Dr. Leon James
Dr. Diane Nahl
(c)1979
This last approach to defining the unit of behavior is more in line with formal scientific and historical practice, though the statistical is more in use today in the social sciences. We predict that in the near future the formal taxonomic approach using natural history methods will compete against the statistical-experimental, and do well! We use the expression SITUATED BEHAVIOR (rather than BEHAVIOR) to indicate that the units of behavior being used are defined in terms of the setting in which they occur. If students use only such units of behavior for their study of social psychology, they will have a rational basic for building a taxonomy of their own behaviors in social life (1.1.a) (1.1.a.2) (5.3.a) (3.3.c.2).
By acquiring skills for describing social behavior on the daily round, you are building for yourself a conceptual system of your environment (1.2.c.4) (1.3.b.1): you note that some behaviors occur in some places at some times, under such and such circumstances, but they do not occur when other conditions are also operative, and so on. By looking at your routine, day to day, unchanging physical settings, making a cognitive map thereof, listing therein the various behaviors you've observed yourself doing in them, you begin to piece together the fabric of community life (3.2.c.3). Upon this fabric of social settings is to be found your own personal life. What you do as an individual, whether alone or in the presence of others, is always (without exception) situated against the background context of the shared, common, community daily round social settings.
Formative Issues No. 5 - 7: Behavior Influences(3.1.a.3) (3.1) (3.2.a.2) (3.2.c.2) (3.3)
What affects behavior? Granted that situated behaviors are "occasioned" by social circumstances in standard social settings: but can one not affect behavior? How are situated behaviors to be affected, controlled, influenced, modified, changed, replaced, and so on? The answer: situated behaviors are influenced by changing the environmental setting, and this change in setting calls forth new responses, different situated behaviors (1.1.a) (1.1.a.2). The technique: record the range of variation of the situated behaviors you're interested in: e.g., for three weeks you keep a record of what you eat, when and where; what you say to yourself about food, when and where; and what you notice about others regarding their food behavior (their eating and talking about it). This will give you accurate, and empirical data about your situated behaviors relating to food. Next you make an index of all the situated behaviors in your data, as well as glossaries, graphs, and maps, the purpose of which is to help you identify patterns of variation in your behaviors. Next you formulate hypotheses to be tested concerning what factors influence your situated behaviors: e.g., you figure on the basis of your data that you eat "junk food" under the following circumstances (2.2.a.3): (1) you've been studying late at the library and make trips to the candy machine; (ii) you're stuck in traffic before dinner, or you're stuck waiting for someone to prepare dinner; (iii) you're hungry and there is nothing else at hand. Now you take steps to change the setting somewhat by preparing little peanut butter sandwiches in the morning, every morning, and carrying them around with you, wherever you go, and sharing them with others as you eat. Your records now show that though the technique worked for the first few days, junk food came back in your diet to about the same rate as before (especially since you stopped sharing). Now you formulate another hypothesis: something is making you eat it, something that is not necessarily in the physical setting. You figure that it is perhaps a social psychological force in certain settings triggering the behavior of eating the junk food. If you could discover which social psychological settings triggers this eating pattern, you'll be in a position to alter the eating pattern by changing or eliminating or avoiding this social psychological setting. But for this you need a taxonomy of social psychological settings (1.2.b.4). Once again you go back to your data, extracting the parts that present what you say to yourself just prior to eating junk food. Inspecting that pattern, you discover to your amazement that many of your thoughts and words ("discourse thinking reports") prior to eating junk food, are related to this one sentence: "Oh, I wish I could stop this" referring to the activity you're engaged in (e.g., studying, waiting, doing nothing, being bored, being dissatisfied, being restricted, etc.).
Now you form the following bold hypothesis: my discourse thinking (talking to myself) is the social psychological setting that influences my eating junk food. Therefore: I can change the controlling conditions that control my behavior by changing my discourse thinking (how I talk to myself). At last, your records now show, that whenever you caught yourself saying "Oh, I wish I could stop this," you were able to talk yourself out of the junk food by adding a second sentence to the first: "Right, but eating this junk is not going to do it."
