Social Psychological Phenomena Research Articles

Educating Tomorrow's Doctors

Soon after a revised program of medical education was introduced at Western Reserve, the present study was undertaken as one means of determining the effectiveness of the program. Twenty students were observed closely throughout their school career. A brief profile is given for each of the 20, and the thoughts, actions, and reactions of each are described at intervals in their progress through the school. There is a brief note on each one five years later. There is some resemblance to the study at the University of Kansas published under the title Boys in White , which observed the development of students as they progressed through medical school. However, in Boys in White the students were studied as a group moving in a social system (the medical school), and the students' progress was viewed as a social-psychological phenomenon. In the present volume the 20 students are followed closely as individuals. While

The Transition from Engagement to Marriage

Marriage is a complex social-psychological phenomenon. From a sociological point of view, the decision to get married involves an undertaking to form a new familial unit in society; this undertaking usually involves two already formed families (of orientation) as well as various groups with which each individual articulates. Getting married also involves participant in a major role transition in society. Whether it is succesfully traversed or not will determine whether the particular new social unit is formed or not. From a societal point of view then, it is important that this transition be traversed successfully for the social institution of marriage to continue in some form. From the point of view of the individuals concerned, there are also major psychological determinants and consequences. Marriage can be seen both as providing an opportunity for growth and maturation of personality and as reinvoking a return to and repetition of certain preoccupations of childhood. The return to an exclusive two-person relationship, perhaps for the first time since early childhood, stimulates the re-emergence of both the good and bad experiences of earlier periods of development. This makes the marriage relationship especially open to a richness of emotional experience and, by the same token, renders it particularly vulnerable to emotional disturbances. 1) We are concerned with the getting married process both as a social-psychological phenomenon and from the viewpoint of preventive social psychiatry and these two viewpoint complement each other in that mental health determinants affect not only individuals' mental health but the functioning of social units. One of the major functions of the newly created family unit is the maintenance of adult personalities2), which involves psychological as well as sociological processes. Given the fact that getting married involves a transition of vital importance to one's person, to the ones with whom one was intimately involved before the marriage and to one's subsequent family of procreation, then it seems important to consider the processes that are involved for individuals making the transition. There are indications from the marriage and family field and from other fields of social-psychological enquiry that the manner in which the transition is made has major effects on subsequent events. For instance, if we view the engagement

IMMOBILIZATION RESPONSE TO SUICIDAL BEHAVIOR.

Certain aspects of self-destructive behavior can be understood as an appeal for help in an intolerable situation made to one or more potential rescuers.³Often the response of the person who receives such a communication is crucial for life or death. When the responses are inadequate, what are the reasons? The concept "suicide" comprises such a wide variety of complex social-psychological phenomena that most investigators have limited themselves to special aspects. For example, Stengel emphasized the social effects of suicidal behavior.¹¹Ordinarily suicide threats or attempts have a powerful social effect, tending automatically to induce or "release" rescuing activity from the environment. Indeed much of the rationale of a Suicide Prevention Center⁵is provided by observations which indicate that potentially self-destructive persons are ambivalent about death. They communicate their suicidal preoccupation. Then others can give aid. In a classical

Law as a Social Psychological Phenomenon

Law as a Social Psychological Phenomenon

The Construction and Evaluation of a Scale to Measure Attitude Toward Any Educational Program

There is a constant search for techniques that might be utilized in evaluating the various types of educational activity to be found in the modern institutions of learning whether on elementary, secondary, or college level. In spite of the extensive progress made in the field of tests and measurements during the past quarter-century there is still a lack of valid and reliable measures of psychological variables that are highly important, especially in the general field of social-psychological phenomena. This lack of evaluative criteria is especially noticeable in the field of certain guidance activities. There is also a general lack of measuring devices available for evaluating the results obtained from the various types of school programs designed by educators to develop certain social-psychological responses. The author noting a lack of suitable scales to measure attitude toward the various types of educational programs that are prevalent in most schools ?home room, auditorium, group guidance, individual guidance, etc.?has developed a generalized scale to measure attitude toward any educational program. A technique developed by H. H. Remmers1 of Purdue University was utilized by the author in developing this measure of social-psychological phenomena or attitudes. This technique, a modification of the method used by Thurstone,2 is described functionally in the explanation of the con struction of the scales to measure any educational program. CONSTRUCTION OF THE SCALES

