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Bruce Lerro

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by Bruce Lerro / January 9th, 2024

Summary of Part I

In Part I of my article, I described how initially the field of social psychology had deep roots in the socio-cultural traditions of Wundt, Royce, Baldwin, Cooley, Thomas and Mead. But by the beginning of World War I a shift towards individualism can be seen in the work first of the behaviorist Watson, and most powerfully in the work of Floyd Allport, Herbert Blumer and symbolic interactionists. When it came to understanding group life these social atomists only tolerated three kinds of groups:

Fleeting face-to-face groups (interactional groups)
Groups that were in laboratory situations (interactional groups)
Derived groups which were mass aggregates based on polling

Missing were reference groups. To keep all of this straight, please see the table below. In Part II of my article, I present the reference group theory’s criticisms of two more sociological social psychologists – the dialogical psychology of Ivana Markova and the social construction theory of Kenneth Gergen.

Types of Social Groups

Category of Comparison	Interpersonal Groups	Derived Social groups	Intrinsic Groups
Social structure	Small face-to-face Aggregates	Large mass aggregates Publics	Small face-to face organic groups Reference groups
Who is it directed to?	In everyday life to particular individuals	A pollster No contact with others in the poll	Roles enacted independently of particular personalities
Examples	Sexual advances, some acts of aggression or circumventing another person who is blocking a doorway	Men, women, blacks, senior citizens, deaf, unemployed, homeless (mass aggregates)	Married persons, occupational work groups A local Baptist Church, a Hells Angels club
Provision of resources	No practical resources for the formation and maintenance of identity	At its best, state provides practical resources for the formation and maintenance of identity	No practical resources for the formation and maintenance of identity
Duration of group	No institutional structure Created and dissolved in the social situation	Categories of groups remain members are born and die	Maintain institutional structure as members come and go
Ontogenetic development	Does not track purpose and development over time One cannot make a lasting developmental projects with fleeting social interactions with strangers	Does not track purpose and development over time One cannot make a lasting developmental project out of being unemployed or retired or some other demographic membership	Can create a purpose and direction in life through Rites of passage, of status elevation or reversal Routes are available for management of reputation and self-worth
Degree of depth in social identity	Superficial: Flirting Gaining temporary attention	Oppression in these groups can keep a developmental identity from getting off the ground or it could be a stimulus to improve standing in terms of race or gender.	More threats to social identity: An academic who publishes a disastrous book; a warrior who runs away; a mother who beats her children
Definition	Populations whose members merely share a common property Experimental settings	Populations whose members merely share a common property Public opinion polls	Members are bound by local subcultures who have a history together of necessary, ongoing and deepening interactions
	Fleeting Encounters in everyday life No commitment	Longstanding engagements with commitments, agreements and conventions

War Research in World War II and Migration of European Social Psychologists

Just as in World War I, World War II catalyzed applied social psychology. They studied attitudes, troop morale and adjustments to combat conditions. Kurt Lewin developed a program to persuade housewives to change their food habits to promote the sale of U.S. savings bonds. Social psychologists were also involved in the study of psychological warfare. Bruno Bettelheim studied the effect of concentration camps on prisoners of war and The Tavistock Institute in England studied the dynamics of small groups.

Thanks to the barbarity of Hitler, there was a migration of academic refugees from Western Europe including Kohler, Lazerfeld, Lewin, Asch and Leon Festinger. France and Germany lost many psychologists to the war. The result is that after the war Yankee social psychology became the center around which social psychological research was funded for decades. There was considerable funding in Yankeedom for research in small group dynamics by the Office of Naval Research. The behavior of Europeans during World War II became the focus of Hannah Arendt’s study on Eichmann on the trial in Jerusalem. In the 1950s, Asch probed the question of why people conformed. In the 1960s Stanley Milgram set up experiments as to the conditions under which people obey.

Solomon Asch and Reference Groups

The most articulate theoretical descriptions of social dimensions of cognition were offered by Solomon Asch in his text Social Psychology. According to John Greenwood, Asch understood attitudes as being constitutionally social. They arise from mutual dependence on reference groups. For example, the racial antagonism of southerners towards Blacks is not just directed at blacks. These attitudes also function as a cementing tie to their families, neighborhoods, race, jobs, their religion and political party loyalties. For Asch there is no such thing as attitudes taken separately. Asch denies that attitudes can be equated with what people have in common as Allport claimed.

In the original Asch experiment, conformity of individuals was not in response to interpersonal pressure from strangers nor were the individuals randomly selected. The extent to which people conform is connected to whether or not they know each other and have a history together. Interestingly, for members of individualist cultures, the difference between strangers and organic groups is not as great as between collectivists in-group and out-group. This results in different cross-cultural outcomes to conformity. The Japanese are more likely to conform if they are in the presence of other Japanese than Americans will in the presence of other Americans. However, the Japanese will be less conforming than Americans in the presence of strangers.

Cold War Impact on Social Psychology

According to Valsiner, the social sciences in Yankeedom throughout the 21st century have been inseparably connected with war preparation, the waging of war as well as trying to overcome the experience of war. After World War II, the US captured control over social science institutions by its power to give grants and publishing rights. This was inseparable from the crusade against communism.

Social psychology in this century has never been free of the distorting effects of wars, both hot and cold. On the whole, Greenwood writes:

the approach was ahistorical, acultural and decontextualized. (211) Socially engaged attitudes were held to represent the psychology of psychopathology of other-directed people or “groupthink“ or nesting grounds for prejudice. (217)

In terms of research, the emphasis was on studying very small chunks of social life that could be quantitatively measured. In addition, research continued to imagine itself to be atheoretical as in the social learning theory of Bandura. In the study of a group’s conformity and/or a group’s susceptibility to persuasion, aggregates were used rather than reference groups. For example:

Lewin inspired his colleagues and students to artfully reproduce theoretical variables abstracted from the dynamics of real-life social processes in artfully managed and controlled experiments. The members of his groups were strangers.(205)

In the 60s

“Bystander effect”, discovered by Latané and Darley, of strangers’ response to cries of help were interpersonal, not social. Neither the victims or the helpers were presumed to be members of distinctive social groups. The explanations offered were diffused responsibility and failure to represent the situation as an emergency. (210)

In terms of the population chosen, there was an increasing use of college students – aggregates – as opposed to ongoing reference groups.

Lastly, social psychology from the 50s forward has continued to be driven by individualism. When individualism becomes an ideology raised against collectivism as the counter-ideology, it becomes a form of political propaganda which distorts the development of social psychology. Students such as Aronson and Zimbardo continued the individualist tradition. Even in Europe, Tajfel’s theory of social identity has its roots in Festinger’s theory of social comparison. Tajfel’s theory is an individualization of the social. It proposed a cognitive theory of prejudice as opposed to Sherif’s field studies based on reference groups.

Reference groups in the 60s

Social representation works of the 60’s and 70’s were Secord, Backman and Slavitt’s book, Understanding Social Life as well as the work of Ralph Turner. Newcome and Turner’s Social Psychology: the Study of Human Interaction was a continuation of groups as reference groups. Michael Billig’s rhetorical approach to groups has done much to restore the cultural and temporal dimensions of social phenomenon. Moscovici chose Durkheim as an appropriate ancestor for his theory of representations and would be classified as sociological.