This example, which you may yourself investigate, points to the crucial role of speech as a 'formative' influence in all situated behaviors. Social psychology must therefore be committed to applied psycholinguistic techniques (1.3). By studying how talk to self and to others is distributed over the range of social psychological settings in your daily, routine behaviors, you are making visible the social dynamic forces that precipitate situated behaviors.
We are all aware that the current mood in science bears a distinctive negative bias towards the investigation of behavior influences which are "cosmic" rather than social or psychological (5.3.b.4). For example, despite creditable and scientifically respectable statistics, ESP phenomena have been banned from virtually every university, granting agency, or respectable textbooks. When they are not banned or censored, they are treated as "unreal." Instead, the interest is shifted towards the study of people's beliefs in ESP phenomena. An even clearer example is praying. Though every speech community known in all history, including our own, has engaged in this method of influencing events, it is banned from psychology. One is not allowed to assume it works, then to find evidence for when or how it works. Instead, one must assume it doesn't work, then try to prove that it does. This negative bias is not extended to such behaviors as voting or intentional planning: it is being assumed that these speech behaviors are actual. We predict that social psychology will soon begin to investigate the psycho-spiritual forces that influence behavior (5.1.a) (5.2.c) (5.2.b.4).
Formative Issue No. 8: Attribution (2.1.b) (2.1)
How do we make sense out of the social environment? Once again, the speech practices of the verbal community give us the data that make visible the individual's psychodynamic life(2.3). By studying the records of your own discourse thinking in various social situations, and by inspecting the records of others, you'll be able to confirm and tabulate the various methods people in this community use to make sense out of everyday, routine situations (see also p. 86).
WHAT IS FIELD THEORY?
Living organisms live in an environment, an ecology, a biosphere, a sociopsychological life-space(2.1.c.2). A life-space contains forces that act upon organisms and upon other forces. That is, a life-space is dynamic. A life-space is a field (hence: "field theory"). Organisms behave within a life-space that functions as a dynamic environment. The dynamic environment of life-space has five zones: (i) Bonding forces of social organization (1.0); (ii) Revitalizing forces of social attitudes and interpersonal relations (2.0); (iii) Enhancing forces of group dynamics (3.0); (iv) Competitive forces of intergroup relations, class, and cultural influences; and (v) Psycho-spiritual forces of collective evolution (5.0).
The forces acting upon organisms that can be traced to the conventions and practices of community life are called socio-dynamic forces (1.1). These are the field forces attributable to collective routines or synchronized behavior patterns, i.e., what is ordinary, what is ordinarily done in a place or time (1.1.a.1). These are the forces which are attributable to the social setting. Social setting forces are forces that act upon organisms that share a daily round living routine. Some things get done in the morning and cannot get done in the evening; on the other hand, there are some things which can be done anywhere, anytime. Thus, all behavior is affected, by social setting forces since it's impossible to behave outside some place and some time. All behavior is situated behavior--situated in a social setting, situated in time, and in place. Thus, sociodynamic forces are forces of social routines.
Psycho-dynamic forces regulate our subjective life (2.3). Subjective life is both solitary (each of us does it alone) and standardized (=each of us does it more or less the same way). Thus, psychodynamic forces regulate subjective life; they are solitary and standardized. Psychodynamic forces regulate feelings, decisions, attitudes, values, and the rest of solitary and standardized subjective life. However, these social psychological forces have a larger field to act upon than merely the subjective life of organisms. They also act upon objective life, that subjective life treated as object, or treated objectively (2.1.c.1) (2.1.c.3) (2.1.c.4).
To treat subjective life objectively (i.e., like an "object") means to idealize our actuality (2.3.b). For example, we treat an experience like an object when we refer to it by a name or sentence ("I told him how I felt and what I've been through"). Without this objectivity it would not be possible to communicate. Therefore, to objectify subjective life, it is necessary to idealize that life, to treat our actuality as if it could be encapsulated in words, in thoughts, in symbols, or some code, or notation system (2.3.b.3) (2.3.b.4) (2.3.c). Situated behavior is regulated, in part, by psychodynamic forces. These are both subjective or actual and objective or idealized. Subjective psychodynamic forces are experienced as impulses to act, feel, and think. Objective psychodynamic forces are experienced as reflective ideals (1.2.a.1) (1.3.a.4).
