its own that led to a flurry of experimentation with forays even into the home territory of general experimental psychology. Traffic with the less theoretically inclined field of anthropology waned, however: the “culture and personality” movement receded from its apogee of the 1930’s and 1940’s.

In the beginning of this fertile period the spirit of Lewin as carried on by his students also held social psychology to a strong commitment to human relevance. Laboratory studies were paralleled by field studies, and much was written about the benefits to be derived from the complementarity of these strategies. Great promise was seen in “action research,” conducted in close collaboration with social programs so as both to provide empirical guidance for social policy and to increase basic knowledge through controlled access to kinds and levels of variables that would elude study in the laboratory. Social psychologists were still predominantly men of social conscience, and the new Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, founded in 1936, reflected their conscientiousness and their optimism.

Over the past decade matters have changed. True, a large amount of applied social-psychological research goes on under governmental and commercial auspices, and SPSSI grows in membership. And one off-shoot of the Lewinian tradition—the “laboratory” approach to sensitivity and leadership training, as exemplified by the National Training Laboratory in Group Development at Bethel, Maine—has continued to flourish, now joining forces in a veritable social movement with other practical efforts to break through the impersonality of bureaucratized modern life. But the “training laboratory” with its “T-groups” has lost contact with the main thrust of experimentally based theoretical advance. And experimentalists working in the conventional social psychological laboratory, now transformed by electronic gadgets, have to a surprising extent lost interest in problems of the real social world. This trend, which I deplore, is doubtless a price paid for the successes of theoretically oriented laboratory experimentation. The way of the experimentalist has been intrinsically rewarding, and in a period of increasingly generous government support for basic research—extrinsic rewards, too!—there has been little reason for the most creative investigators to resist reaping these rewards.

New norms, new values have thus largely replaced the Lewinian synthesis. To overstate the case, virtuosity rather than substatice seems to have carried the day: manipulative virtuosity in the laboratory, and theoretical virtuosity in experimentally armed controversy about interpretative minutiae that are mainly relevant to the laboratory, not to social life. To be sure, the gains have been real: growth in methodological sophistication and impressive clarification of a number of important social processes and relationships. But the losses have been substantial too. As I write, it is a fair bet that countervailing trends may be afoot to redress the balance (see Ring, 1967; McGuire, 1967). The preciousness of some laboratory experimentation has come under criticism; from various quarters comes the call to invest equal ingenuity in field research, to conduct research that bears more directly on the appallingly urgent social problems of the time. (But the most difficult barriers to the solution of these problems are probably matters of political intransigence and expediency, not of lack of knowledge.)

During this period I have been an outsider to the dominant tradition of experimental social psychology, though many of my best friends—and best students—have been experimentalists; and as teacher, editor, and occasional critic I have followed the progress of experimental work, often with admiration or envy. But as I have discovered, my real investments, values, commitments in social psychology lie elsewhere. I persist, with diminishing defen-siveness, in being interested in problems of human values. While I cherish the cumulativeness of the scientific enterprise and thus look askance at some versions of “humanistic psychology” that ignore the basic differences between art and science, increasingly I favor an open pluralism of strategy. One may entertain different grades of evidence without being misled—so long as one remains critically aware of its limitations. One may glean insights and hypotheses from many sources, including common human experience and its refinement in the arts, later to be tested by firmer criteria. I am convinced that there is no royal road to Truth, not even that of the experimentalist. Truth is elusive, and we do best to converge upon it from multiple perspectives.

I persist in seeing value in heuristic conceptual maps when our methods and our knowledge cannot support more adequate theory. Some of my mapping operations have led me to cross disciplinary boundaries: social psychology remains a potential crossroads of the social sciences. Within the central territory of the discipline, I have been most concerned with the common ground that it shares with the psychology of personality. There I have favored natural history over analytical experimentation, not so much in principle (though it does seem to me that social psychology has rushed into experimentation before the tasks of naturalistic observation and description had been carried far enough) as because I find them more congenial. And repeatedly I have been drawn to look at contemporary social problems in the light of conceptual equipment borrowed from the theoretically oriented disciplines. I see merit in substantive social psychology that merges with older traditions of social interpretation, as a complement to the process-oriented social psychology that has recently dominated the scientific stage. Given the aridity of much of our research literature, I think there is a legitimate place for armchair speculation.