The Causation and Control of War

WAR may be defined as the condition which prevails while groups are contending by arms. War is at the same time an exceptional condition, a phenomenon of intergroup social psychology, a species of contention, and a species of violence. While each of these aspects of war suggests an approach to its study, war must not be identified with any one of them. We may throw light on war by studying other exceptional legal conditions like civil litigation, criminal trials, martial law, reprisals, but we must not identify them with war as have some writers in characterizing all legal coercion as war. So also we must not assume that all relations between sovereign groups are war, or that all contention or that all violence is war. Such assumptions, frequently made, render the control of war hopeless. The anarchist striving to eliminate all legal coercion, the isolationist striving to eliminate all intergroup relations, the idealist trying to eliminate all contentions, and the extreme pacifist trying to eliminate all violence are engaged in a hopeless task. On the other hand, it is possible that appropriate modifications of international law and procedure, of national attitudes and ideals, of social and economic conditions, and of the methods by which governments keep themselves in power may prevent the recurrence of war. A detailed analysis has been made of the circumstances preceding the Moslem wars of conquest in the seventh century, the Crusades beginning in the eleventh century, the Hundred Years' War beginning in the fourteenth century, the Thirty Years' War of the seventeenth century, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the World War. Different as were many of their circumstances, all of these wars, scattered over I300 years, exhibit idealistic, psychological, political, and juridical causes. Let us examine each of these four causes more closely. (i) War among civilized peoples has meant great cost, risk, and sacrifice both to civilians and participants. Only widespread belief in an ideal more important than life itself can induce most men and women to carry that burden. In propor-

Some mechanisms which distinguish the crowd from other forms of social behavior.

Social psychology may profitably adapt to its own uses the knowledge of abnormal behavior possessed by the psychopathologist. There is much group behavior which shows a lack of adjustment to social situations very similar to that of certain neuroses. Without entering upon the discussion of the question of the therapeutic value of the Freudian method of psychoanalysis, it is safe to say that we are greatly indebted to Freud for such knowledge as we possess concerning the determinants of many well recognized types of individual maladjustment to environment. The same unconscious mechanisms which cause the unadjusted individual to be out of harmony with his fellows may on occasion lead a group of men to forms of behavior which are in the true sense anti-social. The term is somewhat ambiguous. In one sense any reaction to the human beings in one's environment is social behavior, and anti-social behavior is that in which human fellowship plays no part, being present neither in the stimulus nor as a factor which modifies the mode of response. If we exclude certain very simple reflexes, it is doubtful if there is antisocial behavior in this sense. Psychopathology finds in such behavior a criterion by which the normal may be distinguished from the abnormal. Now unless we are content to regard any sort of social relationship as a norm, it would seem that we are justified in applying to groups of men the same criteria that are used to determine whether an individual is adjusted or unadjusted. Strikes are condemned because the behavior of those who participate in them frequently shows no concern for the public. Evolutionary groups are said to be intoxicated. Men with common sense have long regarded such phenomena as these as epidemic mental affections. Thus, I think, we may fairly say that there is a generally recognized distinction between that social behavior which results in satisfactory adjustment and that which fails in this respect. Not every group is a crowd, in the psychological sense of the term. When a group becomes a crowd, according to Le Bon, there is a stripping off of the layer of conscious personality along with all higher mental faculties. Hence the individual in the crowd descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Le Bon, fanciful as his explanation may have been, was on the right track. He saw that the behavior of crowds is a special phenomenon of social psychology; that the thought and behavior of people in a crowd is different from that which we find in their ordinary social relationships. On this point Le Bon's thinking was essentially empirical. The facts of behavior justify such a distinction and without it, it is difficult to see how a social psychology can be very significant. I give as an illustration an episode in the political history of New York City. There are three characteristics of the crowd mind, which so far as I can discover, are uniformly present. The three characteristics of crowd behavior which are so symptomatic that they may be used empirically to distinguish the crowd from normal forms of social behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)