Reflective ideals are objective psychosocial forces. They do not act upon the organism all the time; that is, reflective ideals are conditional motivators, conditional impulses to action, feeling, and thought. Subjective psychodynamic forces, on the other hand, (or "subjective ideals are solitary and standardized, and unconditional: the subjective psychodynamic forces act all the time, unconditionally, everywhere.
Astrodynamic forces (5.2) are forces of collective evolution that also act upon us all the time, everywhere. Collective evolution (5.0) refers to the constantly changing quality of socio-cultural life across the generations of a community. Evolution, like growth and development, is a biological necessity of organisms. People today are not like people of prior generations. Each generation contributes to collective human evolution. Therefore, this generation, we or us, are under the influence of the astrodynamic forces that create the dynamic field of evolutionary changes .
All behavior is thus situated behavior, and all situated behavior is regulated in a field of forces. For example, ethnodynamic forces are experienced as routine; the ordinary, the normal flow of daily round living in community. Psychodynamic forces are either experienced unconditionally as subjective, solitary, and standardized life experiences; or conditionally, as objective, idealized, symbolically expressed reflective experiences. Astrodynamic forces are experienced collectively by entire generations, universally.
ATTRIBUTION IN TALK (2.1.b)
Attributions stem from a basic psycholinguistic principle according to which we make sense out of what we observe is happening around us; and we make sense through the use of a psycholinguistic ability that Skinner called tacting behavior. For example, you hear a sound as you're reading these Lecture Notes, and you tact it by saying or thinking, "Motorcycle!", or perhaps, "That motorcycle is too loud," in which "that motorcycle" is a tacting of the sound one has noticed or perceived. Or you say to yourself, "Oh, there it is again, that pain in my neck!", so that "there it is" and "that pain" are tacting acts for what you've perceived as sensation in your body.
Thus, tacting behaviors as we produce discourse thinking and oral or written sentences, are all attributions; they all are in the form of a situational proposition or a deictic reference. "That motorcycle" or, "there is that pain again," or, "The traffic light is stuck," are attributions because speakers indicate they've made sense out of perceptions by attributing what they see or feel to some plausible sounding cause or chain of events.
EVALUATION AND ASSESSMENT (2.3.a)
Evaluations are declarations regarding the value ascribed to a standardized list of concerns. For example, when you free associate to many words, you spontaneously come up with an evaluative response:
| EXAM: lousy | LUCK: good |
| MONEY: strong | HONEY: sweet |
| MOTHER: soft | DIAMOND: hard |
| DICTATOR: bad | SOLDIER: courageous |
| etc. | etc. |
C.E. Osgood, a noted psycholinguist at the University of Illinois, and collaborator L.A. Jakobovits, did joint research that showed that evaluative responses were basically the same cross-culturally (2.3.a.2). The research used a simple but powerful psycholinguistic instrument developed by C.E. Osgood around 1950, and called the semantic differential(2.3.a.1).
An example may look as follows:
THE SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL TECHNIQUE (C.E. Osgood)
EXAM: good__:__:__:__:__:_X_:__lousy
MONEY: strong_X_:__:__:__:__:__:__weak
MOTHER: hard __:__:__:__:_X_:__:__soft
DICTATOR: good__:__:__:__:__;__:_X_bad
Through a selection of such items as shown above, the social psychologist can explore the psychodynamic forces in a situation that have to do with standard value concerns. Note that the items are pre-selected according to standard value areas of concern, but the declaration itself is given by the rater or evaluator. That means that the responder or evaluator, places a check mark on one of the available places. The location on the available lines indicates the value direction and value intensity of your evaluative response (2.3.b.3).
In the diagram above, EXAM represents a standard area of value concern to students; by placing the check mark on line 6, the evaluator is indicating the value direction of his response (EXAM is lousy, the one I just wrote), and EXAM is quite lousy, is the value intensity (extremely, quite, slightly, equally both). The value direction and value intensity of evaluative responses are influenced by psychodynamic forces operative in this sub-region of situated behaviors. Various theories have been proposed to describe the details of how various environmental influences of the psychodynamic type operate to affect the direction and intensity of evaluative responses (2.3.b.2).