In most of these idiosyncrasies I have only recently come to recognize the extent of Gordon Allport’s pervasive influence. In my bumptious adolescence as a neophyte psychologist, I sometimes joined fellow graduate students or junior faculty in making fun of his idiosyncrasies; now I find that ever so many of them are my own. It is therefore only appropriate for me to dedicate this volume to his memory in filial gratitude.

The essays that I have selected for inclusion fall into five clusters. The initial group concern some of the interdisciplinary relations of social psychology: with political science, anthropology, and sociology. The first of these essays, touching political science, is my most ambitious attempt at conceptual mapping and draws upon a psychological perspective that is more fully developed in the section that follows. The second, concerning relations with anthropology, is seriously dated, since it takes no account of the “new ethnography” of componential analysis that makes provocative contact with modern cognitive psychology. But in general I would stand by my comments on the earlier and largely still persisting relationships between the disciplines. The biographical essay on Stouffer represents ties with sociology and partly repays a personal intellectual debt.

Attitudes and values as products of socialization that predispose the person to behave distinctively in social situations are the focus of the next group of papers. I have been recurrently preoccupied with this topic ever since my army apprenticeship, most substantially in collaboration with Bruner and White (Smith, Bruner, and White, 1956), as summarized in the initial essay of the section. The final paper, an empirical study of authoritarianism, provides a bridge from the study of attitudes to that of broader constellations of personality, treated in the ensuing section.

The third group of papers, on issues of personality theory, deal with three subsidiary themes. A view of the self—a favorite personality concept among social psychologists—is developed in the first two and elaborated upon in another connection in the final paper of the section. Three papers represent successive stages in my struggle with the concept of “mental health” as an evaluative perspective on personality, initially stimulated by Marie Jahoda’s provocative suggestions toward a social psychology of montai health (1950). Like many of my colleagues in psychology, but perhaps without as much personal basis in interprofessional rivalry (as a social psychologist, I am a “mental-health professional” only by courtesy and avocation), I have become progressively disenchanted with the concept—not: with the “mental” component of the term, but certainly with the medical connotations of “health.” The last two papers are my attempt at an alternative view of psychological effectiveness, drawing upon Robert .White’s valuable concept of competence (1959). The final essay, the recent ontgrowth of long productive interchange with fellow members of the Social Science Research Council Committee on Socialization and Social Structure, is my only serious venture into the terrain of socialization research.

Next come essays that deal with an assortment of social problems. The first is a contemporary polemic that brings the perspective previously developed about competence and “mental health” to bear on issues of social policy toward the psychologically disturbed. The argument is still timely as this book goes to press; hopefully it will quickly become dated. Two essays concerning problems of foreign students and foreign study reflect my association as staff to the SSRC Committee on Cross-Cultural Education in the early 1950’s. They are widely spaced in time,, and the different problems to which they are addressed mirror shifting national priorities from early in the Cold War to the recent past, when the salient problem became one of aiding the newly independent developing countries to attain educational and technical competence. The single paper on family planning gives token recognition to an issue of immense importance to which social psychologists, myself included, have paid shockingly little attention. The one on prejudice deals with a topic in which (thanks to Gordon Allport, Arnold Rose, and important people in my personal life) I have had an abiding interest but with which I have only recently come to grips in empirical research. The two recent essays that conclude the section are by-products of collaborative research on student activism, a matter of anxious concern and hope as this book is assembled. Because they focus particularly on the values and moral orientations of protesting students, they form a natural bridge to the papers of the final group, which leave the realm of basic and applied social science for a more direct consideration of humanistic values.

This last group of essays is a mixed bag lacking any hint of organizing theme. Retrospectively, though, I detect signs of a consistent point of view in the miscellaneous papers. Several of them reflect a rather old-fashio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Social Psychology and Human Values
• Some Interdisciplinary Relationships of Sockl Psychology
• Attitudes and Values
• The Self, "Mental Health," and Competence
• Humanistic Values and Psychology
• References
• Author’s Bibliography, 1938-1969
• Index