Revolt Against Individualism

Dialogical Psychology

Mead’s contention for the social nature of the mind returned in the 1970s along with the influence of European social psychology with its emphasis and the language, interpersonal dialogue and internalization of group process. Concepts such as intersubjectivity, interactional synchrony and empathy replaced Allport’s individuals who had hard boundaries around them. Dialogical theorists insisted that we have to start with the interpersonal relationships or the dyad in order to come to understand the mind of the individual. In her book Paradigms, Thought and Language Ivana Markova argues that most of Western psychology is riddled with dualisms that are the product of Descartes. These include mind-body; mind-emotions; thought-behavior; self and other and rationalism-empiricism. In order to break away from these dualisms, we must renounce Descartes and embrace Hegel.

Hegel was the first thinker to break with the dualism theory of minds and bodies of the Cartesian paradigm. For Markova, the mutual relationship between consciousness and its world evolves from abstract to concrete, from less discriminating to more discriminating structures. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind is the story of a social psychology of the cognizing mind’s development. They are arguments about the social rather than the individualistic nature of the mind and about the social nature of the acquisition of knowledge. Hegel wants to demonstrate the fundamental misconceptions of the traditional epistemology as well as its contradictory nature.

Markova takes Hegel’s five stages in the development of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Mind:

sense data
perception
understanding
self-consciousness
reason – recognition

and creates a loose connection between these stages and the development of awareness in ontogenetic development. Secondly, in her book Human Awareness, she thickens Mead’s understanding of the development of the self by adding the emotional development of empathy. She uses the work of Selman to develop a five-phase theory of perspective taken from birth to the teenage years. She fleshes out the dialectic between Mead’s I-Me dialogues by providing specific strategies that the I and the Me use.

Criticisms of Dialogical Psychology

There is the lack of connection between dialogical self-research and mainstream psychology. In part this is because the notion of dialogue has been largely neglected in psychology and other social sciences. Another disadvantage of the theory is that it lacks a research procedure that is sufficiently common to allow for the exchange of research data among investigators. Although different research tools have been developed by dialogical psychologists, none of them are used by a majority of researchers in the field. This creates stumbling blocks for comparing research data. In addition, other researchers find the scientific work done thus far too heavily weighted on language and verbal exchange. While the theory explicitly acknowledges the importance of pre-linguistic gestures and other non-linguistic forms of dialogue, the actual research is typically taking place on the verbal level. Some researchers would like to see more emphasis on the bodily aspects of dialogue.

Social constructionists challenged Yankee individualism of Allport

In the last two decades of the 20th century in psychology, controversies in social psychology have arisen between left wing “social constructionists” and most traditional social psychologists whom social constructionists have labeled “empiricists”. These mainstream social psychologists use interpersonal or derived groups. Kenneth Gergen challenged social psychology in at least five areas:

Empiricist social psychology lacks a sense of historicity.

Social psychology subjects such as socialization, the self, and persuasion techniques are presented in a universal manner as if these processes have not changed over the course of history. Gergen begins by suggesting that the major topics social psychology studies either change over the course of history or perish for lack of interest. So, for example, let’s take Goffman’s topic of behavior in public. Historically people behave differently in public depending on how the streets are constructed (if there are streets!); what transportation is available and whether the social class composition is rigid or fluid. Social realists or social reference group theory agrees with this.

Empiricists picture the social-individual relationship in a mechanical way.

Social existence is understood as a secondary, instrumental interaction, or social life is seen as a simple aggregate of individual wills. These social atomists reduce the group to a fleeting, ephemeral aggregate which evaporates when individuals decide to dissolve their social contract. Gergen suggests that the relationship between the social and individual is co-creative and already always the case. Social reference groups theory agrees with socially constructionists on this.

Empiricists ignore the political power dynamics that go on between stratified groups—class, race and gender—in everyday life.

For example, in social psychology textbooks, inter-group relationships are treated at the end of the textbook. This implies that there are no race or class relationships in the topics of the earlier chapters such as socialization, emotions or the construction of the self.

Empiricists treat language in a descriptive way and fail to consider the manipulative nature of language.

Allport and other individualist social psychologists treat language as a simple exchange of information between equals. This ignores that people coerce, use force and mass persuasion techniques to get their way. Besides description, there are other functions of language or micro-manipulation techniques (Cialdini, Influence) that Austin points out such as commands, questions, promises, requests and expressives that go unaddressed by empiricists.

Empiricists fail to consider that social life cannot be captured in laboratories.

Lab experiments are contrived and don’t test complex social processes. According to social constructionists, social psychology does not lend itself to experimentation because of the difficulty in reproducing the meaning of everyday situations in social psychology experiments. Because social studies are more of an in-vivo construction, it cannot be objectively recorded. In order to capture it in a lab the process is slowed down and simplified. When people know they are in a contrived situation, they do not react the same way they might in a natural setting. Yet if you try to do experiments in natural settings, it is more difficult to control for all the variables which might affect the outcome.

Social Reference Criticisms of Social Constructivism

According to Greenwood, up to a point social constructionism is a justifiable reaction to the individualism and social reductionism of Allport. However:

Social constructionists overstate the subjective agency of individuals and understate the importance of group loyalties that constrain individuals — family, religion, occupational roles and club memberships.

Greenwood criticizes social constructionists such as Graumann, Danziger and Farr because they lose the concreteness of group loyalties of reference groups by dissolving social life into language and cognition. As we saw earlier, social life is much more specific and tangible than the ethereal linguistic of social relations generally presented by social-constructionists.

Social constructionists overemphasize the importance of language

What is the relationship between language, society and the individual? Because language is a necessary condition for sociality in humans, social constructionists jump to the conclusion that it is language that creates social structures. Normally we think of our language as a description of the world and a map for getting around in it. Social constructionists understand language exchange not as a collaborative effort to understand the world but an artifact through which we decide what counts as an object. An extreme version of constructionism argues that language is not about the world but a living record of the power struggles between derived social groups—class, race and gender struggles. Social identity is inseparable from the social processes of language to negotiate and manipulate, using rhetoric or propaganda. For Gergen, social dimensions of phenomena such as political stratification and economic exchange are not intrinsic properties and real in themselves independent of language, but functions of our linguistic or cognitive constructs of them.

Social Constructionists fail to understand the power of intrinsic groups to stabilize social identity

For social constructionists social identities are constructed out of socially negotiated forms of discourse. There is nothing more to identity than social discourse. They deny the intrinsically social nature of identity or that social emotions form out of loyalty to socially intrinsic groups. As most feminists recognize, changes in vocabulary, by itself, will not ensure the creation of alternative occupations, membership in clubs or higher status positions in religious groups. Greenwood points out that the Hungarian language is entirely non-sexist. One can only refer to a third party by their non-gender. Despite this, Hungary is not known for having a large number of women in the paid work-force. The social identity of a scientist doesn’t come into being and pass away depending on how people talk to him and how he talks to them in the course of a single day. The social identity of a scientist involves actions such as publication in internationally refereed journals, by peer replication of significant results and the attainment of prestigious positions.

Social constructionists fail to understand the power of intrinsic groups (reference group) to understand the social nature of emotions

Constructionists say theoretical discourse “about” emotions does not describe independent psychological states but is rather employed to serve social performing functions such as warning, excusing or endorsing. For example, claiming to be depressed is employed to excuse one’s behavior or elicit sympathy rather than to describe one’s psychological state. Talk about mental talk is largely performative. Language does not map an independent reality. Social constructions argue that emotions come from the labeling process involved in language use.

Social constructionists assume nothing more than that reified social labels exist which are socially constructed. This ignores the fact that emotions are socially constituted for purposes connected to the conventions of long-standing social groups. For example, for a man to be able to admit they are hurt or sad rather than angry in an Anger Management class may be transformative for the man as an individual in opening up a greater range of emotions. The same is true of women who can learn to say they are angry instead of being “upset”. However, both men and women have to face their reference groups who may not like men who express hurt or humiliation or women who express anger. Those reference group loyalties and expectations are not going to dissolve just because these individual men and women have gone to therapy.