BACKGROUND DEFINITIONS FOR SOME GLOSSARY CHART TITLES
FIELD THEORY IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY (3.1.a.1) (l.l.a)
"Field Theory" is a term used in Physics and Thermodynamics and Astrophysics. Einstein's Theory of Relativity is a modern elaboration of it. In social psychology, Kurt Lewin and some of his followers (e.g., Leeper) use it, along with some Gestalt Psychologists (e.g., Kohler) . "Field Theory" shares with "psychodynamic theory" (2.3) (e.g., Freud's) the assumption that behavior is an outcome of social-psychological "forces" acting upon the person in any social setting. This stance allows empirical investigations of behavior by creating socio-psychological forces in an environment that can be controlled, then observing the resultant behavior when the "force" is applied, and again, when it is removed. While Freud focused on "inner environment" forces, Lewin focused on "external" (social) environmental forces.
GROUP DYNAMICS (3.0) (3.1.c)
"Group Dynamics" is a field theory concept referring to social psychological "forces" acting upon a person in any social setting, but is used particularly to refer to forces which stem from an individual's relationship to others with whom some group is formed. There are "natural groups" such as the family, waiting lines, co-habitants, audiences, and so on, and there are "task groups" such as work teams, clubs, committees, professional associations, and so on. Group Dynamics is the specialized study of how to affect people's behavior--individual and collective--through managing the group's environment: e.g., size, composition, structure of interactions, rules of interaction, selection of participants, nature of tasks to be performed, communications network, reward system, and many others.
PERSONALITY AND DEMOGRAPHY (4.1.a) (2.3.c)
Communities are composed of diverse cultural and sub-cultural groupings according to a system of classification determined by the people involved, since every sub-cultural grouping always relates itself to surrounding groupings. As well, groupings within a community retain distinctive characteristics that serve to bind together those that share these distinctive traits, and simultaneously to exclude those that lack these traits, features, or characteristics. "Demography" is the study of these distinctions among the sub-groupings of the population of a community. In psychology today, "personality" often is used to refer to the demographic traits of a person; especially the way in which these "personal characteristics" are acquired from one's associations with others and are maintained through transactional exchanges with others.
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS (1.3) (1.3.b.3) (2.1.c)
A sub-field within the "interdisciplinary" frame of psychology and linguistics; still young (we were both around when it was founded 25 years ago) and incompletely defined (still expanding). Also related to cognitive anthropology; to sociolinguistics; and to philology, among others. Human relations are governed by shared conventions (l.l.b). These conventions are not observable to anyone who is ignorant of the language of communication and thinking, used by the interactants (1.3.a.4). "Psycholinguistics" is the study of the stream of discourse produced in talk, thinking, and writing (l.l.a.3). Some important issues are: (i) relating the stream of discourse to the social psychological forces in the setting; this we call the functional analysis of the verbal community (2.1.c.3) (2.1.c.1); (ii) controlling the stream of discourse through the use of "prompts" (1.3.b.2), such as questions, clues, forms, scales, adjacency-pairs, formulaic expressions, close procedure (2.3.c.1), etc.; this we refer to as applied psycholinguistics in social psychology (1.3) (2.1.c).
SOCIAL ATTITUDES AND IDEOLOGY (4.1) (2.1.c.2) (2.3.b.2) (2.3.c.3) (2.1.b.2) (5.1.b.4)
Attitudes in social psychology refer to verbal declarations people make when asked to give an evaluation or a value judgment or an opinion on a controversial issue or an expression of agreement or disagreement. In social psychology, theories of attitude formation and change is a much researched area. In the social sciences and in the humanities, ideology refers to the dynamic power of ideas, i.e., the power of ideas whereby we can say that "ideas move men." Thus, ideology is a system of ideas that motivates people to action of a particular kind. Since social attitudes are value-laden declarations concerning others, they are the skeleton upon which ideology is based. For example, the disapproval we may feel upon seeing someone cheat on an exam is a social attitude upon which the American ideology of "fair competition" is based.
TRANSCRIPT ANALYSIS (1.3.a.3) (4.3.c) (2.3.c)
Conversation refers to a type of transactional exchange (3.3.c) between people in a community. It involves verbalizing, signing (with gestures and expressions) and, information processing. It is now a new and heavily researched area in psycholinguistics (1.3.b.3). Conversational analysis is usually based on social data we ordinarily call "transcripts." A transcript is a partial and incomplete record of a conversation. The latter is always a particular, unique, event that took place in time and was carried out by real individuals having unique identities. Hence, the record of the event as represented by the transcript must be supplemented with annotations explaining the verbalizations appearing on the transcript. By studying annotated transcripts you can gain greater comprehension of the process of conversation, and thus come to manage your conversations better (3.3.c.3) (3.3.c.4).
The everyday topics of so-called sexual politics and sexism are instances (among others) of intergroup relations (4.0) since males and females are treated as two distinct groups ("inter-group"). Transcript analysis reveals that conversational management techniques employed by the two sexes are contrastive (4.3.c). For instance, research has shown that under many ordinary situations, in talk between couples and cross-sex intimates, the man performs a greater number of interruptions and performs a greater number of minimal or defective answers (e.g., "Mmm." or no answer at all) towards the woman, than is the case the other way round. Other examples include more tentative assertions by women (e.g., "I think...," "I would say that...") and different signaling habits (body and facial gestures). These male-female differences in conduct function as regulating mechanisms between the two groups' relations.
NATURAL HISTORY METHODOLOGY IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
All scientific disciplines have a methodology, which refers to the main procedures used to generate data in that field, or subfield (1.2.c). In social psychology, there are two main methodologies recognized and practiced today: one is called the Experimental Method (1.2.c.1), and the other, the Natural History Method (1.2.b.3). Also discussed under the name of FIELD METHODOLOGY, the natural history method includes the following essential steps: (i) Delimit the area to be observed (e.g., place, time, people, nature of activity) (1.2.b.4); (ii) Construct a recording format (e.g., forms, prompts (oral or written or sensory), transcripts, formulaic paragraphs) (1.3.b.2); (iii) Use the recording format at the delimited area (1.2.c.2); (iv) Annotate data records for explanations (1.2.c.2); (v) Represent patterns in the data through a suitable notation system (e.g., graph, matrix, chart, math, logic) (1.2.c.4).
EXPERIMENTAL METHODOLOGY IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY (1. 2.c.1)
This is the second of the two main methodologies practiced in social psychology today--the other is the NATURAL HISTORY METHOD also known as FIELD METHODOLOGY. The experimental method in social psychology consists of the following essential steps: (i)Become familiar with a sub-field and know what its research topics are; (ii) Formulate a hypothesis concerning some controversial or not yet known phenomenon discussed in the research literature or in oral exchanges with colleagues or students; (iii) Design an experiment following prescribed procedures in manuals of research and in oral exchanges between specialists; (iv) Get subjects under specified conditions and put them through the prescribed procedures while you record those responses of the subjects which were decided upon ahead of time; (v) Analyze data statistically; (vi) Draw inferences and theorize; (vii) Generalize as much as you dare to real life situations; (viii) Make predictions, hypotheses, guesses.
SOCIAL SETTINGS AS SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL ENVIRONMENT (2.1.c.2) (1.l.a) (1.1.a.2)
Everyone recognizes that the environment influences behavior. Various theories and schools of thought exist concerning the mechanism or functional relations that tie behavior to the social setting in which it occurs. In the school of thought associated with field theory, the social psychological forces of the environment make up a field called life space (K. Lewin). Life space is defined as an environment or "field" ("space/time" location) in which numerous forces act upon people who are located in that setting. A common example of forces acting upon you in social settings can be mentioned: you're sitting in your seat in class and now all eyes are upon you as the professor addresses you by name: you feel the change in forces as soon as you're on the spot; and then, off the spot.
STANDARDIZED IMAGININGS OR LANGUAGE IN THOUGHT (1.3.a) (2.3.c)
It is safe to say that thinking is as natural for people as eating, walking around, and talking. It is also safe to say that thinking is influenced by the forces of the social setting just as eating, talking, and walking around are thusly influenced. Walking pattern or style is clearly influenced by family and community customs. So is eating pattern, i.e., what you eat, what combinations, when, how much and how fast, etc.). So is talking influenced by community customs (when, what, how, to whom you talk, etc.) (5.1.b.4). And so is thinking: what you think about something and how you think about it in different circumstances (or, social settings), is similar in some ways (and unique in others) to how others in the community think about it (4.3.a.1) (4.3.a.3). These shared, common background thoughts in a community are called standardized imaginings.