The social constitution of emotions from reference groups

Beneath the froth: unconscious grounding of socially constituted emotions

The socially constituted nature of emotions does not include all emotions. Emotions such as physiological pain or sensations like itching or hunger are not discussed. The non-social emotions are also excluded like rage or fear that we share with non-social, non-linguistic animals.

Socially constituted emotions are grounded by three deeper levels. First, different cultures take pride in different things such as home-building, virginity, academic achievements or birds they have bred. Second are the social conventions and agreements about how to behave in these settings. What is expected and how to play one’s role in a reference group within a culture. Thirdly, within this reference group we are motivated to be included, hold prestige, be honored and respected, have a good reputation, achieve power or have responsibilities. These commitments have been identified in all ages and cultures. On the other hand, we would prefer not to be excluded, degraded, nor appear offensive to others. To summarize, social emotions are grounded in what an entire culture finds a worthy activity; the commitments in our reference group shares within the culture and the social motivations that follow from them. None of this necessarily involves social labeling of emotions that social constructions make so much of.

Long standing human emotions like shame, remorse, pride, envy, jealously, anger, guilt and disappointment are socially constituted. Shame does not occur in us spontaneously and independently of imagined evaluation by our reference groups. Shame has to be taught. Parents would wait a lifetime for purely spontaneous expressions of shame in their children. We have to learn to represent and come to treat certain classes of actions or failure to act as degrading and humiliating and reflecting negatively on our identity. Initially epileptic seizures are reacted to by the epileptic with distress and fear. Only later is the epileptic taught to label their arousal as shame, pride or disappointment.

The depth of our social identities – what events trigger in us such as pride, shame or indifference – are connected to the presence of our loyalties to constituted groups and the social virtues we aspire to within them. Cheating on an exam will inspire more disgust in a teacher than would theft upset a cashier at a market. Failure to support a comrade in the military means more to a soldier than to a lawyer who fails to support another lawyer. Such characteristically human emotions and motives do not simply occur in atomistic isolation.

Social constructivists enmesh the relationship between individualism and empirical research methods

Social constructionists dismiss all experimental methods as inherently individualist. Constructionists and phenomenologists argue that the experimental approach is narrowly restricted because cognitive structures used to develop the research design are already products of society and a specific historical trajectory—individualistic.

For example:

Samuelson explains why social psychologists settled on experimental method because of pressure to publish or perish which encouraged swift, piecemeal unread and unreadable publications loaded on method but with little meaning. (227) Actual social groups were gradually replaced by hypothetical groups that had a purely statistical reality. (224)

Greenwood is skeptical that by itself, commitment to more sophisticated statistical techniques was responsible for the abandonment of a more sociological social psychology. The reason was because its neglect is at least as old as the interwar years. It is true that the development of American social psychology was affected by grant funding agencies such as Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, Sage and the Office of Naval Research. The Ford and Sage foundations were unlikely to fund research that would undermine psychological foundations of autonomy and political liberal individualism. It is also true that social psychologists were steered by these agencies in a direction of small groups rather than large groups and their power dynamics. However, Greenwood says, these factors seem insufficient to explain the specific neglect of the reference group. Social and political factors may explain why American social psychology focused on certain topics at the expense of others (why aggression became a topic) but not at the neglect of the social dimensions of the topics studied. (Why some classes, religions, region of the United States are more aggressive than others).

As Greenwood argues:

the problem was not that experimental method precluded studying the social dimensions of human psychology, but because of the impoverished conception of social groups that came to inform experimental programs of American social psychology. (160)

All experiments of science are not, in their nature, individualist. As mentioned earlier, the experimental methods of social psychologists such as Sherif, Asch and Milgram all captured some very deep truths about our sociality using experimental methods that were far from contrived. Asch traced social group orientation to the role they played by reference groups. Secondly, it is important to understand why there aren’t more studies using reference groups as a base for experiments, not dispensing with experiments, per se.

Greenwood insists that the possibility of experimental social psychology should be directed at the exploration of socially engaged psychological states based on reference groups. It is legitimate and achievable. Individuals do not have to be reduced to individual psychological states in order to be analyzed using research methods. One of the virtues of experimental role-playing is its potential ability to reproduce the social demands of everyday life rather than the peculiar demands of ambiguous laboratory experiments employing deception. The social dimensions of human psychology could be studied experimentally as long as the subjects in experimental groups were pre-selected members of reference social groups.

Social constructionists have misunderstood the place of pragmatism in American social psychology

The original pragmatists Peirce, James, Dewey and Mead were all pro-science and used the experimental method. With the possible exception of William James, all would have criticized Allport and the empiricists as being individualistic (Mead, Dewey) and nominalist (Peirce). Yet none of them would have criticized the very idea of conducting experiments. In social psychology both Sherif and William Thomas were committed pragmatists and Sherif’s work on inter-group relationship was experimental.

When social constructivists and phenomenologists claim the mantle of pragmaticism as their own, they are taking into the bargain a more idealist version of pragmaticism of Richard Rorty.

Social Constructionists overly politicize the field of social psychology in order to understand the predominance of individualist social psychology

Lastly, there is no necessary relationship between the socio-political orientation of the scientists and whether or not they are for or against the experimental method. For example, Sherif and Asch were both socialists yet both were committed to the scientific method. The idea of linking science to capitalism and proposing that only liberals portray science in a favorable light as a problem is a product of the New Left in the 60s, the Frankfurt School and the legacy of Western Marxism which had severed its hopes for a place of science in its vision of the future.

Overview of the History of Yankee Social Psychology

Starting with continental Europe in the middle of the 19th century, social psychology was concerned with how society was imported into the mind of the individual to create an internalized social life. These were the concerns of Adam Smith and David Hume. In Germany Herder (with language) and Herbert (with Folk psychology) continued the emphasis in cross-cultural comparisons of social life. Espinas and Darwin drew references between humans and other animals. Darwin compared the gestures and emotional life of humans and chimps. Espinas compared the social life of humans to the social life of insects. What is provocative is that for the first 60 years of psychology (1850-1900) social psychology was comparative psychology (with other animals), cultural and dominated by Europe. There was no individualism in social psychology nor was it prevalent in the United States.

A transition figure beginning in the 1880s was Wilhelm Wundt who wanted to study the psychology of individuals in laboratories while at the same time developing his own version of cross-cultural psychology. Individualism came out in its brashest form in the social Darwinism of Spencer in England and Sumner in the United States. The avalanche towards individualist social psychology began the pragmatist work of William James and erupted into full scale ideologies in the form of Watson’s behaviorism. Two different forms of individualist psychology began to develop on separate sides of the Atlantic just before the outbreak of war:

Behaviorism in the US (perspective of the observer)
Gestalt perception theory in Germany (perspective of the actor)

Both forms of psychology agreed that the starting point of social psychology ought to be within the individual. The differences were that behaviorism examined conduct and gestalt probed human perception. Between the wars Floyd Alport’s behaviorism insisted that there was nothing in social life that could not be explained by individual psychology. This included public opinion and rumors.

It is tempting to imagine that this individualist version of social psychology went unopposed in this time period, but that is not the case. Alongside the behaviorism and social atomism of Floyd Allport and the individualist symbolic interaction of Blumer, there was a tendency toward a continuation of a sociological social psychology which inherited and developed the ideas of Adam Smith and David Hume. The work of Baldwin, Cooley, Thomas and Mead kept the sociological social psychology alive in the United States. At the same time, in Russia the work of Vygotsky built upon and expanded the work of Mead. Vygotsky and his comrades Luria and Leontiev developed the first explicitly socialist psychology which included a continuation of comparative psychology, added a historical dimension to social psychology, explained the social origin of higher mental functions and developed a cooperative theory of learning (through the zone of proximal development).

During the 1920s and 1930s individualist social psychology continued in the field of mass behavior in the form of Walter Lippman’s pessimistic book, Public Opinion. Sociological social psychology responded with Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism, and Bettelheim’s writings on the psychology of concentration camp victims. Undeterred by the horrors of war in Europe, behaviorist social psychology continued blithely along churning out public opinion polls, including attitudes about everything but power politics and political economy.

During World War II many European social psychologists fled Europe and contributed some of the best research on group dynamics. This included Asch’s experiment on conformity, and Sherif’s experiments on inter-group conflict. This was followed in the 60s by Moscovici’s study on the power of minorities to influence majorities and Milgram’s great experiment on obedience.

By the 1960s radical behaviorism went into decline. Goffman’s work on stigma, life in mental institutions, focused groups and behavior in public added a Durkheimian slant to a wide variety of social life. Up until the 1960s the field of crowd psychology was dominated by the legacy of the right wing ideas of Le Bon and called by later theorists “mass hysteria theory”. New crowd theorists developed two more moderate competing theories – “emergent norm theory” and “structural functionalist theory”. By the early 1970s more radical left-wing theories of crowds developed largely from the experience of crowds during the social movement of the 60s. My discussion of crowd psychology can be found in my article Crowds, Masses and Movements: Right-Wing and Left-Wing Macro Social Psychology.

In the 80s and 90s behaviorist individualist empiricism was attacked in its description of how people were socialized by two new forms. One that emerged out of Europe was the dialogical self of Hermans and Markova. The second one from the US is in Kenneth Gergen’s social constructionism. Meanwhile in the late 1990s John Greenwood sought to revive the reference group theory of Asch and Sherif. From this position he criticized both dialogical psychology and social constructionism. Lastly, individualist social psychology has become more cognitive rather than behavioral. The work of Festinger on cognitive dissonance theory was carried on by Aronson and Zimbardo.

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his four books: From Earth-Spirits to Sky-Gods: the Socio-ecological Origins of Monotheism, Individualism and Hyper-Abstract Reasoning Power in Eden: The Emergence of Gender Hierarchies in the Ancient World Co-Authored with Christopher Chase-Dunn Social Change: Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present and Lucifer's Labyrinth: Individualism, Hyper-Abstract Thinking and the Process of Becoming Civilized He is also a representational artist specializing in pen-and-ink drawings. Bruce is a libertarian communist and lives in Olympia WA.

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LUCID VOICES
Bruce Lerro

YANKEE MICRO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY PART I

Individualism and its Social Shadows

BY BRUCE LERRO / PERSPECTIVES / 19 DEC 2023

Orientation

Developing a Marxist social psychology is a very important aspect of explaining what is going on within the individual in relation to society as well as what is going on in small group interactions between themselves. What we find when we examine social psychology in Yankeedom is what you might suspect, and that is social contract theory. Here the individual is understood prior to and the center of attention. The group is secondary and derivative and attached to the individual as something voluntary and accidental. This is opposed to a Marxian understanding of society as necessary, involuntary and causal. My two articles follow the work of John Greenwood and other social reference theorists and their attempt to expose the individualist nature of Yankee social psychology. While social reference theory is not Marxist it is deeply social in the way that is similar to the work of George Herbert Mead and well worth studying.

This article emerged from my lecture notes for a course I taught in social psychology. I felt that students needed to know the history of the field and since there were no books that covered the full two hundred years, I thought I’d write my own. For the early history I used Gustav Jahoda’s book A History of Social Psychology. For the early social psychologists I referenced Jaan Valsiner and Rene Van der Veer’s work The Social Mind. For the rise of individualism in social psychology, I used Robert Farr’s The Roots of Modern Social Psychology. The social reference orientation of John D. Greenwood is the heart of both Part I and Part II. His books are The Disappearance of the Social In American Social Psychology and Realism, Identity and Emotion. I’ve relied on two wonderful books by Ivana Markova to represent the dialogical self in Part II. They are Paradigms Thought and Language and Human Awareness.

My article is divided into two parts. In part I describe how the early social psychologists were very social in their study of the social-individual relationship. People like Wundt, Royce, James, Baldwin, Cooley, Thomas and Mead, as different as they were, all agreed that the individual was constitutionally social. Then beginning with behaviorists, Floyd Allport, Herbert Blumer and symbolic interactionists and the rise of experimental groups, social-individual dynamic was recalibrated in individualist ways. In part II I describe the return of the social to-social psychology with the work of the theory of reference groups. At the hands of John Greenwood, using experimental groups composed of strangers is criticized as a way of understanding social groups. At the same time Greenwood’s reference group orientation criticizes two left wing social psychology theories, the dialogical psychology of Ivana Markova social constructionism of Kenneth J. Gergen.

Sociogenetic thought in the United States: late 19^thto early 20^thcentury

What is the folk psychology of Wilhelm Wundt?

German psychology was the opposite of British empiricism, atomism that later characterized individualist social psychology in Yankeedom. Instead, for reducing the individual to the lowest elements – pain-pleasure, associations – the Germans started from the complex and refused to reduce it to the simple.

How much can you tell about the psychology of the individual by the things they make – pictures, writing, books read as well as the material they leave behind? We might say quite a bit. But what about the psychology of what a culture leaves behind in the way of tools, language, art, mythology? Are these the products of a collective mind? Why should this collective mind not have the same reality as the individual one? Folk psychologists thought it should. Volker psychology was devoted to the study of the mental products of social communities. These principles were first articulated by Herder and Vico and then carried on by Lazarus in 1851 and then by Wilhelm Wundt.

Wundt wanted to study the developmental history of the collective human soul in the mental products it left behind. To do this he studied tribal and ancient societies from around the world. Wundt filled ten volumes of folk psychology between 1900 – 1920. He thought the comparative-historical methods of folk psychology are at least as objective and scientific as the methods of experimental psychology. Why is this? Introspection was rejected because it will not tell us about the historical dimension of the individual which folk psychology addresses. Furthermore, introspection captures fleeting assessments which do not even cover the ontogenesis of the individual, let alone the historical dimension.

Yankee pragmaticism

Valsiner tells us that major social changes were afoot at the end of the 19^thcentury, including:

Industrialization – Late 19^th and early 20^th century social science was obsessed with the problem of alienation. It’s unifying theme was the destructive result of industrialization which was eliminating the traditional small town and destroying the community based on personal ties.
Increase in urbanization (NYC grew twelve-fold during the 1890s).
Increases in immigrant populations.
Efforts toward racial and moral purification.
Evangelicalism, including campaigns for social hygiene against venereal diseases.
Progressive political era filled with “muckraking” which lasted until 1916.

Out of this malestream of changes it became difficult to contemplate the search for truth as independent of human wants and needs. To the extent that the American people could tolerate philosophy at all, this philosophy would need to be down-to-earth and practical, based on what could people do. The truth of philosophy should be measured against its consequences.

The authentic test for truth is if it works in action. This need was a match made in heaven for philosophers like John Dewey and William James. James characterized the universe as like a joint stock company and our action in the market is a real factor in the course of events. As we shall see shortly, the advent of pragmatism led to the diminishing of an emphasis on dialectical synthesis that Royce and Baldwin had been developing out of the Hegelian tradition.

In spite of the climate of social Darwinism in the 2^nd half of the 19^thcentury, social theorist Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and in War,Graham Wallas in The Great Society, Our Social Heritage and in both Hobhouse’s Mind in Evolution and Development and Purpose maintained that evolved human intelligence enables humans to surmount the limitations of their biological heritage. What united these first great micro-social psychologists was the search to understand by what process social life was internalized by individuals.

Josiah Royce and James Mark Baldwin

For philosopher Josiah Royce the internalization of society into subjective life

allows the person to construct subjectivity (what the individual wants) in terms of a contrast with his dialectical opposite (what he thinks others expect of him) The development of the self takes place through constructive imitation that builds ever more complex oppositions on the basis of new social experiences. Internalization is the process by which social experiences become functional in the self-system.

For James Mark Baldwin, a person’s actual self makes constant effort set against the constant resistance in the actual world. Complex imitation involves increasing experimentation with different aspects of a situation and going beyond it. Play, art and fiction are examples where the situation is used as a scaffold to make new things.

Baldwin argued there are 3 stages of child social perception:

Projective – is conscious of others but not herself—people are objects.
Subjective – also conscious of himself – people are special objects, active but arbitrary.
Ejective – conscious of others as similar to herself, they are social fellows.

Baldwin was very ambitious and also attempted to harness individual development to social evolution. He suggested that whole societies could be at a certain stage of cognitive development. The stages were:

Prelogical (diffused) – primitive societies
Logical (differentiated, hierarchical) integration – differentiation oppositions
Hyper-logical – dialectical synthesis – affective generalization – modern societies

Baldwin ran into trouble with cultural relativists because this characterization of people in primitive societies made them less developed mentally. However, he laid the foundation for the study of child development undertaken later by Piaget and Vygotsky.

Cooley and Thomas

Cooley was a master of what has been called “sympathetic introspection”. He provided narrative accounts of “stories” individuals told themselves as they were participating in their social worlds. Cooley was the first to distinguish “primary” face-to-face” groups such as play groups of children from families and neighborhoods and socialization forces which the individual identifies as “we”. A person puts himself into intimate contact with various sorts of persons and allows them to be aware in himself of a life similar to their own. Larger, anonymous groups to which there is little affinity might be called a “they” or an “it” group.

These socialization groups help to build what Cooley called a “looking glass self” which he divided into three parts:

How we imagine we appear to other people
How we imagine they are reacting to us
The accompanying emotional reaction – pride or dismay

While Cooley and Baldwin distinguished primary from secondary groups in general, they failed to give explicit categorization to other social groups such as aggregates, reference groups or collectivities.

Lastly, sociologist William Thomas pointed out that objective social truths do not guarantee in the slightest that people will follow them. He famously said if human beings define situations as real, they are real in their consequences regardless of whether they are objectively true or not. A good example of this is racism. If physical anthropologists could control our vocabulary, they would abolish the word “race”. Why? Because scientifically it has no meaning. Because of the intense mating between races over the last thousands of years – much of it forced – whatever significant genetic differences between races which might have existed no longer exist. Yet this does not stop people from deciding not to marry someone because they want to maintain their “racial purity”. As long as people believe in this and act accordingly, the more racism becomes a social fact, regardless of whether or not there is a genetic basis for it.

George Herbert Mead

Darwinian beginnings

Though Mead was a social psychologist, he started with Darwin. He was a comparative

psychologist in his whole approach to social psychology. This approach can be seen in his reference to the behavior of snakes, insects, birds, cats, dogs, horses, cows and the higher primates. Mead asked how is it that an immaterial mind can arise from a material world? Furthermore, by what process can immaterial thoughts result in material actions? Mead saw Darwin’s theory of evolution as a new beginning, an alternative to both mechanistic explanations of the physical sciences and the teleological explanations of idealists and spiritualists.

Mead drew from Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals as well as on Wundt’s work to develop importance of gestures in socialization. In the winter semester of 1888-1889 Mead enrolled in Wundt’s classes in Leipzig, Germany. Later, in his own work, Mead showed gestures were systems of social relationships, not isolated expressions. He was very interested in the relationship between the hand and the development of the central nervous system.

Social origin of mind

Mead was critical of Wundt for presupposing mind in his physiological psychology. Mind, the basis of Wundt’s experimental science can only be the mind of an individual. Mead thought the mind was social in its origins.Mead shows how mind emerges naturally from the conversation of gestures that occurs at the lowest level in the evolutionary scale. When a person speaks, she speaks to herself as well as to others. Mead agrees that it is possible to have society without minds, for example in insect social organization, but not mind without a society.

Furthermore, Mead showed how the self does not evolve out of itself in isolation but is a product of social interaction. This actual social interaction is then internalized into the form of roles. While studying at Harvard Mead was more influenced by Royce than William James. Cooley introduced Mead to the writings of Adam Smith, (Theory of Moral Sentiments) who is the source of Mead’s idea about assuming the role of the other. According to Smith in everyday market transitions buyers and sellers assume each other roles by imaging what they might say. In assuming the role of the other with regard to ourselves, we become an object to ourselves. Our awareness of others is a necessary prerequisite to our awareness of self (Markova, Human Awareness). Mead showed how an actress, in the course of interacting might incorporate the perspective of the other in her own perspective and become an object to herself, become self-conscious rather than merely conscious.

Mead was trying to create a theory of meaning which is midway between introspectionists on the one hand and behaviorists on the other. Meaning should be more action-oriented than the introspectionists’ views of Wundt, but more mentalistic than the behaviorists. He drew from Wilhelm Dilthey in arguing that meaning is not derived from the individual but within existing systems of relationships.

Types of play, generalized other, biographical selves and I-me dialogues.

Environments can change in uncontrollable ways such as an earthquake, but the organism involves itself in a social process that follows such sudden changes and reconstructs new adaptive environments. It is in this process that social institutions emerge. Other selves stand upon different bases from that of physical objects. Physical objects are merely objects of perception, while the other selves are perceiving subjects as well as perceived objects. Mead agreed with Cooley about the importance of play groups. In fact it was in play groups that children were first socialized through both let’s pretend play and what Mead called the game. Both these forms of play taught children to develop role-making (pretend play) and role-taking (designed play). The socialization of the individual included cultivating an objective self – what Mead called “the generalized other” – and a subjective self – which he called the biographical self.

These two identities became internalized by the middle of childhood through dialogue with each other. Most situations require the individual to balance out the needs of the subjective side: “what do I want in the situation” and from the objective side “what do others expect of me”. Mead labeled the side that weighs what others expect him to do, the “me” side and the part that defends their immediate self-interest is the “I” part. The internal conversation Mead called “I-me” dialogues.

Beyond Descartes Dualism

Markova points out that the histories of Western philosophy are often accounts of the epistemological conflict between rationalism and empiricism and we are asked to choose between them. Such histories obscure the fact that these rival philosophies are both mutually exclusive opposites within a larger system of Descartes. Thanks to Descartes we have the following dualisms:

Cartesian dualisms

Mind	Category of comparison	Body
Knower	Epistemology	Known
Isolated individual	Inner-outer world	Outer world
Self	Social relationships	Others
Rationalism	Epistemological system	Empiricism
Cognitivism	Theories of social psychology	Behaviorism
Chomsky	Study of language theorists	Watson, Skinner
Syntactic Structure	Books about language	Verbal Behavior

As a philosopher, Mead sought to overcome Cartesian dualism in all its forms.

The real incompatibility is not between rationalism and empiricism, but between the paradigms of Descartes and Hegel. Mead, Wundt and Vygotsky were part of a tradition that goes back to Herder, Humboldt and Hegel. For them humanity was constitutionally social with social life being responsible for creating language, the mind and the self. In referring to the history of modern psychology, Markova says that between 1912 and 1920 psychology books were written as if behaviorism had laid to rest the ghost of Descartes with behaviorism’s own anti-cognitive stance. But psychologists did nothing of the kind. For Watson, how the mind interacts with the body is to be found now in the larynx rather than in the pineal gland of Descartes. But this was not a full-blown revolution. Behaviorism just switched from the rationalist, mind side of Descartes to the empiricist action side of dualities. They really just switched to the opposite pole within the same tradition. When psychology became a “science of behavior” it did not progress beyond Cartesian dualism.

Language

The same is true for language. The social nature of language is undermined whether one accepts the rationalism of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structure or the empiricism of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. What both have in common is a physiological search for the mind. The psycholinguistic traditions in the study of language and thought derive from Descartes rather than from Hegel. Speech for Mead is social not physiological. Mead suggests the origin of mind is not in the brain but is in language. It is the person’s inner speech that creates the autonomy of the self. This is in contrast to Watson who treats thinking as sub-vocal speech. It’s potentially detectable as minute innervations in the larynx.

Mead is rightly grouped with pragmatists such as James, Dewey and Peirce but there are important differences between them. Peirce and Mead are more social in their theory of truth. As Lewis and Smith point out in American Sociology and Pragmatism:

The lines of influence run from Peirce; Royce to Mead. Epistemological, Dewey and James were nominalists; Pierce and Mead were realists. The social psychology of Mead is closer to the pragmatics of Peirce than it is to either the pragmatism of James or the instrumentalism of Dewey. Mead socialized Dewey’s philosophy in his book Philosophy of the act. (66-68)

Please see my article Collectivist, individualist and Communist Selves Part I for more detail about this section and Mead.

Invasion of individualist social psychology

Wundt’s Folk Psychology is rejected in the US

Between 1865 and 1914 something like 10,000 Americans studied in Germany. However, the rise of pragmatism in philosophy and behaviorism in psychology both emphasized the individual and laboratoryexperiments to the neglect of a comparative historical and cross-cultural psychology. With behaviorism, the model for studying human behavior was natural science, not social science. The split between the two approaches was amplified by World War I where the United States and Germany fought on different sides. Wundt’s increasingly vociferous support for German nationalism cut him off from his many former students in the US. After World WWI, the central relevance of Germany as the source of knowledge was in steep decline.

As we saw earlier Wundt had his hands in both experimental psychology and folk psychology. But his students in the US, along the historians of psychology ignored Wundt’s Folk Psychology. According to Lewis and Smith,

Most of Wundt’s American students almost completely ignored folk psychology which were grounded in alien philosophical tradition of Leibniz and Kant, not Locke, Hume, Mill or Berkeley. It is not widely known that Wundt also wrote ten volumes of Volk psychology between 1900 and 1920. The fact that historians of psychology have overlooked the folk psychology of Wundt even though he developed it earlier than his experimental work is a good example of American psychology’s efforts to deny its humanistic, historical roots in favor of the ideals of the physical sciences (45)

The reduction of Wundt to a laboratory psychologist was deepened by a student of Wundt, Titchener. Titchener gave an empirical , associationist twist to Wundt’s philosophy of mind.

Wundt’s Legacy

Both social constructionists (more on them later) and social atomists (Allport and other behaviorists) want to claim Wundt as their own. But contrary to the experimentalists’ claims, Wundt did not come to folk psychology in his old age (implying that only an enfeebled old man could be interested in such things). His interest in folk psychology existed throughout his life. Even schools of later periods (cognitive psychology in the 1950s) and cross-cultural psychology in the 1990s distanced themselves from Wundt’s folk psychology.

On the other hand, social constructionists claim Wundt as their own because it seemed that by advocating for a folk psychology he was renouncing the experimental work he did in the lab. In fact, Wundt was interested in both all throughout his life. Wundt did not suggest that the folk community had a life of its own, a super-mental mind independent of the mental life of individuals. According to Greenwood, Wundt insisted that higher cognitive processes were grounded in neurophysiologic systems of individuals.

Behaviorism denies consciousness as a field of social study

Watson attacked the imprecision in the calibration of the introspectionist research instrument. Watson wanted to rid psychology of consciousness, self and mind. Instead, he wanted to focus on what could be measured precisely. Since at the time measuring behavior made more sense than tracking individuals’ self-reports. His manifesto was comparable to other social purification efforts that were occurring at the time in the United States. Watson’s call for a revolution in psychology was supported by Dewey and James.

The advancement of the behaviorist tradition in America led to the narrowing of the discipline of psychology in the following ways:

The issue of the social nature of the mind disappeared from the discourse of American psychologists. Most of the sociogenetic thinking became “exiled” into other areas of social sciences.
The study of the higher mental functions was ignored.
The cross-cultural differences in psychological states were neglected.
The impact of history on psychological processes was ignored.
The Darwinian side of psychology was neglected by behaviorists.

Yet behaviorism widened psychology in other ways. For example, the study of the behavior of animal species compared to the functions of human behavior was scandalous to humanists and religious evangelicals but it had the blessing of the pragmatists. The combination of pragmatism and behaviorism constituted an ideological take-over of American psychology.

Mead’s legacy is misunderstood: Herbert Blumer and the symbolic interactionists

As famous and respected as he is now, Mead had little influence over the historical development of social psychology because he was a Hegelian and social psychology developed within a Cartesian paradigm. Also, Mead followed Peirce instead of the more individualist James and Dewey as did his fellow sociologists at Chicago.

Mead did not win many followers for himself because at a time when social psychologists were demanding more precision Mead referred to society in at least three different ways:

as represented social groups
as people as co-present in social interaction
as society as a whole

When Mead died in 1931 his course on social psychology was taken over by Herbert Blumer and the course changed substantially. The problem today is that many social psychologists present Mead’s work as more or less synonymous with the work of Herbert Blumer. But as we shall see, Blumer, like Thomas and Cooley, was a psychic interactionist with their roots firmly planted in the social contract theory of Rousseau. Blumer was able to see how Mead’s social psychology opposed Watsonian behaviorism, but he failed to appreciate the radical differences between the psychical interactionism of Thomas and Cooley as opposed to the social realism of Mead. He proposed a psychological social psychology which views interpretive interaction as the source of social organization.

Let’s review these differences in detail. According to Greenwood, Blumer moved increasingly away from the organicist, Darwinian model of Mead in favor of a more phenomenological orientation. Reference to interaction between organic and psychical phenomenon have virtually disappeared in Blumer’s work.

One place this can be seen is when we consider the difference between Mead’s “attitude” and Blumer’s “role”. For Mead, an attitude partly refers to a physiological base. Blumer’s role is completely social and has no physiological foundation and is more dramatological as in Goffman.

Thirdly, Blumer’s depiction of the social order was local, situational and voluntaristic. For Blumer, the active part of society appears to be no more than what is negotiated in every situation. For Blumer, a larger social order exists but only as a parameter for voluntaristic action or a power to be avoided. While there is no better “process sociologist than Mead, he didrecognize there is a relatively permanent social order which exists independently of local situations. Just like Peirce’s general laws of nature and the objective existence of the scientific community, so society is a whole that, while not independent of all individuals, is more than each taken separately.

Fourth, for Blumer, whether the social order is engaged at the micro or the macro level, social life is external to the individual. For Mead, society at all levels is already always inside of people and it is not anything that could be negotiated. Fifth, for Mead the self consists of a never-ending dialectic between the self as a subject (biographical self) and the self as an object (how I imagine others see me). According to Greenwood, there is no place in Blumer’s theory for Mead’s generalized other or collective conscience. There exist only so many individual consciences co-adapting to each other from autonomous positions. There are only flesh and blood individuals who must calculate one’s actions but not an internalized socialization. It seems that for Blumer all of social life is negotiated by the individual.

Fifth, for Mead, meaning is grounded in significant symbols for society. They are universal and objective. They have an existence which is independent of whether this or that individual negotiates what they mean or how they are interpreted. Symbols are antecedent to their use. They exist before people are born will be there when the person dies. Meaning is based on performance which results from long-standing gestures. These meanings can be unconscious and sometimes physiological. Human beings act towards things on the basis of meanings that things have for them. But for Mead, Peirce, Durkheim and all realists, there is no such thing as meaning for me as there is for Blumer and the symbolic interactionists who followed him. There is only meaning for us.

Blumer undermined Mead’s social theory of meaning by making meanings dependent upon subjective imagination (Cooley) rather than on the objective, communal character of significant symbols. This meant that the meaning of symbols emerged through the gestures and interpretations of individuals as they interact. Meaning is based, not on gestures or performance but through the interpretation of words. Because meanings are negotiated with others there is no room for an unconscious processing of symbols. Everything takes place at a conscious level.

Blumer’s emphasis on interpretation makes it difficult for making social psychology to be a science because:

For Stryker, interpretations are an extremely undesirable terminus for the explanation of human behavior. They are undesirable because there are no laws of interpretation. Without laws we can never say the interpretation a was a necessary or sufficient condition for the appearance of act b. (178)

On the whole, Mead was more expansive than Blumer. His claimed that human beings were a product of two larger forces, evolutionary Darwinism on one hand and the macro-structure of society on the other. While Mead did not discuss larger social institutions very much he still understood them to be present inside individuals. Blumer was more of a micro psychological social psychologist and far more interested in how people make sense of things when they meet face to face. Blumer treated Darwinian and macro-sociological forces as unimportant. Please see my table at the end of this article for a summary.

Floyd Allport’s individualist social psychology

Decline of Darwinism

Continuing Watson’s separation of human beings from Darwin, Allport’s textbook Social

Psychology ignored its comparative psychological framework on the social life of insects including wasps, bees, ants and termites. Instead:

The laboratory replaced the field as the preferred location of observing the behavior of animals.
The number of different species being studied was dramatically reduced to rats and pigeons.

Unlike Allport, social scientists at Chicago University were very much concerned with studying the metropolis. They produced urban studies on crime, juvenile delinquency and mental illness. They studied anomie and egoism in the strictly Durkheimian sense. Yet, though Durkheim’s understanding of society was the opposite of Allport’s behaviorism, what they had in common was a rejection of Darwin.

Social Atomism

Floyd Allport was an unrelenting critic of any social psychological attempt to attribute any agency to social processes beyond the individual. Allport’s methodological individualism made him hypersensitive to personifications, objectifications or reifications of society. He attacked any kind of social group as if it were a group mind of crowd psychologists.

What was social was an abstract concept of what people had in common. This is a Humean description of empirical invariance. This ignores that:

People can have common beliefs with others that do not originate in interpersonal relations. For example, they could be rooting for a professional sports team.
There are some interpersonal acts that are not common such as acts of rape or aggression.
People’s common beliefs can have a developmental history rooted in reference groups like region of the country, occupation or religion.

Allport’s commitment to behaviorism limited him to an empiricist conception of science. His behaviorist perspective played a significant role in his rejection of theories of the social reference groups states because they were often in the physical absence of actual members. His behaviorism precluded treating representative products rather than social stimuli.

Allport perceived any understanding of social life that claims existence beyond the psychology of individuals as a threat to his cherished ideals of moral individualism and to his ideals of personal autonomy and responsibility. According to Greenwood, behind this was Allport’s Kantian theory of morality. Morality is unconditionally autonomous and personal. One ought to do one’s duty for its own sake independently of whether any others are represented as having done their duty in similar circumstances.

Allport equated sociality with uniformity (conformity) and uniformity with involuntary behavior. This means that social behavior cannot be diverse or voluntary. Allport was insensitive to the fact people can conform to something voluntarily and sometime people prefer to do social activities over individual activities and that individual activities can be unpleasantbut necessary. A simplified picture of Allport’s thinking about the individual and the social looks something like this:

Individual	Social
Voluntary	Involuntary
Freedom	Uniformity, conforming
Enjoyable	Necessary evil
Moral individual: autonomy	Collectivist loyalty to fascism or communism
Methodological individualism	Personification, objectification, reification
Social is what is abstract and common

Allport had his most powerful influence on social psychology between the wars.

Allport mistakenly identifies with Mead

Even though Mead was critical of Watsonian behaviorism, Allport treats Mead as a fellow behaviorist and fails to understand how profoundly Mead differed from Watson. While Mead was interested in society as a whole and the self, including the mind, Watson was interested in the relationship between a small stimulus and a micro-behavior. He was not interested in the mind or in social relationships.

Individualist Rejection of Reference Groups

Embracing the social as public, facilitation experimental groups

While American social psychologists were individualists, they accepted certain kinds of social groups like interpersonal groups. These occur when strangers interacted in face-to-face encounters in everyday life or when strangers interacted in scientific experiments. The second group is derivedsocial groups – when individuals answered polling questions which were based on their membership as races, genders or ages.

For these social atomists, any description of social forces larger than these interactions was dismissed. For social atomists lurking beyond these atomistic relations were the dark social forces of crowds, movements and what seemed to them human irrationality. To a point this is understandable, given fascism and perceived authoritarian communism which were present in the 1930s. Yet most social psychologists, including Park, accepted uncritically some of the worst, least scientific claims of the crowd psychologists and imagined them as the only way crowds, masses and movements could be understood. See my article on macro social psychology.

Derived social groups as mass aggregates

In reaction to crowd theory, American social psychologists sought to avoid the irrational and antidemocratic tendencies they perceived in crowds by developing Tarde’s distinction between physically proximate crowds and dispersed crowds or publics. American social psychologists maintained that so long as aggregations of individuals are physically dispersed, then they exist as masses. That way the irrationalist influences of physically proximate crowds could be resisted. Allport thought that publics were less of a threat to rationality than crowds. After all, according to Allport, moderate public opinion is what guides politicians. Mass aggregates are groups that are known to each other not through face-to-face encounters, but through statistical gatherings and publishing though polls or individual interviews.

For these reasons, American social psychologists restricted experimental social psychology to publics. Social attitudes were restricted to surveys of dispersed masses of individuals. After all, according to Allport, public opinion is merely the collection of individual opinions. It has no existence except in individual minds. In the field of persuasion studies, Paul Lazarsfeld emigrated from Vienna where he helped to establish The Bureau of Applied Social Research. He became a dominate influence in the methodology of social research.

Many more radical theorists stressed that our sense of identity comes from our social location such as gender, race, age, social class – that is derived aggregate groups. However, many measures of social psychologists of identity are free of structured invitations to list and rank self-categorizations. But this is only a partial identity. Whether I am happy or embarrassed to be an Italian-American hardly helps to direct my social identity that I do not make any long-standing commitment to. For example, there is far more loyalty to my Elks club or to a local gang.

Interpersonal groups as facilitation groups and aggregates in scientific experiments

Allport was also involved in experimental facilitation groups. Facilitation studies are made when people are placed in groups with some task to be performed by themselves. The experiments consist of whether and how the variation of size and atmosphere will affect how well the task will be performed. When mass studies of attitudes such as competition and aggression were undertaken, the results were grouped on the common properties of groups such as all males within the state of Oklahoma between the ages of 21 and 25.

Interpersonal groups are not limited to experimental facilitation groups. The interpersonal groups are interactions between particular individuals in face-to-face encounters within everyday life. For example, a women resisting sexual advances is not in any particular role. She has to deal with the physical characteristics of this particular man. She cannot give a stereotypic response. If a person is blocking a door-way an individual has to adapt and change courses. Since blocking doorways is not part of a socially scripted situation the individual must make adjustments, not in any particular role to role, but as individual to individual. Social atomists think that being social begins with a face-to-face encounter. A social identity is built up from a series of fleeting, and changing social encounters. Anglo-American theorists of social cognition such as Fisk and Taylor think social cognition grows out of interpersonal situations rather than being there at the beginning. Greenwood concludes:

Anglo-American “social” psychology has never really been a social psychology. Unlike European studies of social representation (Farr and Moscovici) where attention is focused on the social dimension of cognition, Anglo-American studies of social cognition like Fiske and Taylor, focus on other persons in situations. There is no consideration of the possibility that cognition itself has social dimensions (95)

A rejection of intrinsic groups (reference groups) as subjects for experiment

The problem with the way American social psychologists have understood groups is that they ignore using an individual’s membership in intrinsic groups in their experiments. They ignore that:

Individuals have an ongoing social relationship with groups whom they get to know.
These groups provide support for individual development in the form of rituals.
They constrain the individual with norms and expectations.
They invite the individual to take a role.
Intrinsic groups themselves have a history.
A person is becoming social all the way from birth and once that infrastructure is in place they continue to be social even when they are alone.

Over time an individual develops loyalties to family of origin, religious communities or neighborhood associations and work groups. They also join clubs and over time roles are played with others interdependently through mutual role enactment. In socially intrinsic groups individuals make a commitment to abide by certain standards and agreement which both constrain the individuals while allowing for a new kind of individual development. In intrinsic social groups, society is outside and inside the individual. All human cognition is social cognition because being social is a condition for being human.

Greenwood argues that being married is not only socially significant but also enables a person to fix and develop their identity by reference to the predictable hopes and structure the institution of marriage provides. With marriage comes a predictable set of expectations about what constitutes a good reputation, along with dignity, honor and respect. All emotions which follow are inseparable from:

their social identity as a member of a reference group;
their social motivational virtues.

Every intrinsic groups provides this, not just marriages.

On the downside, most threats to identity will be connected to reference groups and their social expectations. Greenwood gives the example of a writer who publishes a disastrous book, a warrior who runs away from a battle or a mother who is caught beating her children. The problem is that with rare exceptions, American social psychologists do not conduct experiments with people with their membership of intrinsic groups (reference groups) as the focus of attention.

Mead vs Symbolic Interactionism

Mead	Category of Comparison	Blumer
Important Organicism interaction between organic and physical	Place of Darwinian evolutionary theory	Not important Phenomenological No references to biological evolution
Attitude Has a physiological referent	Social identity	Role Dramaturgical meaning
Thick Permanent social order which exists independently of local situations	How thin or thick is the social order?	Thin Temporary social order negotiated in each situation
Outside and inside The part that is inside of people and cannot be instrumentally manipulated	Is the social order inside or outside the individual	Outside Social organization sets conditions for individual action Social structure merely a tool to be used or an obstacle to be avoided
Active dialectic Self is a subject and self is an object. Me, generalized other, collective conscience	How is the self conceived?	Self as a subject but not self as an object—no “me” or generalized other or collective conscience Social negotiations are only with flesh and blood individuals,no internalization
Organic interdependency	How to understand the relationship between society and the individual	Social contract of voluntarily participating individuals
Realism (Charles Sanders Peirce)	Epistemology	Nominalism (William James)
Social theory of meaning Depends on objective communal character of significant symbols	What does meaning depend on?	Depends on the subjective imagination
Universal and objective Meaning for us	Meaning of symbols	Individual and subjective Meaning for me
Antecedent to their use	Timing of meaning	Emerges with the interaction between people as they deal with local situations.
Unconscious and physiological	Is meaning conscious or unconscious	Conscious
Gestures, performance	What is meaning based on?	After the gesture through individual interpretationof words
Sociological	Field of social psychology	Psychological

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his four books: From Earth-Spirits to Sky-Gods: the Socio-ecological Origins of Monotheism, Individualism and Hyper-Abstract Reasoning Power in Eden: The Emergence of Gender Hierarchies in the Ancient World Co-Authored with Christopher Chase-Dunn Social Change: Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present and Lucifer's Labyrinth: Individualism, Hyper-Abstract Thinking and the Process of Becoming Civilized He is also a representational artist specializing in pen-and-ink drawings. Bruce is a libertarian communist and lives in Olympia WA.

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Yankee Micro Social Psychology Part II

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Yankee Micro Social Psychology Part I

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Dr Pierre Kory’s Defence of Ivermectin Against Government & Big Pharma Slanders

By Pierre Kory, MD, MPA President & Chief Medical Officer Front- Line COVID- 19 Critical Care Alliance Annotated by Patrice Greanville

READ THE REST OF THIS DOCUMENT. DOWNLOAD, AND HOPEFULLY SHARE IT WIDELY CLICK HERE KORY IVERMECTIN DEFENSE 2021_0179_0011_TSTMNY

As for Dr Kory's professional credentials, they are unusually solid. Just examine this document.

RELATED READING: THE NIH ADMITS IT: Ivermectin has a place in the treatment of Covid-19 A belated admission that Ivermectin, however defamed, still has a role to play in the handling of viral pandemics.

ADDENDA

Ronald Reagan Speaks out Against Socialized Medicine

(In 1975 the Wall Street Journal ran a piece noting that 75% of Americans favored a universal, public healthcare system as it existed in all other developed capitalist countries, including Britain and Canada, of course).

People in favor of Ivermectin

Dr John Campbell

The Efficacy of Ivermectin • Best ivermectin meta analysis

Dr John Campbell

Ivermectin and COVID 19

Local 12 (Cincinnati TV)

New study shows antiviral effect of ivermectin for COVID-19 in lab studies

JIMMY DORE

Remember When Late Night Hosts Mocked Ivermectin? – Now Approved By FDA To Treat COVID!

Dr. John Campbell

Moderna paid 400 million to NIH

Dr. Robert Malone

Dr. Robert Malone: Pfizer Video From Project Veritas ‘Profoundly Disturbing’

People Badmouthing Ivermectin (And Dr Campbell)

Dr. John Campbell's Pfizer antiviral / Ivermectin misinformation: A detailed response

A Wikipedia page on Dr Campbell

John Campbell (YouTuber) This is largely a hatchet piece

Indrajit

OpEds

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
My name is Indrajit Samarajiva and I'm a writer. People also call me Indi or Jit. I was born in Canada, raised in America, and live in Nugegoda, Sri Lanka.

LUCID VOICES
Bruce Lerro

Keep truth and free speech alive by supporting this site.
Donate using the button below, or by scanning our QR code.

By Pierre Kory, MD, MPA
President & Chief Medical Officer
Front- Line COVID- 19 Critical Care Alliance
Annotated by Patrice Greanville

READ THE REST OF THIS DOCUMENT. DOWNLOAD, AND HOPEFULLY SHARE IT WIDELY
CLICK HERE
KORY IVERMECTIN DEFENSE 2021_0179_0011_TSTMNY

RELATED READING:
THE NIH ADMITS IT: Ivermectin has a place in the treatment of Covid-19 A belated admission that Ivermectin, however defamed, still has a role to play in the handling of viral pandemics.

The Efficacy of Ivermectin •
Best ivermectin meta analysis

John Campbell (YouTuber)
This is largely a hatchet piece