Standardized imaginings (2.3.c) refer to commonly held thoughts and ideas about the world and shared community life. Human transactions always involve two channels: what is visible or made explicit and what is not directly visible, i.e., "implicit" or "implied." Our shared thoughts and ideas on the common, daily round world around us, forms the basis of the background knowledge we need to share in order to interact with each other. Background knowledge includes items of information and reasoning logic. Thus, when we observe happenings in social situations, we attribute a cause-effect chain to them so that we see one thing causing another and leading to still another, etc. in a network of attributions (2.1.b). This network of ideas about what's what in social settings form the basis of our standardized imaginings.
INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES
(1.1.c.4) (3.2.b) (1.2.a)
The expression "intentional community" is used by the settlers or founders of a farm-community or other communal settlement or cooperative. The word "intentional" is thus used to express the deliberate "intention" of the settlers to come together into a new collective. This new collective is "intended" rather than "haphazard," as compared to other gatherings where people live together (e.g., neighborhoods, hotels, dude ranches, school dormitories, etc.). An "intentional community" is thus a gathering of people who in advance select themselves on the basis of specified intentions regarding how to live together. Intentional communities in the United States vary with respect to the guiding intentions of their founders. Some are motivated by spiritual intentions, some by social, humanitarian, and even environmental and demographic ideals.
B.F. Skinner's ideas on an "intentional community" (e.g., Walden Two) are actively being pursued by some small communal settlements, as we've recently learned from a PBS Broadcast featuring Skinner himself visiting one such settlement and talking with its members. Skinner has been arguing since 1937 that social behavior must be viewed as an outcome of environmental influences. Thus, he related socialization and education to the reinforcing practices of the community. Here was a powerful suggestion for affecting out own communal fate as a society: change people's environment and their behavior will then be affected accordingly! Naturally this led him to a life-long search for effective techniques (l.l.a.4) (3.1.a.3) (3.2.b.1).
COMMUNITY-BUILDING AND COMMUNITY-INTEGRATION
(1.2.a.1) (1.2.a) (5.3) (5.1.c)
(1) A gathering of people may form either a group or community depending on how well integrated is the collectivity of individuals. "Community integration" refers to the process which transforms a group into a community. The integration of a collectivity of individuals into an organic, functioning whole called "a community" is accomplished when the individuals interact in such a way as to display joint values and collective ideals. How these are displayed will now be specified (1.2.a.1).
(2) Joint values are those that individuals in the group recognize as a matter of shared background. But when a group first gets together, the individuals do not share a joint background. Joint background refers to common history. When individuals in a group are active together for some time, there evolves a common history for the group. Each individual is bound to the group through his or her participatory actions. They share a common history: they know how they got together, what happened since, etc. This common history forms an "interpersonal space" and the items in this interpersonal space are the objects seen in common by all. Thus, we may call these items objective ideals, because they are objects in interpersonal space seen by all in common.
(3) When life is shared in common by a group of co-participants engaged in a collective activity, it is possible to observe a change which may be pictured as follows:
This Venn diagram shows how objective ideals come about when imagined ideals are "penetrated" or "overlapped" by universal ideals. When the group first gathers, and for some number of ensuing episodes over time, there will be imagined ideals that each person holds about the others, the purpose of the group, the desirable and undesirable procedures and activities, and so on (2.3.c). In other words, due to their past experiences, their current uncertainty and lack of opportunity, the individuals will each on their own, in solitary fashion, think up, figure out, and imagine all sorts of things about the others, about how they react, and what they approve or dislike. These imagined ideals each individual has, get modified as a result of working together on a collective task (1.3.a.4). In their attempts to work together at the collective activity, each participant will offer justifications for suggestions or for actions already done. In this process of exchange, only the universal ideals can survive: the imagined ideals will be modified towards the universal ideals, and where they overlap, the objective ideals are born (2.2.c) (2.2.c.4).
The following are some examples of the way imagined ideals interact with universal ideals, to identify the objective ideals: