Blind Alleys in Social Psychology: A Search for Ways Out

BLIND ALLEYS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY A Search for Ways Out

ADVANCES IN PSYCHOLOGY 48 Editors:

G. E. STELMACH P. A. VROON

NORTH-HOLLAND AMSTERDAM . N E W YORK . O X F O R D . T O K Y O

BLIND ALLEYS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY A Search forWays Out

Antti ESKOLA Department of Sociology and Social Psychology University of Tampere Tampere, Finland

in collaboration with

ANNA KIHISTROM DAVID KIVINEN KLAUS WECKROTH OILI-HELENA YLIJOKI

19x8

NORTH-HOLLAND AMSTERDAM . NEW YORK . OXFORD .TOKYO

OELSEVIER SCIENCE PUBLISHERS B.V.. 198X All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced. stored in a retrieval system. or transmitted, in any form or by any means. electronic. mechanical. photocopying. recording or otherwise. without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

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f s k o l a , Antti. Blind alleys in social psychology : a search f o r n a y s out I Antti E s k o l a in collaboration with Anna Kihlstrbm . . . L e t al.1. p. cm. I n c l u d e s index. I S B N 0-444-70360-8 1. S o c i a l psychology. 2. S o c i a l psychology--Methodology. I. Kihlstrom. Anna. 11. T i t l e . 111. S e r i e s . A d v a n c e s in psychology (Amsterdam. N e t h e r l a n d s ) HM251.E745 1988 302--dC19

87-30583

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V

CONTENTS Introduction and Preface Chapter 1 How Many Social Psychologies Are There? Antti Eskola

1

11

A . Social Influence as Research Object ........................ 12 1. Object as the Basic Criterion of a Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 2 . Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 3. Social Influence as Research Object: What Does It Imply? . . . 23 B . Social Interaction as Research Object ....................... 28 1. The Concept Revisited ................................. 28 Can interaction be reduced to individuals? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Chance in social interaction ............................ 31 Interaction and cooperation ............................ 33 2 . Differences between the Study of Social Interaction and the Study of Social Influence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 3. Methods of Concrete Research .......................... 37 IPA and ethnomethodology ............................ 38 Basic unit: episode ................................... 40 Elements of an episode: dependencies. acts. effects . . . . . . . 42

C . The Psychology of Groups and Masses as Research Object 1. Action and Personality at the Individual and Group Level . . . . . 2 . Organizational Factors and Collective Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Prisoner's Dilemma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The secret of mass power ............................. 3. Is There a 'Group Mind'? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

47 48 51 52 55 58

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

62

vi

Contents

Chapter 2 The Experiment in Social Psychology: Alcohol Research as a Case in Point Oili-Helena Ylijoki

69

A . The Pharmacological Approach ............................. 1. The Effect of Alcohol on Emotions ....................... 2 . The Effect of Alcohol on Behaviour ....................... Aggression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Risk taking .......................................... Sexual arousal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Interaction .......................................... 3 . Summary .............................................

69 70

B . The Cognitive Approach ................................... 1. Situational Factors ..................................... 2 . Expectations .......................................... 3 . Attributions ........................................... 4 . Summary ............................................

86 87 91 96 100

79

79 81 82 83

85

C . Problems of Social Psychological Alcohol Research . . . . . . . . . . . 101 References ...............................................

110

Chapter 3 The Psychological Foundations of Social Psychology Klaus Weckroth

117

A . In Search of the Object of Psychology ...................... 1. Why the Whole Man Won’t Do ......................... Notions of chance ................................... Methodological implications of chance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 . Interaction of Man and Environment? ....................

117 118 119 121 122

B . Subject and Action ....................................... 1. The Study of Action ................................... 2 . Action and the Future .................................

124 126 130

Conten ts

Vii

3. Psychc and Practical Activity ........................... Memory. perception. thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Feeling. needing. wanting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

132 133 135

C . Subject and Organism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

137

D . Subject and Personality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Subject and Human Action ............................. 2 . Subject and Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

140 143 144

E . On Cooperation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

149

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

154

Chapter 4 Social Psychology as an Historical Discipline Antti Eskola

159

A . Individual. Mode of Life. History .......................... 1. The Role of Community in the Individual's Choices . . . . . . . . Choosing a course of action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ethical choices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Can the force beyond the individual be explained? . . . . . . . . 2 . Historical and historical Social Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 . How Do General Laws Relate to Social Life? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The place of 'laws' in nature and history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What method is required to discover social 'laws'? . . . . . . .

160 160 161 162 163 165 168 168 171

B . Interaction and Cooperation in Precapitalist Society . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Social Bond in Collective Life: Four Cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . First case: Montaillou . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Second case: A Karelian extended family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Third case: Mill sect in western Finland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fourth case: The Society of the Broken Dish . . . . . . . . . . . 2 . Was Collectivity a Result of Man's Primitiveness? . . . . . . . . . Finnish man in the sixteenth century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 'Experiments' with nineteenth century Russian Lapps . . . .

173 174 174 176 178 180 181 182 183

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viii

Studies in Asia after the Russian Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 3. How Should the Past be Assessed? ...................... 185 C . The Development of Modern Society:

Some Classical Thematizations ............................ 1. From Feudalism to Capitalism ........................... The logic of capitalism ............................... Social psychological changes .......................... An excursion: how to study book reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 . From Traditional to Rational Action ...................... Types of social action ................................ War. peace. and types of rational action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rationality and the ‘underdeveloped’ world . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. The Elongation of Mediating Chains ...................... Food and eating as a case in point ..................... From immediate to mediated relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 . The Problems of ‘Egoism’ and ‘Anomie’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Does community still provide goals for individual action? ................................. Does community still regulate the individual’s passions? . . . Uncertainty and ordeal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. The Changing Face of Anxiety .......................... Sense of unhappiness and guilt ........................ Has civilization gone back on its word? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

188 189 191 194 197 201 202 204 207 210 210 212 216

218 222 225 229 229 232

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

234

Chapter 5 Non-Active Role-Playing: Some Experiences Antti Eskola

239

A . Objectives and Limitations of the Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. The Use of Role-Playing in Assessment and Therapy . . . . . . . 2 . Role-Playing as an Alternative to the Laboratory Experiment .......................... Role-playing as a substitute for deception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

241 243 245 246

Conrents

Role-playing as an instrument of theoretical work . . . . . . . . Role-playing as a ‘light’ alternative to the experiment . . . . . 3. In Search of the ‘Situation Logic’. . . . . ................... Episode and its meaning ............................. Internal logic of episodes ............................. 4 . An Instrument for Sounding the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Predicting the future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future as a dimension of life space .................... 5. Levels of Reality and Irreality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

ix

247 249 251 252 256 256 257 259 260

B . In Search of the Social Meanings of Drinking. or “How Does the Situation Proceed?” .................... 1. Why We Abandoned the All-or-None Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The basic script . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Some modifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What did we learn? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 . On the Cognitive-Emotional Meaning of Some Simple Episodes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Does Role-Playing Merely Produce Stereotypes? . . . . . . . . . . Categorization and beliefs about groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stereotypes and reality .............................. 4 . Is the Role-Playing Method Useful in Cross-Cultural Studies?

271 274 274 279 281

C . The Logic Behind the Development of Certain Realities. or “What has Happened?” ............................... 1. Lasse and Laura Travelling the World .................... 2 . The Structure of Threats in Today’s World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The structure of threats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Librarians and social workers: a comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 . The Future of Family and Marriage ...................... Marriage as an obstacle and as a necessity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The family in the world of threats and dangers . . . . . . . . . . 4 . Self-controlling Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

287 288 291 292 294 296 298 299 300 302

262 263 263 265 269

X

D . Objection: The First Step out of the Blind Alley

Contents

.............

305

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

309

Name Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

315 321

1

Introduction and Preface

In most scientific discussions there is generally a single theme that overshadows all others and that therefore structures the discourse. For years such a theme in social psychology was the “crisis” of the discipline. In this book we do not want to repeat the arguments of this debate. However, criticism and reassessment of earlier solutions form an integral part of scientific work, even in times of normalcy. In every branch of science there are certain basic problems which persistently defy final solution - if indeed such solutions exist. One such problem in social psychology is the experimental method. On the surface it seems like a promising strategy: vary certain factors and try to see what kind of changes this causes in other parts of the system; then compare what you have changed with what it used to be, or with what you did not change. Yet in many cases the concrete forms in which this basic idea has been applied in social psychological research do not seem to be very satisfactory. Another basic problem is our relation to history. The phenomena with which social psychology is concerned change with history, but the researcher may nevertheless hope to discover universal laws. In physics, Albert Einstein dreamt in vain of a uniform field theory, while at the same time science proceeded to make impressive progress along completely different paths (Hiebert 1984). The social psychologist is often in the same position: the path which seems to lead to progress and results does not always allow for the kind of theoretical elegance he would like to achieve in his work. At the points where questions like these are taken up, this book touches upon social psychology’s ‘crisis debate’, which by now should be history. There is also another, more external ‘crisis’ whose root cause lies in the mounting pressures towards efficiency and utility. The criteria by which science is evaluated on these dimensions may be applicable in the natural sciences, but they are not so, at least to the same extent, in psychology;

2

Introduction and Preface

what is more, they are fairer in some branches of psychology than in others. For example, they clearly favour psychophysiology, in which it is easier to produce articles and to obtain citations from the international scientific community than in social psychology. This applies at any event in a small country like Finland, where one of the social scientist’s most important duties is to enrich his own culture by publishing in his native language (see StolteHeiskanen and Eskola 1987). When writing this book, we have wanted to forget these extra-scientific pressures as far as possible and concentrate on what would seem to be most important from the point of view of pure science. In the world of today there is, however, one particular plea for application to which no scientist can remain indifferent, and that is the application of his knowledge to the problems of war and peace. The only reason we do not discuss this important subject in the present volume is that it is dealt with in many papers written at the same time as this book (Eskola 1987a, 1987b, 1987d). We shall start our book with a brief outline of the contents of the five chapters.

Chapter One: Traditions Chapter 1 is about research traditions in social psychology. It is customary to speak of the two branches of social psychology, the ‘psychological’ and the ‘sociological’. In recent years, however, there has been a clear drift away from discussions of social psychology as a bifurcated science and towards integration. As Backman (1983) says, we have now entered the “second wave” of discussion. We do not take these ‘two social psychologies’ as given; it is our intention to dig deeper. Before we attempt to integrate things we should know exactly what it is we should be integrating. The first step is to realize the importance of having a crystallized idea of one’s object of research. Emile Durkheim stated this very clearly in his sociological study of suicide. For sociology to be possible, he wrote, it has to have an object all its own: “It must take cognizance of a reality which is not in the domain of other sciences.” Sociology and psychology, for example, must be kept strictly apart: “On the pretext of giving the science a more solid foundation by establishing it upon the psychological constitution of the individual, it is thus

Introduction and Preface

3

robbed of the only object proper to it.” (Durkheim 1952, 38). It is impossible to firmly integrate sociological and psychological knowledge about the human being before we understand what kind of research object the former knowledge applies to, and to what kind of object the latter is related. This concept, the research object, is the key to our analysis and comparisons in chapter 1 of social psychology’s research traditions. How has ‘psychological’ social psychology defined its research object; and how has ’sociological’ social psychology seen its research object? If we started out from the object, could we find other traditions or other ways of perceiving the object? Is there one which is more inclusive than others, so that the latter could be inferred from it or reduced to it? And can we, at this early stage, tell whether there are any differences between the objects of social psychology and those of the natural sciences so that the study of the latter cannot serve as a model for the study of the former?

Chapter Two: Methodology It seems reasonably clear that the methods of scientific research must be adapted and modified according to the characteristics of the object. How, then, does one account for the idea of a methodological unity of science, an idea promoted by many scientists, including psychologists, in the 1930s (e.g. Neurath, Carnap and Morris 1938; Brunswik 1938)? In chapter 2 we shall look into this question with reference to the experimental study. The reason we have chosen the laboratory experiment for closer scrutiny is that it was very often experimental social psychology that was pointed to in the ‘crisis’ discussions. To blame all research failures on the methods used would obviously be wrong. It is also possible that we have gone astray in our search for explanatory factors - if we turn to biology, for instance, when the best explanation of a psychological phenomenon lies in cognitive processes. Perhaps it was not the experimental method that was in crisis, but the naturalistic explanations? Hoping to come to grips with these problems, we focus in chapter 2 on a field of study where the laboratory experiment has been used for testing both naturalist and cognitive hypotheses: social psychological alcohol studies. Our aim is to find out how the experiment works when it is combined with pharmacological assumptions about the ef-

4

Introduction and Preface

fects of alcohol; and how7 it works when the assumptions are changed for cognitive ones. This analysis should help us to see whether the experimental approach could also be used in some form in ‘postcrisis’ social psychology.

Chapter Three: Conceptual Schemes In chapter 3 we revert to the question of the objects of psychology and social psychology. The aim is to reach beyond some of the weaknesses of today’s traditions and to propose more fundamental starting-points. We refuse to accept such easy answers as psychology being concerned with “the whole man” or “interaction of man and his environment”. Such answers are of no practical use since neither psychologists nor even the sum total of human scientists can ever cover so infinitely wide and loosely defined areas. If we want to stop psychology (and the psychologist) from falling to pieces, we have to make a choice from among all the possible perspectives. In chapter 3 we attempt to answer questions such as: How does man appear in a genuine psychological perspective? What does psychological interaction between man and environment consist in? How car, social interaction be thematized? We begin to work out our ideas by asking, very simply, what distinguishes man from non-living nature and what distinguishes him from animals. The concepts that surface most persistently are those of subject and action. Having defined these basic psychological concepts, we move on to social psychology and to the concepts of personality and social interaction. Using these concepts, the aim is to describe the division of labour between social psychology and general psychology and the paths along which these sciences proceed. Our discussion should also give a clearer idea of what to expect from these sciences. It has been the firm belief of many psychologists that social environment has a direct influence on the individual in the same way as nature exerts its influence on its own domain. If you sit in the sun, your skin wi!l turn brown; but if you avoid exposure to sunlight, no such process occurs. Accordingly, it has been assumed that in the social environment X human action will always develop in direction Y , but under the circumstances non-X the result is always non-Y. However, empirical findings

Introduction and Preface

5

often fail to confirm hypotheses of this kind. And so word will get out that the science is in crisis. In chapter 3 we counter this line of thought and argue that the influence of social environment is not comparable to the effect of the sun on the human skin, but with the influence of the sun on human action. It is probably true that you see fewer people outside on a rainy day than when the sun is shining, but not everyone stays in if it’s raining. What they decide to do depends on the goal of their action; what the weather is like bears a much looser relation to their behaviour. But this may also be the case with the social environment. This is why there is no reason to be disappointed even if we do not find strict, necessary relations between the environment and human action. It is precisely what might be expected. The author of chapter 3 has adopted a somewhat unorthodox approach to his subject and the translation of his ideas has not been easy; therefore the reader with a traditional background may find this part of the book hard going. Nevertheless we believe that the patient and careful reader will be rewarded.

C h a p t e r Four: History Our concern in chapter 4 is with the question of social psychology’s relation to history. Gergen’s (1973) well-known thesis is that “social psychology is primarily an historical inquiry”. More precisely: “social psychological research is primarily the systematic study of contemporary history”. In chapter 4 we make our position clear with regard to Gergen’s arguments. We welcome the idea of an historical social psychology, but cannot really see why we should confine ourselves to contemporary history. Why not try to cover a longer historical perspective? We are well aware of the difficulties. In a review of Western social theory in the post-war period, Giddens (1979, 235-240) has noted that up until the end of the 1960s there was something like a consensus on two ideas: First, the “theory of industrial society” described how societies developed from “traditional” to “industrial”; and second, by reference to Comte’s hierarchy of the sciences, it was believed that the social sciences were “more youthful” in character compared with the natural sciences. At the same time, however, it was also believed that by strict adherence to the

6

Introduction and Preface

methodological models of the natural sciences the former would eventually come to rank with the true sciences. Now, the consensus has broken down. It has been succeeded, Giddens says, by “the Babel of theoretical voices that currently clamour for attention”; a situation that was probably one cause for the crisis debate in social psychology. This Babel of voices has brought about a growing awareness of indigenous psychologies among social psychologists (Heelas and Lock 1981). We now realize we must have a thorough knowledge of these native forms of thought before we can even dream about comprehensive theories to explain them. Social psychology cannot become a true science before we understand the relation of medieval man to his environment; the distinctive features of social psychological phenomena in advanced capitalist and socialist societies; and the social world from the viewpoint of people living in the developing countries. But even then, is the whole idea of attempting a general, essentially historical theory of social psychology possible? This is the problem of chapter 4.

Chapter Five: Concrete R e s e a r c h In the last chapter we return to the methods of concrete social psychological research. The social psychologist who takes his job seriously will sooner or later learn that while it is important to use all his creative power in theoretical brainwork, the only way he can find the forbearance required in the face of that self-willed research object is by doing concrete empirical research. When your subject in the laboratory decides to do precisely the opposite to what you had in mind in your theory, you will no longer need to be convinced that you are working with real subjects. For the social psychologist this is not only a frustrating, but also an encouraging experience. When writing this book we also mean to bear in mind the importance of Forschung, even though we are putting together a Darstellung of ‘postcrisis’ social psychology. Human action is guided towards given goals in accordance with the meanings that the individual has attached to different elements in his environment. Of importance are not only things that are here and now, but also things that appear possible, creating hopes and fears in us. All this can be expressed, directly or indirectly, in verbal form, as

Introduction and Preface

7

material that can be used in social psychological analysis, in the same way as free associations, slips, dreams and jokes served as Freud’s material. One way to obtain this kind of material is through a method known as nonactive role-playing (Ginsburg 1979; Greenwood 1983). The idea is that a certain situation is briefly described to the subjects, who are asked to imagine and describe how that situation will continue, or what must have preceded it. The logic of experimentation can be utilized in this method by varying different elements of the ‘scripts’ given to the subjects and observing how this affects their stories. Chapter 5 includes a more detailed scrutiny of this method. We shall also report on our practical experiences as to how the method works when applied to different kinds of problems.

The Research Team Next, we would like to introduce the small research team which is behind this book. Antti Eskola (b. 1934) is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Tampere, one of the two universities in Finland where social psychology is taught as an independent subject. At Tampere, social psychology has existed side by side with sociology, and it has often been used to sharpen the weapons of social criticism (see Eskola 1980). In 1982-85 Eskola was research professor of the Academy of Finland, during which time he worked on a book on the methodological development of personality research; this book has been published in Finnish and Swedish (Eskola 1 9 8 7 ~ )The . professorship was extended for an additional two years, and the present volume was written during this time, in 1986-87. Chapters 1 and 4 are largely based on the author’s previous book (in Swedish Eskola 1982). However, the author hopes that the relationship of the old and new text is similar to that described in Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional story of Pierre Menard, who quite independently wrote certain sections of Don Quzxote three hundred years after Cervantes: “Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer”. Anna Kihlstrom (b. 1951) worked on the team as research assistant. The role-playing experiments on which we report in this book were designed and conducted by Kihlstrom, and certain sections of chapter 5 are based on a separate study of hers. However, her contribution to the book has been

8

Introduction and Preface

much greater than that: she has in fact taken an active part in shaping the whole text. David Kivinen (b. 1957) has worked as part-time research assistant and helped the team over what has often seemed to be an insurmcuntable barrier: the English language, which causes great difficulty to researchers from a very different linguistic culture. Apart from having done the translation, he has worked in close cooperation with the other team members on many of the book’s theoretical ideas. The social psychological aspects of this kind of cooperation are described in a separate paper (Eskola and Kivinen 1987). Klaus Weckroth (b. 1955) is Assistant of Social Psychology at the University of Tampere. In his earlier research work he has been mainly concerned with questions of a basic theoretical nature, particularly in the field of general psychology. Weckroth has written chapter 3. Oili-Helena Ylijokz (b. 1957), who wrote chapter 2, has worked as research assistant on the team. During the project she prepared a critical study on social psychological alcohol research, which forms the basis for the text included in this volume. The contribution of both extends far beyond the writing of their own chapters: at our numerous meetings they have made many helpful comments on the other parts of the book as well. This book is therefore largely a product of one of its own catchwords: cooperative interaction.

Acknowledgements Finally we would like to thank the many individuals and institutions who have helped us in our work. Acknowledgements are due to: Mogens Berg, Jacques Blom, Jari Eskola, Hermann Fahrenkrug, Peter Gregory, Pirkko Heiskanen, Taru Hurme, Marita Hyttinen, Michael Porsager, Suvi Ronkainen, Jussi Simpura and Thorkild Thorsen; the Academy of Finland, the Finnish Foundation for Alcohol Research, the Nordic Council for Alcohol and Drug Research, the Scientific Foundation of the City of Tampere, and the Social Research Institute of Alcohol Studies. Tampere, Midsummer’s Day 1987 Antti Eskola

Introduction and Preface

9

References Backman, C .W. (1983) Toward an interdisciplinary social psychology. In: Berkowitz, L. (ed.) Advances in experimental social psychology, Volume 16. Orlando, Florida: Academic Press. Brunswik, E. (1938) The conceptual framework of psychology. International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Volume I. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press. Durkheim, E. (1952) Suicide. A study in sociology. London: Routledge. Eskola, A. (1980) Social psychology at the University of Tampere. Acta Psychologica Fennica VII, 116-120. Eskola, A. (1982) Socialpsykologins grunder - en kritisk granskning. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Eskola, A. (1987a) Can social psychology contribute to peacemaking and peace-building? Current Research on Peace and Violence, 2-3/1987, 66-70. Eskola, A. (1987b) Human consciousness and violence. In: Vayrynen, R. in collaboration with Senghaas, D. and Schmidt, C. (eds.) The Quest for Peace. London: SAGE. E skola , A. (1987c) Personlighetsbegreppe ts forvandlingar - en metodologisk betraktelse. Kristianstad: R a b h & Sjogren. Eskola, A. (1987d) War, peace and types of rational action. Proceedings of the Congress of European Psychologists for Peace. Helsinki: Finnish Psychological Society. Eskola, A. and Kivinen, D. (1987) Cooperation and the logic of action. Experiences of cooperation between scientist and translator. (Unpublished manuscript) Gergen, K.J. (1973) Social psychology as history. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 26, 309-320. Giddens, A. (1979) Central problems in social theory. Action, structure and contradiction in social analysis. London: Macmillan. Ginsburg, G.P. (1979) The effective use of role-playing in social psychological research. In: Ginsburg, G.P. (ed.) Emerging strategies in social psychological research. New York: Wiley. Greenwood, J.U. (1983) Role-playing as an experimental strategy in social psychology. European Journal of Social Psychology, 13, 235-254. Heelas, P. and Lock, A. (eds.) (1981) Indigenous psychologies. The anthropology of the self. London: Academic Press.

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Introduction and Preface

Hiebert, E. (1984) Einstein’s image of himself as a philosopher of science. In: Mendelsohn, E. (ed.) Transformation and tradition in the sciences. London: Cambridge University Press. Neurath, O., Carnap, R. and Morris, C. (1938) International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Volume I. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press. Stolte-Heiskanen, V. and Eskola, A. (1987). Evaluations of sociology and psychology in Finland: Examples of self-evaluations by the scientific community. In: Evaluation of research: Nordic experiences. Copenhagen: Nordic Science Policy Council.

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Chapter 1 How Many Social Psychologies Are There? Antti Eskola

How can the intellectual pursuit known as the science of social psychology be justified? How indeed can one justify calling it a scientific discipline? Usually, the legitimacy of a science lies amidst a host of myths. Just as the earth is explained as the creation of God, sociology is explained as the creation of Comte. Comte is also featured in the famous story that made social psychology legitimate, the article by Gordon W. Allport on “The Historical Background of Modem Social Psychology” (1954; 1968). Allport calls social psychology “Comte’s Discovery”: ‘‘( ...I towards the end of his life Comte was wrestling with a ‘true final science’ which, if fully worked out, could only have been what today we call psychology, even though Comte preferred to label it the science of ‘la morale positive’.’’ This history of creation can indeed be called a myth, as Samelson (1974) has pointed out. It has omitted to say anything about the religious, ideological and reactionary elements in Comte’s concept of la morale and has highlighted only those sides of Comte’s production that fit into OUY picture of social psychology. The myth that is created “validates and legitimizes present views by showing that a great thinker ‘discovered’ these, (...I that our questions are ‘perennial’ ones. It gives an impression of continuity and a tradition to our discipline, including the place of final, supreme science” (Samelson 1974). There are many other fascinating tales about the development of social psychology of which the social psychologist is as keenly aware as the Christian is of certain events in the life of Christ. For example: the first textbooks on social psychology were published in 1908 by E.A. Ross, an American sociologist, and William McDougall, a European psychologist - which makes for a perfect story because social psychology grew out of sociology

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and psychology, and out of American and European traditions. Nobody wants to be a spoilsport, so it is conveniently forgotten that at least Gabriel Tarde in France and Paolo Orane in Italy used the term social psychology before the magical year of 1908. However, unlike Comte’s teachings, modern social psychology is more than just philosophy. It is an experimental science, and so there has to be a tale of the beginnings of experimental social psychology as well: Norman Triplett’s experiment with his ‘competition machine’ (which is pictured in Hare 1962, 344). This particular myth has been questioned by Haines and Vaughan (1979), who say that Triplett’s study was in fact not the first social psychological experiment. The mythical representation of social psychology contains one tragic break for which there is no story. The discipline is split into two branches, ‘psychological’ and ‘sociological’ social psychology. Allport says that of the fifty odd social psychology textbooks published in English by 1952, two thirds were written by psychologists and one third by sociologists. This leads him to conclude that the psychological branch must be so much stronger. However, he adds that “works combining the two aspects are increasing in frequency” -- and indeed in the 1980s we hear repeated calls for integration of ‘psychological’ and ‘sociological’ social psychology (see Backman 1983).

A. Social Influence as Research Object 1. Object as the Basic Criterion of a Science

It would be naive to believe that a science is born at the moment that someone invents a name for it. It is quite obvious that much must have happened before that moment. And in any case, it is not the label that in the end distinguishes one science from another. So what does? What is the actual criterion by which a science can be defined and distinguished from another discipline, or by which different traditions within a science can be demarcated? It is argued below that the criterion we need is the particular object of a science; not, for example, its methods. Methodical differences between

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sciences are of secondary importance. The methods applied in social psychology differ from those applied in physics because the two sciences have different objects. Object refers here to an area or item of reality thematized from a particular perspective. Lenin’s (1971, 542) example of the different properties of a tumbler illustrates what we mean by thematization: A tumbler, he says, “is assuredly both a glass cylinder and a drinking vessel. But there are more than these two properties, qualities or facets to it; there are an infinite number of them, an infinite number of ‘mediacies’ and inter-relationships with the rest of the world. A tumbler is a heavy object which can be used as a missile; it can serve as a paper-weight, a receptacle for a captive butterfly, or a valuable object with an artistic engraving or design”. In other words, as Galperin (1979, 40) concludes, it can be an object of many different sciences: “As a missile, a tumbler is an object of ballistics, as a receptacle for a captive butterfly it is an entomological instrument, as an objet d’art it is of interest to the study of handicraft, as a commodity it is an object of economics, as a drinking vessel it is a household utensil, and so on.” It is important to have a clear picture of the relationships between a science, its object and its method. When we say that the method must be applied and adapted according to the object studied, we do not mean to say that a tumbler and a human being should be studied differently. What we mean is that when the tumbler is thematized as a work of art, the relevant scientific methods should be used differently than when the tumbler is thematized as a missile. This is not because aesthetics as a science a priori has different methods than ballistics, but because there are many features that distinguish the tumbler as a household utensil from the tumbler thematized as a missile. The human being can also be thematized from numerous perspectives, as an object of study of many different disciplines. A person who jumps off the top of a building behaves as any physical object does, and it is from this point of view that the police will examine his trajectory. The psychologist is in turn concerned with man as a living creature that differs in several respects frcm a non-living object. However, this is not an adequate thematization of the object of psychology because the biologist and the physiologist are also interested in man as a living organism. There has to be a specifically psychological perspective. One such perspective is outlined in chapter 3 by

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Klaus Weckroth. Allport (1954) says that social psychologists, with few exceptions, regard their science as “an attempt to understand and explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others”. According to this definition, social psychology focuses on the individual in his social environment, an area in which many other sciences also share an interest. Social psychology approaches this broad object from the perspective of social influence, which under this narrower definition is the object proper of social psychology. The study of social influence is undoubtedly one of the most important research traditions of social psychology. In this chapter we shall take a look at how the concept and study of social influence have developed; review some of the basic assumptions underlying the tradition and discuss the controversies that surround them; and finally ask how the object is defined by those social psychologists for whom social psychology is not the study of social influence.

2. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact The above heading is the title of a book published in 1935 by a Polish doctor called Ludwik Fleck. His main argument is that scientific facts do not float around in handy packages but develop in a historical process. They are products of the thought styles and thought collectives of different historical times. Fleck illustrates his point by describing the evolution of a medical fact - the disease of syphilis and its relation to the Wassermann reaction. The first descriptions occurring in Europe that correspond to our concept of syphilis date from the sixteenth century. At that time the disease was explained against a moral and religious background and regarded as a scourge brought about by sin. On this basis, however, it is difficult to draw a distinction between syphilis and other venereal diseases. But as a result of medical przctice people gradually learned to see the connections between the different types of chronic skin conditions that reacted favourably to certain treatments, especially mercury ointment. Although this did mean some progress, there was still a long way to go to the modern concept of syphilis. The turning point was the discovery of the causative agent of syphilis in the blcod (Spirochaeta pallida). The modern concept of syphilis was thus fully

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established. (Fleck 1979) The scientist who is interested in finding out how one of social psychology’s traditions came to occupy itself with social influence will find some useful clues in Fleck’s analysis. As with syphilis, social influence was not a ready-to-use scientific fact when it was discovered, but it has matured and developed as a product of several thought styles and thought collectives. The early notion of social influence was far from consistent, but based on what we would today call prescientific concepts, involved in moral disputes. The term that was used was not social influence, but sympathy, imitation or suggestion. An early explanation of how these concepts differ from each other was proposed by William McDougall in 1908. In sympathy, the emphasis is on the influence occurring at the emotional or affective level, as when a person experiences fear on seeing another person in danger. If the outcome of influence is found in action, in bodily movements or a manner of speech, for instance, we talk about imitation. Suggestion means cognitive influence, that the ideas and beliefs of a person induce similar ideas and beliefs in another person (McDougall 1960, 77-78). Sympathy, imitation and suggestion thus correspond to the old distinction between feeling, action and thought. Of these three concepts, suggestion has the most colourful history, especially if we include in it the interest shown in hypnosis. As late as the eighteenth century, hypnosis was regarded as a non-social phenomenon, or in the words of the Austrian physician Franz Mesmer, as “animal mzgnetism” (see Eysenck 1957,30-31). It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the Scottish surgeon James Braid explained the phenomenon as a psychic one, which must be seen as an important step in the process in which hypnosis became a scientific fact. By the end of the century two rival schools had emerged in France, both exploring suggestion and hypnosis, of which one (at the Salpktrigre Hospital in Paris) stressed the ‘pathological’ phenomena related to hypnosis, while the other (the Nancy school) considered it part of ‘normal life’ (see Nye 1975,45-46). However, as is evident in Axel Munthe’s description of professor Charcot’s Tuesday lectures at the SalpCtrikre, the study of this social psychological phenomenon was far removed from genuine science: “The huge amphitheatre was filled to the last place with a multicoloured audience drawn from tout Paris, authors, journalists, leading actors and ac-

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tresses, fashionable demi-mondaines, all full of morbid curiosity to witness the startling phenomena of hypnotism almost forgotten since the days of Mesmer and Braid. (...) “Some of these subjects were no doubt real somnambulists faithfully carrying out in a waking state the various suggestions made to them during sleep-post-hypnotic suggestions. Many of them were mere frauds, knowing quite well what they were expected to do, delighted to perform their various tricks in public, cheating both doctors and audience with the amazing cunning of the hyst6riques. They were always ready to ‘piquer une attaque’ of Charcot’s classical grand hystCrie arc-en-ciel and all, or to exhibit his famous three stages of hypnotism: lethargy, catalepsy, somnambulism, all invited by the Master and hardly ever observed outside the Salp&iC!re.” (Munthe 1930, 296; 302) The concept of sympathy has in turn generated heated moral disputes about certain aspects of social influence. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the concept was used as a weapon against those interpretations of Darwin that saw the survival of the fittest not only as a law of nature, but also of social development. Social Darwinists (see Hofstadter 1955) believed that it was unnatural to aid the weak, the ‘unfit’. It was condemned as harmful interference in natural selection. Do not pick up the drunkard frcm the gutter, William Graham Sumner wrote in 1883, because the drunkard is just where he ought to be: “Nature is working away at him to get him out of the way, just as she sets up her processes of dissolution to remove whatever is a failure in its line” (Sumner 1963,122). In Mutual Aid (1902), Prince Peter Kropotkin set out to refute these arguments by reference to the concept of sympathy. He gives numerous examples of how sympathy towards an individual of the same species creates mutual aid and cooperation among humans and animals. Sympathy within the species-unit is natural and supports the survival of the species. When attention is turned frcm the individual to the struggle for existence between groups, it is found thzt the species amongst which there is most sympathy, cooperation and mutual aid is also the most successful. With regard to the human species, maybe it is worthwhile to save the drunkard from the gutter, after all? The crystallization of medical phenomena into scientific facts has been furthered by the medical profession and the experience gained in curing illnesses in medical practice. Within the intellectual pursuit of what we would today call the social sciences, there were also mounting pressures towards

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greater rationality, expediency and efficiency, generated by the rise of a new economic system in Europe. These sciences were also affected by the expectations and demands that the results they produced should be applicable to practical life and to the new industrial occupations. What makes Triplett’s famous experiment so important is that it is bound up with these historical tendencies. Let us recall some of the details of this experiment. Triplett was a bicycle-racing enthusiast and had noticed that when riders raced each other they usually made better times than when racing alone, against the clock. He believed this observation indicated that the physical presence of another competitor aroused a stronger motivation and released more nervous energy in the individual than he could mobilize alone. Triplett called this idea ‘the theory of dynamogenesis’. To test it, he performed a laboratory experiment. The children who were selected as the subjects for this test were given the task of winding string in on a fishing reel, first alone and then in pairs, in direct competition. Triplett did not, however, get the result he had expected, namely that competition would always improve the performance of the subject. Instead, the subjects fell into three groups: some improved their performance in competition, others were faster alone, and the third group were equally fast in both situations. Statistical methods for testing these types of differences were developed some years later, and when applied to Triplett’s results, they have shown that the differences between the trials alone and in competition are not statistically significant (Hare 1962, 346). What could possibly be the link between this harmless little experiment and the violent changes taking place in society? The answer might lie in two mhor but important details. First, in this experiment the separate irdicidual is set against a person who is together with other people. And second, this setting is thematized as a competition, the results of which can be measured with a fair degree of accuracy. These are the two points that Asplund (1983, 301-309) refers to in his interpretation of Triplett’s experiment. As we shall see in chapter 4, in medieval Europe man was not so much a separate individual as a natural part of a collective, tied by several bonds to his environment. The only people who really stood out were those who en;oyed a great deal of power. Those who were subjected to this power have traditionally remained an indistinct mass. But in due course the ordinary man also begins to receive more attention and new institutions

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develop within which the individual is the focus of observation and control: school examinations, parade-ground inspections, doctors’ hospital rounds (Foucault 1977). In traditional society it had been important to be able to distinguish one clan from another in the same way as wolves are distinguished from foxes. Now, it was more important to possess the tools for distinguishing the individual from others within a group of people. Asplund (1978) mentions two famous sleuths of the late nineteenth century as the main symbols of this historical stage. One is Sherlock Holmes who won fame by his detective work, looking for fingerprints with his magnZying glass; the other is chief inspector Bertillon of the Pans police, who developed methods for the identification of individual criminals (“Bertillonage”; “portrait parlC”). Once the individual’s ties to the community have been severed, it is natural to ask in what ways the solitary individual differs from the individual acting together with his fellow-men. It is also natural that in the new efficiency-oriented economic system, this setting is thematized from the point of view of competition, especially as the role of social influence in furthering competition and efficiency had already been noted by Karl Marx in 1867: “( ...I mere social contact begets in most industries a rivalry and a stimulation of the ‘animal spirits’, which heightens the efficiency of each individual worker”. This, he continues, originates from the fact that “man, if not as Aristotle thought a political, is at all events a social animal” (Marx 1977, 443-444). On all these grounds Triplett’s experiment may be regarded as a modern one and one which symbolizes the growing hopes that were being placed on psychology. Whether or not it was the first social psychological experiment is not really so important. Social influence began to crystallize into a scientific fact when practical experimentation took over from philosophy. It was no longer merely a concept but a tangible and manipulable fact. The problem, as in the case of syphilis, was to find the ‘causative agent’ that would explain the phenomenon. However, in the case of social influence this was difficult because when examined from the efficiency point of view, it seemed impossible to pin down the concept. Although Floyd Allport argued in the 1920s that the core of social influence was in what he termed ‘social facilitation’, the presence of another person by no means always improved the performance of the individual. And whether performance was improved or not, this may have been due to a variety of factors. In some cases a coactor elicited an

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emulative spirit. In others, the coactor served as a model that the subject imitated, which thus facilitated his performance. But a coactor could also prove to be a distraction. His movements and the sound produced by his efforts could disturb the performance of the subject just as any movement or sound. A major step towards the solution of these theoretical problems was taken in 1965 when Robert B. Zajonc published an article entitled “Social Facilitation”. Zajonc introduced new concepts and proposed a theory to explain why the presence of another person sometimes improved and sometimes impaired performance. Concepts now connected with the study of social influence were (1) the general arousal or drive level and (2) the concept of dominant responses. Zajonc assumes that the presence of others heightens the organism’s general arousal or drive level. Second, he assumes that as the arousal level rises the probability of dominant responses increases, whatever their content might be in various situations. As far as efficiency is concerned, if a task is well learned, correct responses are dominant and the presence of others improves performance. If the task has been poorly learned or is still being learned, incorrect responses are dominant. In this case the presence of others increases the probability of wrong responses, i.e. impairs performance. The arousal or drive level is the intervening variable here: it depends on the presence of others, but in turn it also affects performance. There were of course still some anomalies thzt did not seem to fit into the theory. For instance, for a person who is stress-ridden or overcome by fear, another person is often a factor which lowers, not enhances, the arousal level (cf. Davidson and Kelley 1973). But, as the history of science clearly shows, a theory usually passes the test by complementary explanations that develop it further rather than refute it. However, theory is always underdetermined. There are always numerous alternative theories by which a given group of facts can be explained, and there is no foolproof way of telling which is the best (see Laudan 1984, 15-16; 88-102). One alternative theory to Zajonc’s model has been outlined by Manstead and Semin (1980). Their central concept is attention. In brief, their idea is that while a task is still being learned, it requires controlled performance and sharply-focused attention. The presence of others diverts some of this attention and therefore impairs performance. On the other hand, a task that is well learned is performed automatically. It is no longer continuously monitored, and thus the subject fails to reach

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optimal performance. Awareness of the presence of a critical audience makes the subject focus attention more sharply on the task, resulting in maximal performance. Another reason why theories may differ is that ‘causative agents’ can be sought in different directions or at different levels. The theory that is based on causative agents found at the physiological level will necessarily differ frcm the theory based on causative agents found at the psychological or cognitive level. Zajonc’s theory is intimately bound up with physiology. One of the best indicators of arousal, for example, would according to Zajonc appear to be “the activity of the endocrine systems in general and of the adrenal cortex in particular” (Zajonc 1965). In this case social influence is in essence a physiological fact, suggesting that physiological measurements should be used in search of evidence that the presence of other people does actually “beget stimulation of the animal spirits”, as Marx put it, i.e. that it raises the arousal level (on these studies, see Moore and Baron 1983); and not only in the presence of other people, because Zajonc found similar effects in his experiments with cockroaches as well (Zajonc, Heingartner and Herman 1969). But is it social psychology’s task in the first place to study the physiology of cockroaches - or even of humans for that matter? Should this not be the concern of physiology, or in some cases of its branch of psychophysiology? When someone commits suicide by jumping off the top of a skyscraper, we do not look for the ‘causative agent’ of suicide among the physical laws governing the way the body falls to the ground. So why search for the inner essence of social influence among physiological laws obtaining in the organism in a social episode? Should the psychologist not try to find the psychological laws of that episode? These questions go to show that the genesis and development of a scientific fact such as social influence is by no means a simple and straightforward process. Psychophysiological theories explain social influence as a mechanical phenomenon that arises directly out of some sort of sensitivity or ‘sympathy’. However, a similar picture is also drawn by some psychological theories. Conditioning no doubt belongs to the vocabulary of psychologists, but it is still a concept that leads to a mechanistic interpretation where social influence is understood as an immediate response to external stimuli. The idea is that as a person sees and hears himself working, the performance of this particular task becomes, through the conditioning process,

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associated with these visual and auditory stimuli. When the person then sees and hears the stimuli caused by another person carrying out the same task, they elicit work motivation and thereby improve his performance. But is man a being that responds directly to stimuli in the same way as Pavlov’s dogs (or Zajonc’s cockroaches)? Is not the bulk of social influence between people mediated by cognitive and verbal factors such as thought, consideration, interpretation of stimuli, etc.? Man’s action cannot be described by the formula S-R; a third factor must be inserted between stimulus (S) and response (R). Let us illustrate the difference with certain classical experiments. A number of studies were conducted in the USA during the 1930s in which a questionnaire containing several aphorisms was submitted to the subjects. Each saying was followed by the name of the well-known figure who had uttered it. The subjects were asked to consider each saying separately and to note down whether they agreed with it or not. The subjects did not know that the questionnaires were not identical. For instance, an aphorism that in one questionnaire had been ascribed to Thomas Jefferson was in another attributed to V.I. Lenin. In the former case the subjects agreed with the aphorism more often than in the latter. This was explained by suggesting that, for the American student, the name of the ex-President of his country had through conditioning become linked to positive feelings, and the name of the Soviet leader to negative feelings. Due to the generalization of the conditioned response, the utterance believed to be Jefferson’s triggered an approving response and that thought to be Lenin’s a disapproving response. Solomon E. Asch (1948) repeated this experiment, but also asked the subjects to write a short essay on the content of each aphorism. One of the aphorisms read: ‘‘I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical.” The subjects who thought the aphorism was Jefferson’s agreed with it more often than those who believed it was Lenin’s. But Asch concluded that this was not simply an outcome of the generalization of the conditioned response. The essays showed that the subjects had interpreted the aphorisms in different ways depending on who they thought was behind it. When the statement was attributed to Jefferson, the word ‘rebellion’ was interpreted as peaceful change of political control; when attributed to Lenin, it meant ‘revolution’. The subjects did not respond to the stimulus sentence in the same way as Pavlov’s dogs reacted to the sound of a metronome,

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but produced their own interpretation of the sentence and, in effect, responded to different stimuli. The influence was not direct and mechanical, but mediated by cognitive factors. In this experiment social influence is brought about by an authoritative figure who is present not in person but only as a name (e.g. Thomas Jefferson). But perhaps social influence is mediated by cognitive factors even when other people physically present are the source of influence? This problem is illuminated by another series of experiments performed by Asch (1951; 1952). Here the subject had to match the length of a standard line with one of three comparison lines. The experiment was carried out in groups of 7-9 individuals, everyone making their guess out loud and in turn. Hcwever, only the person next to the last was a naive subject; all the others were confederates who gave the same incorrect answer. On average, the naive subject gave the same wrong answer as the majority of the group in one third of the trials. Asch interviewed his subjects after the experiment and found that they could be divided into three groups according to the way in which the influence had been mediated. Some failed to discriminate the lengths correctly and really perceived the majority estimates as correct (“distortion of perception”). To use classical concepts, we could say that in this case social influence occurred as immediate suggestion, or that for these subjects the formula S-R provided an adequate description. A second group had perceived the lengths correctly, but reasoned that they must be wrong as the answers of the majority differed from their own perception (“distortion of judgement”). Here the influence was manifested in the imitation of or compliance with a model, and it was mediated by the weighing of alternatives and conscious reasoning. Third, there were also subjects who gave wrong answers because they did not like the idea of standing out from the group (“distortion of action”). They experienced the majority’s opinion as a norm to which they, on the surface, conformed - even though they knew they were giving the wrong answer. Here too, influence was mediated. The response was preceded by interpretation of the situation and the experiencing of norm pressure, as well as conscious weighing of different actions and their consequences. If we intend to maintain the integrity of social influence as a scientific fact, it will be necessary to incorporate both the mediate and immediate influence into the same theory. One possible tool for doing this is provided by the theory of set proposed by the Georgian psychologist D.N. Uznadze. Ac-

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cording to this theory, man acts in his day-to-day life largely on the basis of his sets and is conscious of the flow of his activities, but he acts ‘impulsively’ rather than constantly making conscious decisions. Occasionally, however, there are breaks in this flow. It is necessary to stop and think about what one is doing: to ‘objectivate’ one’s own activity, to take it under conscious consideration (Uznadze 1966, 109-119). It might be possible to fit social influence into this theory. Influence also tends to occur ‘impulsively’ in the familiar, recurrent episodes of everyday life; it is rather like suggestion. We rarely stop to think about the impulses that determine the course of our action; indeed, we sometimes do not even notice them. Hcwever, in the flow of influences there are moments of ‘objectification’ when our consciousness plays a greater role. This especially is the case in new or strange situations (for example, if we participate as a subject in a scientific experiment), We become aware of people’s attempts to influence us and if we yield, this influence is mediated rather than suggestion-like. From this point of view, the phenomenon we call social influence forms one integral scientific fact.

3. Social Influence as Research Object: What Does It Imply? The science that concerns itself with this one integral fact of social influence is not all of social psychology. It is only part of it, one of its research traditions. But what kind of a tradition are we talking about? What are its other characteristics? For different objects we need at least partly different methods. What are the methods needed in the study of social influence? Ever since the days of Triplett, the most popular method within this tradition has been the experiment. Very often it has been performed in laboratory conditions, but in some cases in less formal paper and pencil tests where some independent variable (such as the identity of the person who uttered the aphorism used as a stimulus) is systematically varied. It is accordingly this tradition of social psychology that has received most of the criticism. In chapter 2 Oili-Helena Ylijoki discusses in detail the problems involved in the use of the experimental method in alcohol research. Here, we shall confine ourselves to more general criticisms of the social psychological experiment. Some critics argue that experiments are artificial, but this is not

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very convincing. In the natural sciences, ‘artificial’ experiments have often produced fruitful results. To take just one example, Henshel (1980) mentions the studies that gave us the method for vulcanizing rubber; these hardly elucidate any other ‘natural’ phenomenon apart from what happens to a rubber tree in a forest fire. Nor is it ‘natural’ for a person to notice variations in his blood pressure, but experiments with display apparatuses producing this kind of ‘artificial’ situation have led to biofeedback research, which has been of both practical and theoretical value (cf. Lazarus 1975). It is important for science, in its theorizing, to go further than commonsensicd interpretations; in experimentation too, it must strive to break loose from the narrow confines of the naturalistic setting. Another common argument is that social psychological experiments are ethically unacceptable if the subjects are deceived by the use of experimental confederates, by false information on the purpose of the experiment, etc. The ethics of scientific research is a broad question. There may be situations where it is ethically questionable whether research should be done at all; for example, if there is reason to believe that the information produced might be harmful to the interests of a minority group in its struggle for existence (see Gronfors 1982). At this point we shall leave value questions aside, including the question of whether cheating subjects really is in violation of ethical norms. It is more interesting to ask whether there is something in cheating that undermines the scientific value of research. Consider the “Basic Principle of Ethogeny” by Harrk and Secord (1972, 84): “For scientific purposes, treat people as if they were human beings”. There can hardly be a more important piece of methodological advice for the scientist who is studying the psychology of human beings. This psychology is concealed in the consciousness of these beings and in their ability to use lacguage. In the context of an experiment, if we shut out our subjects’ consciousness and language by giving them misleading information, by not allowing them to talk, and by limiting their response options, we will lose track of the object we were supposed to study and in fact be studying something completely different. This must be one of the most stupid mistakes possible in any science. But in social psychology this mistake has been made, and not just once or twice. In this scientific sense, disregarding the ethical side of the matter, much of the criticism voiced against deceiving the subject has been justified. Although it seems that the experiment has been the most popular method

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in the study of social influence, it is by no means the only one possible. Social influence can also be observed in ‘natural’ everyday situations; or it can be traced in various documents, such as the detailed minutes of a meeting. There is however one methodological feature that this research tradition apparently cannot escape. When socizl influence is regarded as the object of social psychology, attention is focused on the individual, whose feelings, behaviour or opinions are influenced by the mere presence of other people or by their action. Social psychology is seen as research into the individual, not as a science of structures, communities and processes with a genuinely social or societal nature. As research into social influence, social psychology is taken to be a subfield of psychology. If a textbook defines social psychology as the study of social influence, it most probably also claims that this science is a “subdiscipline of psychology” (Jones and Gerard 1967, 11, “a branch of general psychology” (Wrightsman 1973, 5), or “a branch of modem psychology” (Baron, Byrne and GrEitt 1974, 3). It differs from other branches of psychology in that the ‘stimuli’ influencing the behaviour of the individual are social: othei people. This idea is clearly brought out in Zajonc’s attempt to define the most important subfields of psychology. Let us assume that we are studying whether a rat turns left or right in a T-maze. If the rat is rewarded every time it turns left and our purpose is to determine the effect of rewarding, our study would be classified under psychology of learning. If the factor explaining which way the animal chooses to turn is its level of hunger, or some other internal state, research would fall under psychology of motivation. If the left arm of the maze is physically different from the right one, and we are examining the influence of this fact upon turning, our study would be dealing with psychology of perception. But if the objective is to find out how the presence of another animal of the same species in either arm influences the animal in choosing its way, we become social psychologists, Zajonc reasons. Conversely: ‘psychological’ social psychology turns out to be a research tradition of social psychology whose object is social influence. How, then, should we deal with studies like Sherif‘s (1936), which examines the formation of social norms. Surely this also forms part of the canon, so to speak, of social psychology? After all, does not the concept of social norm imply something that is ‘genuinely social’? Are not social norms in point of fact ‘social facts’ that “are not only external to the individual but

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are, moreover, endowed with coercive power, by virtue of which they impose themselves upon him, independent of his individual will’’ (Durkheim 1938, 2)? Let us take a brief look at the setting of Sherif’s experiment, at his results and his own interpretation of these results. The experiment made use of the autokinetic effect, the illusory movement of a stationary point of light in ;Icompletely dark room. The point of light appeared in the room but was soon turned off, and Sherif allowed his subject to believe that it really did move, and asked him to estimate the distance it had travelled. This was repeated several times, and the subject gradually established a stable range of estimated movement, expressed in inches. He began to establish, as Sherif says, his own individual norm of estimation. In the second part of the experiment the same subjects were given the same task in groups of two or three, and each could hear the estimates made by the others. In this case their judgements usually began to converge. The subjects established a common norm of estimation. It was not, however, a mechanical average of the individuals’ estimations, but a more complex product of interaction. If the subjects were then tested individually again, they tended to stick to this common norm rather than drift back to their original individual norm. Sherif regards his study as a general experimental model for norm formation. In this model the world of common norms is not something that originates or sets itself outside the individual, influencing him from the outside, but it has been psychologized; its genesis has been found in the individual’s own activity and its mechanism of emergence in social influence (Sherif and Sherif 1969, 187-188). Thus Sherif takes a clearly different stand from that of Durkheim (1938,3), according to whom the origin of social facts “is not in the individual, their substratum can be no other than society”. For Sherif (19631, not only the study of social influence but social psychology by and large is “the scientific study of the experience and behavior of individuals in relation to social-stimulus situations”. Durkheim (1962, lvi) does indeed admit, in reply to his critics, that the individual plays a certain role in the genesis of social facts, but continues that “in order that there may be a social fact, several individuals, at the very least, must have contributed their action; and in this joint activity is the origin of a new fact”. For this reason Sherif‘s series of experiments does not give a very realistic demonstration of how norms evolve and extend their influence from one generation to the next. More successful in this

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respect is Jacobs’s and Campbell’s (1961) modification of the same experiment. In every group there were three persons and it was known that when alcne, the subject ‘saw’ the point of light moving some 4 inches. In the first trial two of the three persons were confederates, who gave much higher estimates, around 15 or 16 inches. This influenced the judgement of the naive subject, and brought his estimations up to more or less the same distance. The task was repeated 30 times, and then one of the confederates was replaced by a new naive subject, who during the following 30 trials gave his estimate after hearing those of the others in the room. Then, the remaining confederate was also replaced by a naive subject. The experiment was continued with the ‘oldest’ group member always being replaced after 30 trials by a new subject, who gave his estimation after hearing those made by the older group members. In this way the changing of generations and the adoption of culture as a tradition by subsequent generations was simulated in the laboratory. The ‘cultural element’ initiated by the two confederates, i.e. the inclination to overestimate the distance the point of light moved, persisted for a few laboratory generations, but the judgements grew regularly smaller with each stage. At the sixth stage, when the fourth naive subject was replaced, the estimates had drifted down to the basic four-inch level. Although the norm in this experiment had its origin in certain individuals, after the first two stages it was no longer in those who carried it and whom it influenced - and who step by step changed it. Thus far the experiment is a realistic model of norm formation. The norm of judgement, established by the accomplices and subject to gradual change, represents culture handed down from one generation to another, but this laboratory ‘culture’ lacks the societal relations of the subjects and the societal activity in which they necessarily participate in reality - in production, as citizens, etc. - and which essentially influence the genesis and persistence of norms. In real life, norms develop in response to certain structural problems (see UllmanMargalit 19771, not out of arbitrary decisions made by individuals. In this respect the experiment by Jacobs and Campbell is unrealistic and psychologistic. But perhaps society is represented in the experiment after all, even though the scientist excludes it from his analyses. Everything that happens in the laboratory is part of scientific research and in the Durkheimian sense this is a social fact. The experimenter and his subjects have more or less

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clear ideas of how they are expected to behave in a scientific experiment; the source of these ideas is however not in the individual, but in the social institution that is called science. Therefore these ways of acting, thinking and feeling are endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control what happens in the laboratory. In ‘psychological’ social psychology, where the baseline assumptions are individualistic, this is often ignored. ‘Society’ is present in the experiment through one of its institutions science - but the scientist fails to gain conceptual control of this fact and remains at the mercy of its influence. In this sense those research traditions within social psychology whose assumptions do not refer to individuals’ reactions only are much better equipped. In the two sections that follow we shall deal with these traditions, first with one that does not concern itself with social influence, but with social interaction.

B. Social Interaction as Research Object 1. The Concept Revisited Some definitions of social psychology stress the reciprocal and holistic nature of the process of social influence by stating that social psychology deals with interaction between people: “Social psychology is concerned with the behavioral processes, causal factors, and results of interaction among persons and groups” (Lindgren 1969, 7). One constituent of social interaction, one ‘moment’ in this process is social influence occurring between two persons. In interaction between A and B, A influences B and vice versa. Interaction between three people is more complicated in that A can influence B both directly and through C. If interaction consists in nothing other than influence relations between individuals, or if it is fully reducible to social influence, then the study of interaction has to be categorized under the tradition we have been discussing above.

Can interaction be reduced to individuals? Even reference to social interaction does not necessarily imply anything beyond simple influence relations. For example, in Murchinson’s (1935) Handbook of Social Psychology there are extensive reviews of ‘interaction’

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not only between humans but also between bacteria and between plants. That these forms of interaction are included in a textbook on social psychology seems to suggest that social psychology is concerned with all cases where several individuals or elements influencing one another appear simultaneously. Whether these are humans, animals, plants or bacteria is of secondary importance. In the mechanistic model of social interaction people are conceived as separate, isolated units; they influence each other in the same ways as the balls in a game of billiards, through external and direct contact. Observe one ball in relation to others. That is the whole problem of the individual vs. his social environment. However, when applied to humans, this is a very misleading model. The human individual is an active subject, not a lifeless billiard ball, and he is also active in a different way than plants or animals. Buridan’s ass - a theoretical creature - starved to death facing two equally desirable haybales. Insofar as the world is ruled by physical laws, equal opposing forces do cancel each other out. But in real life an ass would easily tuck away both hay-bales, and the mechanical model would be even less adequate for describing human action. The laws governing the human psyche are not physical but psychological. For the human being this kind of dilemma is not a ‘stimulus’ that exerts a constant mechanical force, but a challenge or task he has to solve through his own initiative. For instance, a human being will imagine that this or that alternative is more tempting, or set up a rule for making the decision: he tosses a coin. It is a false prediction that in the face of a dilemma the human being will petrify. On the contrary, he will make active efforts to overcome the problem and resolve the situation. We will not get very far if we attempt to depart from the mechanistic concept of interaction by annexing activity and self-reflection to the individuals that were initially understood as billiard ball-like entities. This, as Joas (1985, 113) says, is merely an attempt of “crude behaviourism to liberalize itself”. We will get a lot further if we incorporate into the concept of interaction the common meanings that are assigned by the participants to their acts. This will take us into the domain of the school of social psychology known as symbolic interactionism. Representatives of symbolic interactionism (e.g. Blumer 1969) point out that in interaction people do not respond to each other’s acts as they stand, but always to their meanings. As we saw above when discussing Asch’s ex-

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periments, A’s act and B’s response to it are usually mediated by B’s interpretation of A’s act. In fact we cannot speak of an ‘act’ (as distinct from mere ‘behaviour’) until some meaning has been assigned to a person’s movements, the noises he emits, etc. Zeitlin (1973, 215-218) is sharply critical of Blumer’s symbolic interactionism because it “presents us with a philosophical conception that flattens out both ‘society’ and the ‘individual”’. It does the latter by representing individuals without organic drives; and the former by representing society without structure. Blumer’s theory does, however, contain some sort of germ of society. It is present in concepts such as ‘meaning’, ‘interpretation’, ‘understanding’. Max Weber (1947, 94-96) says in his classical analysis that understanding m2y be of two kinds. The first is the direct observational understanding of the subjective meaning of a given act as such, including verbal utterances. We understand a person’s anger from his words or facial expressions. Or we understand from our neighbour’s actions what he is doing: he is chopping wood. The second kind of Understanding is explanatory understanding. Here, we understand the motive of an act by placing it in an intelligible and mcre inclusive context of meaning. We understand why another person is angry: he was offended by what we just said. Or we understand why our neighbour is chopping wood on a hot summer’s day: he is going to warm up the sauna. According to Weber, a meaning can be understood by direct observation or by emotional reactions, whereas the understanding of motives is mediated, i.e. it requires additional information and reasoning by which a motive background is constructed. Yet in practice a European may have difficulties in immediately understanding the facial expressions of an Asiatic, and to understand that somebody is chopping wood or warming up the sauna we have to know what an “axe” and what a “sauna” is. So even to understand meanings - and not only motives - it is necessary to have common ways of expression, common forms of action and common rules, as well as knowledge of their material forms. The substance required for understanding is by nature social, not individual; it is the culture that the community has produced, stored and materialized in the course of its history and that it continuously develops. This is why we can say that when it adopts the concept of meaning, symbolic interactionism also has to accept, at least in some elementary form, the concepts of culture and society. Summarizing the above discussion, it seems perfectly clear that when it

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defines its object as social interaction, social psychology must not confine itself to individuals and inter-individual influence relations. First, interaction presupposes common meanings, which derive neither from the interaction episode in question nor from the participants of interaction. Second, interaction normally emerges out of or with the purpose of accomplishing something that lies outside the actual episode. Third, interaction usually has consequences that could never have been predicted on the basis of the individuals involved or their qualities.

Chance in social interaction If the consequences emerging from interaction are unpredictable, the attempt to explain them will use the concept of chance. This concept is employed in more than one way. Scientific descriptions may refer to an event as chance even though there is a perfectly rational scientific explanation. Hempel’s example of the ‘covering law’ model of explanation is illustrative. Mr. A. is starting his car on a cold winter’s morning but realizes that the radiator has cracked. There is a simple physical explanation of what has happened: as the temperature dropped the water froze, expanded and broke the radiator. Now assume that A. is an important person who missed a meeting because of his mishap; and that the meeting made a decision that would have been different had Mr. A. been present. The historian might say that this incident changed the course of history by chance: because the engine of A’s car failed to start at the decisive moment. He will use thls explanation even though he is familiar with the physical explanation for the ‘ccincidence’. There is no historical law that can provide an explanation, and it is the historian’s job to thematize the episode from the point of view of history (and not from the point of view of physics). We sometimes talk of chance when we lack the knowledge and tools to produce a rational explanation, even though it is fairly clear that there must be some lawfulness behind the incident. Monod (1971, 111) calls this “operational” uncertainty. Uncertainty is operational in the case of dice or roulette. If we had a device that could throw the dice or spin the ball which observe given physical laws - in precisely the same way time after time, it would no longer be necessary to talk of chance. But in other situations the idea of chance takes on an essential and no lor?ger merely operational meaning. Monod continues:

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“This is the case, for instance, in what may be called ‘absolute coincidences’, those which result from the intersection of two totally independent chains of events. Suppose that Dr Brown sets out on an emergency call to a new patient. In the meantime Jones the carpenter has started work on repairs to the roof of a nearby building. As Dr Brown walks past the building, Jones inadvertently drops his hammer, whose (deterministic) trajectory happens to intercept that of the physician, who dies of a fractured skull. We say he was a victim of chance. What other term fits such an event, by its very nature unforeseeable? Chance is obviously the essential factor here, inherent in the complete independence of two causal chains of events whose convergence produces the accident. ” It is clear from everyday experience that the events Monod calls “essential uncertainties” play a major role in our interaction with other people. We may not be hit by falling hammers very often, but it is possible that something we have overheard or an unintended secondary meaning of an intentional statement ‘collides’ with something we happen to be thinking about at that very moment; collides in a way that a completely new thought, feeling, or some act that could not have been predicted just a few moments earlier, comes to our mind; and yet this new element may cause the interaction process to move onto completely new lies. When the unexpected that was brought about by interaction in one individual meets something unexpected that it brought about in another individual, surprises emerge at a new level. This is due, on the one hand, to the reasons that made the individual act and will; on the other hand to the laws that determine the results of the numerous wills and acts of people. The latter are no longer psychological laws pertaining to individual behaviour, but social psychological, sociological or historical laws, But are they laws of probability determined by chance, or something else? Among others, Engels occupied himself with this problem. He wrote (Engels 1958, 391): “The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which actually follow from these actions are not intended; or when they do seem to correspond to the end intended, they ultimately have consequences quite other thzn those intended. Historical events thus appear on the whole to be likewise governed by chance. But where on the surface accident holds sway, there actually it is always governed by inner, hidden laws and it is only a matter of discovering these laws.’’

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The end-result of an interaction process is also often something other than what the actors had expected or hoped. What interaction seems to beget, or what seems to emerge in interaction, is something that even in principle cannot be predicted on the basis of the individual’s qualities and intentions. Engels argues that similar societal processes actually observe historical laws. The social psychologist dealing with interaction must ask himself whether his object observes social psychological laws that cannot be reduced to the individual’s qualities and intentions. Is it for him, too, “only a matter of discovering these laws”?

Interaction and cooperation However, it is not only the end-result that lies outside the individuals involved in the interaction process, but also the starting-point. The forces that set this process into motion must exert their influence through the interacting individuals; or, to quote Engels (1958, 377) again, “( ...I all the driving forces of the actions of any individual person must pass through his brain, and transform themselves into motives of his will in order to set him into action”. But surely the causes of war, for instance, cannot be found in the will of the individuals who are ‘interacting’ by killing each other. Wars will not break out and persist unless alien forces pass through the brain of the individual soldier and “transform themselves into motives of his will in order to set him into action”; but it would be definitely wrong to say that these forces are nothing more than the will of individual soldiers. An individual person can accomplish very little in this world without the cooperation of other individuals. The solitary hunter in the wilderness must sell or trade some of his skins to get the things he needs, things that often are produced not by the person he is trading with but someone else. These cooperative relations generate interaction; and it is impossible to understand this interaction if we fail to include these relations in our analysis. This goes for all forms of interaction, whether cooperative, positive, or of the kind that involves a conflict or that turns into violent or destructive interaction. Reverting to the thoughts of Engels, one of the first things that people must do to survive in this world is “the production and reproduction of immediate life”. Production involves “the production of the means of subsistence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools requisite therefore”.

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Reproduction means “the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species”. People are organized into groups to produce their material conditions of life, reproduction of life takes place within the family. Labour and family, the way in which cooperation has been organized in these two spheres at each given moment in history, are the key poles around which interaction is organized in other spheres of life as well (Engels 1958, 170-171).

However, it is necessary at this point to make an important distinction between what we call societal relations - e.g. class relations, such as between lord and serf in feudal society, or between employer and employee of today - and immediate social relations between individuals. The latter do not affect the former; the employer remains an employer and his wcrkers are always wage-earners whether they are deadly enemies or close friends as individuals, in their social relations. Societal relations, then, provide the framework within which social relations evolve and the context within which they are to be analysed. A social relationship, say friendship or enmity, between the feudal lord and his serf was of a different kind than the corresponding relationship between the employer and the worker of modern industrial society: societal relations are determinants of social relations. One of the most challenging tasks for the branch of social psychology concerned with interaction is to work out a theoretical and methodological approach that at the same time pays attention to both societal and social relations and to the processes mediating them.

2. Differences between the Study of Social Interaction and the Study of Social Influence What are the main differences between the concept of interaction we have been developing above and the concept of social influence? How does the study of the former differ from the study of the latter? It is clear that if we take interaction as consisting in productive and reproductive cooperation, then the emphasis is on what is specific to humans. Cooperation among bees or ants is strictly determined by biology. It is not based on conscious planning, nor do its forms change with history in the same way as the forms of human productive cooperation. Animals do not plan their family life as humans do. Given that stimulus and response

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in human interaction always appear within the context of or as part of some societal activity, it should be obvious by now why the S-R formula is inadequate. This should also explain why the attempt by Homans (1950), for example, to describe in abstract the relations between such elements as ‘interaction’ and ‘liking’ is futile. The result will depend decisively on the kind of activity within which these elements combine: their relation in one kind of activity may differ essentially from that found in a different kind of activity. In animals, where responses to stimuli are strictly biologml, the situation is completely different. Second, if we bear in mind that interaction is always part of some meaningful activity, we are bound to realize that interaction between the scientist and his subject is also part of a societal activity known as science. In many cases it is precisely this that is the key explanatory factor of what happens in the experiment. Let us illustrate this by Milgram’s (1974) famous experiment where the subjects were required to administer electric shocks to other subjects as punishment for wrong answers. Further wrong answers were to be punished by increasing the intensity of the shock. According to Milgram’s results, over half of the subjects were prepared to administer a shock to the ‘victim’ (whose reactions were faked) that was labelled “Dangerous: Severe Shock” on the shock generator; admittedly the subjects were reassured that even this level of shock intensity would not cause any permanent damage. These results have given rise to far-reaching speculation on people’s preparedness to obey orders in various situations, such as in war. Mixon (1972; 1979) re-analysed Milgram’s experiment and wrote ‘scripts’ describing the setting in which it was carried out - but only the setting, not how the subjects actually responded. Mixon then asked his subjects to imagine they were in this situation and to say how the experiment wodd probably continue from the point where the script broke off. Mixon registers whether hs subjects had the script subject obey or defy the experimenter’s order to administer shocks. In particular, he tries to see how this varies when slight modifications are entered in the scripts. His aim is to develop a script all continuations of which describe obedient subjects; and on the other hand, a script where none of the stories have obedient subjects. Mixon succeeded. The critical factor distinguishing ‘all’ from ‘none’ scripts is whether the subjects believe the electric shocks only cause pain

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to the ‘victim’ or that they may actually damage his health. In the former case all the stories have subjects who obey the experimenter’s order to administer shocks; in the latter case all the subjects refuse to go on with the experiment. The explanation of Milgram’s results is thus reduced to a norm that his subjects had apparently observed and that goes like this: It is legitimate in a scientific experiment (as it is at the dentist’s, for instance) to cause pain to voluntary subjects, but it is not legitimate to harm them. Milgram’s experiment does not in fact prove anything about the abstract idea of ‘obedience’. Instead, it is evidence of a norm prevailing in a social psychological experiment. The subjects obeyed the orders because they were involved in an activity called ‘science’. It is not possible on the basis of this experiment to tell how people would respond in another situation, if they were involved in an activity such as ‘war’ or ‘torture’. Perhaps in this case the majority would refuse to obey? It might be added here that it is useless to try to find abstract laws for ‘obedience in general’ by testing these hypotheses in a number of different situations and then suggesting that they are a statistically representative sample of all possible kinds of situations. This kind of statistical thinking is hardly applicable to such a vague and ambiguous concept as ‘situation’. Rather, ‘‘( ...I the forces of the environment and the laws of their operation (. ..) can be discovered only by proceeding from certain total situations that are simple but well defined in their concrete individuality”; by a method “which usually implies experiment and systematic variation of conditions” (Lewin 1935, 69). Third, the concept of social interaction developed above is no longer as individually-centred as the concept of social influence. There is more to interaction than individuals and influence relations between individuals. It emerges out of a social structure that leads people to cooperation; and things emerge out of it that we could not have predicted on the basis of the individuals involved and their qualities. Thus, the social psychology concerned with social interaction has a lot in common with what is known as ‘ scciological’ social psychology. The tragic internal contradiction which hampers progress within this tradition is that so many ‘sociological’ social psychologists (such as Rosenberg and Turner 1981, xv) adhere - at least implicitly - to the thesis that the social can be reduced to individuals. We now have a simple explanation for the asymmetry mentioned by Liska (1977) that most representatives of ‘sociological’ social psychology refer to the results of ‘psychological’ social psychology, whereas the represen-

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tatives of the latter school, psychologists, pay little or no attention to ‘scciological’ social psychology. There is no reason to suspect that psychologists are more arrogant or narrow-minded than sociologists. The imbalance follows logically from the different focuses of the two traditions. Social influence is one aspect or moment of social interaction, which is the object proper of ‘sociological’ social psychology. This is why scientists within this tradition are also interested in research into influence. But there is more to social interaction than social influence. This is why ‘psychological’ social psychology, which focuses narrowly on the study of social influence, fails to grasp social interaction as anything other than a mechanical construction. Genuine social interaction, for this tradition, remains a mystery and something it does not concern itself with in its researches.

3. Methods of Concrete Research It should be clear by now to the reader familiar with the discussions on methodological individualism (e.g. O’Neill 1973) that the concept of ‘genuine’ social interaction advocated above is not compatible with the principles of this doctrine. On the other hand, it is equally clear that our concept does not imply mystical or irrational factors that affect people’s lives in the same way as some people believe their life is guided by God or the stars above. Even that which is ‘more than individuals’ emerges out of interaction among people or between people and nature. The point is that we can no longer identify the people of the past as individuals. All we can do is accept the results of their interaction as institutions, language, culture. None of these have the form of an individual person. This also applies to a great part of our own acts in interaction with other people, or more precisely to the results of our common acts. I fear that a full-length philosophical discussion of the antagonisms between methodological individualism and methodological collectivism or ho!ism would soon begin to comply with Mulkay’s (1985, 65-67) ironic rules for generating scientific letters, rules that guarantee the debate will be unsuccessful. It is therefore wiser to concentrate on concrete research and focus our criticism of methodological individualism on the methods and techniques used in the study of interaction.

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IPA and ethnomethodology One of the most popular methods of interaction analysis is the one originally published in 1950 by R.F. Bales, and revised in 1970 (Interaction Process Analysis; IPA). Here, interaction is divided into units that Bales calls acts. An act is usually a sentence expressing a complete idea. There may be several acts in one short utterance. An act may also be laughter, a gesture, a facial expression, etc. According to Bales, an act is the smallest independent unit of interaction. For each act, the observer notes down three facts: who performed the act, to whom it was directed, and what its content was. On the basis of its content every act is entered in one of twelve categories which form the core of the method. These categories can be combined in different ways into larger classes. This method has been used in describing the general course and various phases of a conversation process and, combined with other methods, for role differentiation in small groups. IPA is not just a neutral technique but its categories draw on some of the ideas of Talcott Parsons’s general theory of action. However, Bales’s approach is restricted to the formal features of interaction and abstracts from the content of discussion. Surely it is more important not to note that somebody ‘shows disagreement’ (category 10) or ‘gives suggestion’ (category 41,but to find out what it was the person disagreed with or what was the content of his suggestion. This problem, to take it a little further, stems from the fact that a purely formal analysis is in reality not even possible. To be able to resolve whether an utterance is ‘giving opinion’ (category 5) or ‘giving information’ (category 6), the observer must interpret it. Turning to Max Weber (1947, 91-96) again, he must, firstly, understand the meaning of the act, i.e. what the person said. Secondly, he must understand the motive of the act: did the speaker say something to ‘show tension release’ (category 2) or to ‘show solidarity’ (category 1).The observer has to be well acquainted with what Bales calls the group culture, but this important element used in interpretation remains invisible and the information it involves remains largely unused. This is because the focus is exclusively on the individuals and their acts. Methodological individualism leads to the concealment of important factors even though they cannot be ignored in reality; yet when concealed they remain beyond scientific control and criticism. The elements that Bales’s IPA neglects are the focus of analysis in the line of interaction research that emerged during the 1950s and 1960s,

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known as ethnomethodology. Exploring the origins of the term, Garfinkel (1974) mentions a study where recorded conversations of jury members were reviewed. Bales’s method would have allowed us to study how the jury works as a small group, says Garfinkel, but “the question that we had was, ‘What makes them jurors?”’. This question, as it concerned action and not only behaviour, drew attention to methodological rules that the layman uses in trying to solve a court case by relying on his common sense: how much harm did the act cause, who was responsible, who was to blame, how could it be remedied, etc. (Garfinkel 1967, 104-115). Just as the anthropologst uses the concept ‘ethnomedicine’ to designate popular notions of illnesses and their remedies, the term ‘ethnomethodology’ refers to the assumptions, conceptions and rules underlying everyday routines. So while Bales’s method makes it possible to describe the formal regularities of an interaction process already interpreted by the observer (within the framework of a set of concepts derived from Parsons’s theory), ethnomethodology aims to explain that interpretation as well as the social nature of the reality interpreted. The assumptions, notions and rules upon which everyday interpretations are based are not explicated. We know them without knowing that we know them, as a speaker knows how to use his mother tongue without necessarily being familiar with the rules of grammar. Rules of this kind do not usually come to light until somebody breaks them. A typical example of an ethnomethodological research technique would be to ask a student to go home and act for a while as if he were a lodger and to observe his family’s reactions - bewilderment, astonishment, finally maybe anger. In this way invisible elements necessary for everyday interaction are made visible, in this case the different rules that are used in interaction with ‘familiar’ and ‘strange’ people (cf. Garfinkel 1957, 36-49). When we talk about a meaning reality or an ‘invisible element’ outside the individual, it must be borne in mind that in interaction people also add to that element, create new meanings. “We do not ‘have’ meanings and then share them”, says Duncan (1959, 108); on the contrary, “as we communicate we create meanings”. Ethnomethodology has also been interested in this aspect, such as in what gives a certain argument or object the meaning of a ‘fact’ or ‘evidence’ (cf. Zimmerman 1974); or in science, what does it mean when we say that someone has made a ‘discovery’ (see Mulkay 1985, 173-200).

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Basic unit: episode Interaction consists both in people’s acts and words and in the common knowledge and experience that gives them meaning and that enables these meanings to be interpreted. Bales’s method is primarily concerned with the former, ethnomethodology attaches more importance to the latter. Both, however, may omit something that is central to the interaction process as a whole. The Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky (1962, 349, who wrote his major works in the 1930s, distinguished two forms of analysis, one of which divides the object of study into elements, the other into units. When water is divided into hydrogen and oxygen, it is divided into elements. Water is composed of them, but neither hydrogen nor oxygen possess the same properties as water. Both of them have properties that water does not. Knowing that hydrogen bums and oxygen sustains fire, it is difficult, with this method of analysis, to explain why a compound of them extinguishes fire. Similar problems are met in psychology when analysing objects into elements. Vygotsky takes verbal thought as an example. If it is divided into elements by detaching thought from word, we wind up in a dead end, he says. Unit is the term Vygotsky uses for describing a product of analysis that has all the basic properties of the whole that is analysed, and that cannot be divided into smaller parts without losing these properties. The true units of water are its molecules. In biological analysis the unit is the living cell. In the psychological analysis of verbal thought it is the meaning of a word, Vygotsky writes. The basic unit of interaction should comprise all the essential elements of interaction if it is to retain all the most important properties of the object of analysis. It cannot consist only of an influence relation, an act, or a rule; it must be an entire interaction episode (cf. Watson and Potter 1962; HarrC and Secord 1972, 147-175). The study of concrete interaction processes would thus include (1)a division of the process into episodes and (2) a division of the episodes into elements such as relations of dependence, act, and various types of social influence. According to the definition by HarrC and Secord (1972, 147), an episode is “any natural division of social life”. Elsewhere, HarrC (1974, 250) defines an episode as “any coherent fragment of social life”. These definitions do not seem very informative, but HarrC provides some examples: a

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lecture by a visiting lecturer with introduction, thanks and other rituals is an episode; to enter a university, study for five years, take a degree and join lay society is an episode; to go to a restaurant, order, eat, pay, and leave with expressions of civility is an episode. However, it seems that these entities are too extensive to correspond to Vygotsky’s idea of the smallest possible unit that contains all the essential properties and features of the whole that is analysed. A lecturer’s visit or an evening at a restaurant can both be analysed into smaller units from which it is immediately clear whether the unit in question is part of the lecture or part of the evening out, i.e. which contain the essential features of the whole. It is more useful to call these parts episodes, and to take the examples that Harrk mentions as chains of episodes. But one separate act, somebody ‘asking for information’ or ‘giving an opinion’, does not constitute an episode because we cannot tell whether it belongs to the lecture or the evening out; it is a constituent smaller than a unit, an element. One limit to the smallest possible unit of interaction is set by the norms and other elements that constitute the meaning of the interaction process (see Searle 1970, 50-53). In a marriage ceremony, for example, certain minimum requirements must be met. Marriage has not taken place until a person with the right, defined by a particular set of rules, to perform the ceremony has asked certain questions, received certain answers, and declared those who gave these answers husband and wife, provided that the witnesses defined by the set of rules are present. An episode must involve at least this minimum number of normative elements, as well as people and their acts in a certain order. But usually it also includes many nonconstitutive elements, such as wedding guests, regulative norms influencing their behaviour, congratulations, etc. Episodes are less clearly demarcated in social situations that are not strictly regulated by official norms. One relatively external and formal criterion for an episode in the verbal interaction process might be the object of discussion. Shifting from one object or topic to another is thus a natural bomdary between two successive episodes, and the entire interaction process assumes a structure that Vygotsky (1962,641 calls a “chain complex” (cf. also Brown 1965, 323-328). He uses this term to describe the course of a child’s activity as she classifies different kinds of objects on a table. To begin with, the child follows one principle and gathers, say, triangular blocks into one pile; then she switches to another principle and starts putting other

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wooden blocks into the same pile as the wooden triangular block; until she once again changes her system and starts choosing red objects. Similar chains develop in conversation by changes of subject. The change may be preceded by a transition phrase, the form of which indicates how radical or permanent the change will be: “By the way, ...”; “That reminds me, ,..”; ‘ ‘To change the subject entirely, ...” . One conversation episode unfolds into a new subject, a new episode. The flow of our everyday activities is similarly divided into episodes. One activity unfolds into another when the focus or object of activity changes. Inasmuch as the new subject or activity springs from the previous one, and what has previously been said or done influences what will be said or done now, the order of episodes is also important. Episodes have their own history in the entity of events. And not only does what has already been said influence what will be subsequently said, but a later episode may also shed new light on an earlier one, give it a new meaning. Interaction is, as Wilson (1970) defines it, ‘‘an interpretive process in which meanings evolve and change over the course of interaction”. However, in one interaction process there may be several meaning levels. At one level interaction may proceed in the form of decision-making, at another as a struggle for power. For this reason it is impossible to divide interaction into episodes in one single way, as water is analysed into molecules. An analysis that detaches episodes from their broader historical context and attempts by way of factor anzlysis, for instance, to identrfy the main dimensions of a group of episodes cannot be a very fruitful methodological approach.

Elements of an episode: dependencies, acts, effects The social psychologist who has decided to abandon methodological individualism will have to resolve many methodological challenges. In the analysis of the various elements of an interaction episode he has to be prepared to tackle the vast fields of personality, language and culture. Let us first take a look at inter-individual dependence relations, which constitute one element of every interaction episode. Here we shall use the same example that Roger Brown has used in a comparison of personality theories: the problems of the Tyrone family in Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey Info Night. Mary Tyrone, the mother, is a morphine addict. Mary and the family’s younger son Edmund are devoted to each other.

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Therefore Edmund is worried about his mother’s morphine habit and she is concerned about Edmund’s drinking. Both alleviate their own anxiety by an indulgence that distresses the other: Edmund uses alcohol and Mary morphine. The many interaction episodes between Mary and Edmund that have an unfortunate ending involve this basic pattern leading to vicious cycles (see Brown and Herrnstein 1975, 568-570).

Table 1.1. Mary’s and Edmund’s behaviour alternatives and their corresponding subjective experiences Subjective experience Mary Edmund 1. Edmund drinks, Mary does not take morphine ..... 2. Edmund drinks, Mary takes morphine ..... 3. Edmund does not drink, Mary does not take morphine 4. Edmund does not drink, Mary takes morphine .....

Mary

-2

+2

+1

+1

-1

-1

+2

-2

drinks

Edmund does not drink

takes morphine does not take morphine

T o simplify the situation, let us assume that Mary and Edmund have two basic alternatives: Mary takes morphine or does not, Edmund drinks or abstains from drinking. These alternatives can be combined in four different ways, as shown in Table 1.1.Numerical values have been given to describe Mary’s subjective feelings assuming that (a) without morphine Mary is always depressed and that (b) Edmund’s drinking aggravates her anxiety; and that (c) morphine makes Mary feel better and (d) even more so if Edmund does not drink. The corresponding assumptions are made for Edmund. The same information is also presented in a matrix below the table,

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with Mary’s subjective feelings below the diagonal in each cell, Edmund’s above the diagonal. It is clear from the table and the matrix that Mary cannot actually influence Edmund by her own behaviour. She can add to Edmund’s contentment by refraining from morphine, but for Edmund drinking is the more tempting alternative no matter what his mother does. The same applies to Edmund’s possibilities of influencing Mary’s morphine addiction. Thus the options taken by Edmund and Mary easily lead to a combination that gives a tolerable degree of contentment to both: Edmund drinks and Mary resorts to morphine. Both wish that the other would opt for the alternative, but their relationship does not in this case evoke a motivation in either of them to change their behaviour. Edmund and Mary are two separate subjects who act in accordance with their own desires. Both are simply part of each other’s ‘environment’ that they wish were different, but that they cannot change. This relationship changes essentially if (a) Mary is always distressed when Edmund drinks, although (b) less so if she takes morphine; and (c) she is always pleased when Edmund does not drink, although (d) less so if she does not take morphine. Given symmetrical assumptions for Edmund, the matrix would look like this:

We shall later revert to the discussion of this kind of situation, known as the ’Prisoner’s Dilemma’ (pp. 52-55). Meanwhile, it is useful to note how it differs from the situation in Table 1.1. First, the persons involved are no longer separate subjects that are merely part of each other’s environment. They are now intertwined at the level of personality, if we take that concept to mean the individual’s complex motivation and self-regulation system (the distinction between subject and personality is discussed in chapter 3). The situation elicits in both a desire to reach a mutual agreement whereby they abstain from morphine and alcohol. This would mean they could both be fair-

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ly satisfied. Similarly, both are willing to control their own behaviour in order that the agreement holds. But: both are still left with the temptation to break the agreement, hoping that the other keeps it, because the party who breaks the agreement could be even more satisfied. Therefore this situation, too, easily breaks down into Mary taking morphine and Edmund drinking. But because the mutual dependence now extends to the level of personality, the retreat to an egoistic subject who attempts to maximize his or her own pleasure leads to anxiety in both and repeated efforts at cooperation. In this case, analysis of one element of an interaction episode dependence - led to the problematic of personality. Below, we shall see how analysis of another type of element of interaction, i.e. acts and their meanings, leads us to dealing with language. A certain act or verbal expression may represent a way of overcoming the norms regulating interaction between people of different social status. The person of higher status has the right to regulate interaction; it is part of his power. The regulation norm would make it difficult for the person in the lower position to start interaction with someone in a higher position as for a child with an adult - were it not for the supplementing norm: if you have been asked, you have the right to answer. So all the child has to do is to provoke a question from his parent. A child opens an episode by saying, “Guess what?” or “D’you know what?” To this, his father or mother usually replies spontaneously, “What?” Now the child has been asked and has the right to say what he has in mind (Sacks 1974; Fishman 1978). Sometimes the parent may get tired of the continual questions, ‘objectivate’ the situation (cf. p. 231, and answer, “No I don’t and I couldn’t care less”. The parent has ‘beaten’ the child in the interaction game, but from the child’s point of view perhaps also violated the normal rules of interaction. It is often argued that direct, straightforward communication is always better and more efficient than indirect and complicated communication. This is one of the simplistic assumptions we want to dissociate ourselves from by our concept of interaction. The above example of interaction between child and parent shows that there are situations in which adequate communication requires complex forms. One complex form of communication is what is known as double-bind, or an order that negates itself, such as “Don’t obey me!” or “Act spontaneously!” It is impossible to fulfill these demands because ordered disobedience or spontaneity is not true disobe-

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dience or spontaneity. If parents tell their children to do things in the form of double-bind demands and by doing so repeatedly force them into blind alleys, the consequences may be negative. This may also apply to the kind of communication where family members do not communicate with each other directly but always via a third person (as when parents communicate with each other via their child). However, the actual cause of the negative consequences is not the form of communication but the negative or emotionally contradictory interpersonal relationship. So simplified communication is not the solution; instead, it is necessary to change the underlying relationships that led to the complicated communication. There are also situations in which double-bind or communication via a third person do not produce negative consequences. On the contrary, they are means developed in human interaction by which an expression can be given more depth and nuances and, if necessary, more accuracy and honesty than would be the case if simple communication that abandons these instruments were used. The feedback effects of an act on the actor himself constitute a very important category of elements in every interaction episode. It is customary to describe these effects by learning-theory concepts. If an act has positive consequences for the actor, the probability of it occurring again increases, i.e. the individual learns to repeat the act. If the consequences are unpleasant, the probability of reoccurrence decreases, i.e. the individual learns to avoid the act. A pleasant consequence may be a reward (for instance, a rat is given a piece of food when it presses the right lever), or the omission of punishment (the rat receives electric shocks that cease when it presses the right lever). An unpleasant consequence may be a punishment (the rat gets an electric shock when it presses the wrong lever), or the omission of the reward (a net preventing the rat’s access to food falls into the cage when it presses the wrong lever). There are however serious limitations to this learning model even in animal experiments. It is not indifferent to the animal’s learning process what kind of a response terminates electric shocks from the cage floor. It is likely that there are biological instincts - such as escaping - for respondicg to such a stimulus. Responding to a pain-inducing stimulus by pressing a lever is hardly part of the animal’s biological heritage; to say nothing of situations in which the animal could terminate the punishment by acting in a w7ay completely opposite to escaping, by starting to eat the food placed

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in the cage, for instance. The animal might in fact even be ‘contraprepared’ to such behaviour (see Howarth and Gillham 1981, 132-133). Here again we can clearly see the difference between man and animal. Unless ‘punishment’ comes as a surprise or an overwhelming shock, the human individual will take it as a task to be solved by finding the means to terminate the punishment. He will not escape a stimulus that frightens him (even if he were biologically inclined to) but his response will be mediated by conscious deliberation and self-control. And what is more important, ‘punishments’ are a normal part of everyday social activity and therefore the individual is prepared for them. This is why we do not run out of the room or attack the dentist if his drill hits a nerve, which is what an animal would do. The effect of the ‘punishment’ on our response is mediated by the activity of which it is a natural part. If a prisoner is so devoted to his cause as to resort to an activity known as a ‘hunger strike’, he is prepared for the suffering and the risks involved in refusing to eat. Social interaction is intertwined with personality, language and culture (including such institutions as ‘dentistry’ and ‘hunger strike’) to such an extent that the simple theoretical keys offered by the tradition of ‘social influence’ cannot open up its episodes.

C. The Psychology of Groups and Masses as Research Object We have so far analysed two different concepts of social psychology. According to the first one, social psychology is concerned with social influence; a concept leading to ‘psychological’ social psychology. The second regards social psychology as the study of social interaction; a starting-point from which at least one path leads to what is known as ‘sociological’ social psychology. House (1977), however, talks about the three faces of social psychology. The first face is psychological social psychology and the second symbolic interactionism. The third face is “psychological sociology (or social structure and personality)”, a tradition concerned with “the relation of macrosocial structures (e.g. organizations, occupations, ‘social classes’, religion, type of community) and processes (urbanization, industrialization, social mobili-

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ty) to individual psychological attributes and behavior”. The key word in this definition is ‘macrosocial’. Below, we shall present our own definition of the third face of social psychology, or the psychology of ‘macrosocial’ entities: organized groups, masses, peoples, etc. Much in the same way as psychology deals with the thought, action and personality of individuals and with inter-individual relationships, this ‘third social psychology’ is interested in how groups think and act, in the national character of a people, or in the way in which groups view other groups. We start by asking whether the analogy between group and individual is justified. For example, does a nation have a ‘character’ in the same sense as we talk about an individual’s character? Second, we shall try to find out how group action arises from individual action. And third, we shall be dealing with groups and masses as objects of group and mass action, i.e. with the problem of intergroup relations.

1. Action and Personality at the Individual and Group Level

A classic presentation dealing with groups and masses as if they were individuals with a personality of their own is Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd (orig. 1895; 1903). This book aims to answer the classic social psychological question of how (1) the behaviour of the individual in a group differs from the behaviour of the solitary individual, and how (2) mass action differs from individual action. Here, we are concerned only with the latter question. According to Le Bon, individual action is controlled by human consciousness and rationality, whereas mass action is subconscious and irrational - an idea to which Freud (1922) lends support in his psychology of groups. The transition from individual rationality to mass irrationality, says Le Bon, is an important historical trend: “The substitution of the unconscious action of crowds for the conscious activity of individuals is one of the principal characteristics of the present age” (Le Bon 1903, 5). In chapter 4 we shall discuss the emergence of the modern industrial working class and its growing political influence in the context of European history. It is these changes that underlie Le Bon’s presentation. What he calls “masses” represent the working class, “the era of masses” means the new era of democracy. In this respect his book has many points in common with the aristocratic critique of ‘masses’ and democratization by the

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Spaniard Ortega y Gasset (1932). Le Bon was a medical doctor. This explains why he writes about masses as if they were a pathological phenomenon: “Ideas, sentiments, emotions, and beliefs possess in crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes. (. ..) In the case of men collected in a crowd all emotions are very rapidly contagious, which explains the suddenness of panics. Brain disorders, like madness, are themselves contagious. The frequency of madness among doctors who are specialists for the mad is notorious.” (Le Bon 1903, 143) Pathological descriptions of the working class or of any force strugghg for democracy are to the liking of conservative and anti-democratic circles. Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy, was a faithful reader of Le Bon, and Adolf Hitler seems to have drawn many of the ideas expressed in Mein Kampf from Le Bon’s mass psychology (Nye 1975, 177-179). This is no reason to ignore Le Bon’s social psychology, however. What we need is scientific criticism to show where Le Bon went wrong; that way we will be better able to explain the important phenomena he dealt with. To begin with, what is wrong with the idea that groups and masses can be regarded as entities in the same way as individuals? Consider the following two examples, one from Raymond B. Cattell and the other from Talcott Parsons. Cattell started his career as a personality psychologist, using factor analysis in his search for the basic dimensions of personality, and developing what he called a dynamic theory of personality (Cattell 1959). Later, moving on to work on social psychological problems, Cattell is convinced that the methodology he has used for the analysis of individual personalities is also applicable to the study of small groups, masses, and peoples as coherent entities. All that is needed is a concept that corresponds to the concept of personality at the individual level. Cattell proposes the term ‘syntality’, because he feels it aptly describes the feeling of ‘togetherness’ and in form resembles words such as ‘personality’ and ‘totality’ (Cattell 1948). Syntality thus means the personality of a group of people. Cattell now used factor analysis to identlfy syntality traits of small groups (Cattell and Wispe 1948; Cattell, Saunders and Stice 1953) and even to examine the syntality of entire peoples (Cattell 1949). He also coupled the concept of leadership to syntality by defining it as the influence a person exerts on his group’s syntality (Cattell 1951).

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However, some of Cattell’s results suggest that the individual and the group are, when considered as systems, different kinds of entities. It is therefore not justified to talk about a group in the same way as we would talk about an individual. Take for instance Cattell’s observations of how the qualities of individual group members affect group activity as a whole (for a summary of these results, see Hare 1962, 191-193). Certain individual traits have an additive effect on the group’s syntality - as a soccer team on average plays a better game the more talented individual players it has. By contrast, some other syntality traits can best be predicted according to the distn’butzolz of the members’ traits. For example, we can probably give a better prediction of how lively a discussion will turn out in a group by counting how the political views of its members are distributed than by estimating how radical or conservative this group is on average. In the individual personality, however, there are no equivalents for the group level concepts of ‘average of individual traits’ or ‘distribution of individual traits’. The rules according to which individual traits influence the group’s syntality are bound up with social organization, which can exist only at the group level. Therefore the theory of groups and masses must be essentially different from the theory of the individual’s personality. Our second example is from the extensive production of the American sociologist Talcott Parsons. While Cattell takes a theoretical and methodological approach originally developed for analysis at the individual level and uses it for group level analyses, Parsons does precisely the opposite. He builds up his theory for the description of a social system, but then extends it to take in personality, a psychological system (Parsons 1959). This extension is based on the assumption that there are structural similarities between social and psychological systems. For instance, Parsons assumes that both systems have to solve four functional problems: goal-attainment, adaptation, pattern maintenance, and integration. This analogy has met with some criticism. Black (1961, 281) says that “concepts literally applicable to persons cannot be transferred to groups or other social systems without systematic alterations in their meanings”. An organization cannot have a ‘goal’ in the same sense as individuals, nor can it have feelings for or against something as individuals do. The elements that constitute Parsons’s social system are human beings, whereas the elements of the psychological system are ‘needs’ or ‘dispositions’. The former are physical beings, the latter conceptual constructs.

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This is why ‘integration’ in the social system as a problem between human individuals bears little resemblance to the problem of integration between need dispositions in the psychological system. The analogy between a small group and society is understandable in the sense that it remains at the level of social system (although it fails to make a distinction between the ‘social’ and the ‘societal’). The analogy between individual and group has the added problem that it attempts to combine two totally different system levels (cf. Baldwin 1961, 185). In reply to this critique, Parsons (1961, 356) admits that personality and society cannot be regarded as isomorphic. The similarities, he says, are mainly due to the fact that culture penetrates both systems: society in the form of institutionalization, personality in the form of internalization. So what in fact would seem to be the only real similarity is that cultural values, for Parsons, play an important role both at the individual and the group level. The theoretical concepts required for the description of group activity differ from those required for describing individual action. This is because group action and individual action are different. For instance, it has been an easier task for one person to write this chapter than for our small group to put together the manuscript of the whole book. The latter has required not only the creative contribution of several individuals, but also organized cooperative interaction. We have already referred in passing to this kind of interaction when we were dealing with episodes and their elements, at which point we considered it from the viewpoint of the tradition that takes social psychology as the study of social interaction. Now we shall revert to the same problems from the perspective of the tradition that is concerned with groups and masses.

2. Organizational Factors and Collective Action Within the latter tradition it is possible to make a rough distinction between two explanations of what happens to groups and masses. One is that group action reflects above all the emotionality and irrationality of the individuals that make up the group; the theories of Le Bon and Freud belong to this category. The alternative explanation points to the role of the structural circumstances under which group action emerges out of the decisions and

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efforts of the individuals. Emotions are not the cause of action, but a consequence of the same structural circumstances as action itself.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma The best-known paradigm of the latter type of explanation is the so-called Prisoner’s Dilemma, a game developed in the 1950s by a group of American social scientists (see Rapoport 1982). In groups and masses that are not merely aggregates of separate individuals, the fates of the individual members of the group are intertwined. The acts of an individual determine not only his own fate but to a great extent also that of others. In this sense, action is collective. And this is the situation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. A verbal account of the Prisoner’s Dilemma describes two men, A and B, who are suspected of having jointly committed a crime, are taken into custody, and separated. Hoping to get a confession out of the men, the prosecutor lays down the following alternatives. If neither confesses, both prisoners will be convicted on a minor charge and each will get a one-year sentence. If both confess, they will be convicted but get off with five years, less than the maximum penalty. If one confesses and the other does not, then the one who confesses will receive lenient treatment for turning state’s evidence and get six months while the other will get the maximum penalty of 10 years (see Table 1.2.). Table 1.2. Prisoner’s Dilemma

B Not confess

Not confess

Confess

1 year for A 1 year for B

10 years for A 6 months for B

6 months for A 10 years for B

5 years for A 5 years for B

A Confess

In situations like this the actors rarely know in advance what the other party intends to do, and this is also the case here. However, prisoner A wants to make a rational decision whatever B does. So A will reason that

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if B does not confess, he will do best to confess, because he will get off with just six months instead of a year. But it is wisest for him to confess even if B also happens to confess, because in this case he will get five instead of 10 years. B will reason in precisely the same way and conclude that it is wisest for him to confess, whatever A does. Both act rationally, but as far as the dyad is concerned the end result is not the best possible. As a group, it seems that the prisoners acted irrationally because both ended up getting a five-year sentence although they could have got off with one year. The popular notion that groups and masses are more emotional and less rational in their behaviour than individuals probably derives from these kinds of observations in everyday life. However, as a deeper analysis with more elaborate conceptual tools will show, this is not only an unnecessary assumption but also untrue. In reality fear and anxiety are elements in the prisoners’ situation, but they do not decide the outcome. The key to the solution lies in the structure of the circumstances under which the prisoners have to make their decision. If someone scores in this game it is definitely not Le Bon or Freud, but the social psychological theory of interaction that points to the importance of organizational and cognitive factors. But let us continue with our example. Perhaps Le Bon and Freud will get their chance if we make the additional assumption that the prisoners are allowed to agree on a strategy and to decide that neither confesses. What happens to our small group now? Having agreed on their strategy, the prisoners return to their cells and start thinking. Both will be tempted to break the agreement because if one goes back on his word while the other keeps to the agreement, he will get a six-month sentence instead of one year. And that is not all. Both are well aware that their partner in the other cell has realized the same thing. He too is planning to break the agreement. The fear of being betrayed takes hold of both prisoners; which then develops into horror when they realize that if one breaks the agreement and the other keeps to it, the one who decides to keep to the agreement will get the maximum penalty of 10 years. So, despite the agreement, both prisoners hurry to confess - and again our dyad fails to act rationally. The above description contains words such as ‘temptation’, ‘fear’, ‘horror’. However, it was not these emotions that led the dyad to ‘irrational’

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action. We need not assume that the Devil himself whispered to the prisoner, why not betray your mate; or that there is an ‘Oedipus complex’ which explains the prisoners’ fear of being betrayed. Both the temptation and the fear arise out of rational inference and out of the structure of the situation. The same structure and pursuit of rationality also lie behind the unfortunate outcome. Emotions are a secondary phenomenon that at best can be a distraction in the actor’s decision-making and so contribute to the outcome. Brown (1965, 709-763) suggests that even such an emotionally charged situation as panic in a theatre where fire has broken out, may be explained as a variation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The best result, considering the theatre audience as a whole, would be achieved if no one rushed to the exit, but everyone calmly took their turn. But on the other hand: if others rush, I have to rush too, because if I don’t I’ll be trapped. The surest way for me to get out is for all the others to wait for their turn and I’ll rush past them. Whatever the others do, I shall try to get out among the first. But because everyone thinks in the same way, the outcome is panic and probably many casualties. This line of reasoning, where emphasis is placed on structural and cognitive factors instead of emotions, is supported by an experiment carried out by Mintz (1951). A situation was created that to some extent resembled panic in a burning theatre. There were 15-21 individuals in the test groups, each of whom was given a string with a metal cone at one end. The cones were all placed into a large glass bottle, the mouth of which was big enough to pull out one cone at a time. If several of the subjects tried to pull out their cones at the same time, they would get jammed. The situation was varied in several ways. For instance, water was slowly let into the bottle via an inlet at the bottom. Those subjects who managed to get their cone out dry won a prize. In some experiments those who failed were fined; in others there were spectators who acted like a fanatic audience at a sports event. Mintz’s main result was that when his subjects did not have to compete for prizes, they pulled their cones out of the glass bottle, by taking turns with no signs of panic, whether or not there were spectators. But as soon as rewards and fines were at stake, the cones got jammed, Mintz’s findings do not support explanations suggesting mass behaviour based on emotionality or irrationality, but cognitive interpretations along the lines suggested in the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

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According to the latter interpretation, not only emotions but also the absolute number of people involved is a secondary circumstance with regard to the emergence of panic. Panic, just like the rush for special offers at a supermarket, arises in a situation where it seems that not everyone involved can be saved (or where there are more people than articles on special offer), and where scarcity is solved by free competition rather than by a common plan. It is just as likely that ‘him or me’ situations like this arise between two people as in a large crowd. It would seem that from a theoretical point of view, the category of ‘mass phenomena’ based on the number of people acting - despite its persistence in social psychological literature - is an erroneous and fruitless abstraction.

The secret of mass power The Prisoner’s Dilemma provides an interpretation for situations where the group or mass, despite the determined efforts of the individuals involved, fails to reach the best possible result. But groups can of course also be very effective. The question that has most often intrigued scientists about groups and masses is: What is the secret of mass power? It is again possible to divide the answers into two categories. First, it is suggested that the excellence of the group is based on the influence it has on its members; or on ‘social facilitation’, to use Floyd Allport’s famous term. Other answers point to the additional strength that derives from the size and organization of the group. This means the group is as powerful as the individual efforts of its members knowing and feeling that they are working together, plus this additional force. Karl Marx made a clear distinction between these two components. Cooperation, he said, is beneficial, first, because of the social influence it generates; social contact “begets in most industries an emulation and a stimulation of the animal spirits that heighten the efficiency of each individual workman” (Marx 1977, 443). But there is also another advantage in cooperation: it creates a completely new power factor, mass power. When the action of a mass is organized rather than composed of the individual acts of separate individuals, the mass will accomplish more, even though the sum total of the time they work is precisely the same: “Just as the offensive power of a squadron of cavalry, or the defensive power of an infantry regiment, is essentially different from the sum of the

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offensive or defensive powers of the individual soldiers taken separately, so the sum total of the mechanical forces exerted by isolated workers differs from the social force that is developed when many hands co-operate in the same undivided operation, such as raising a heavy weight, turning a winch or getting an obstacle out of the way. In such cases the effect of the combined labour could either not be produced at all by isolated individual labour, or it could be produced only by a great expenditure of time, or on a very dwarf-like scale. Not only do we have here an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of co-operation, but the creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one.” (Marx 1977, 443) Marx’s associate Engels was particularly interested in power that only emerges when an organized group has grown large enough, or when what we today would call ‘critical mass’ has been reached. He described this using an example taken from Napoleon about the combat between the disciplined French cavalry and the Mamelukes, who were superior in single combat: “Two Mamelukes were undoubtedly more than a match for three Frenchmen; 100 Mamelukes were equal to 100 Frenchmen; 300 Frenchmen could generally beat 300 Mamelukes, and 1,000 Frenchmen invariably defeated 1,500 Mamelukes.” In other words, “with Napoleon a detachment of cavalry had to be of a definite minimum number in order to make it possible for the force of discipline, embodied in closed order and planned utilization, to manifest itself and rise superior even to greater numbers of irregular cavalry, in spite of the latter being better mounted, more dexterous horsemen and fighters, and at least as brave as the former.” (Engels 1959, 176-177) Ekman (1951) has carried out systematic analyses to identify the cases in which the group is more efficient or makes better decisions than its best individual member, and the cases in which the group would lose to its best member. We have adages for both alternatives: “many hands make light work”, and “too many cooks spoil the broth”. According to Ekman, the structure of the task determines which of them applies. In some cases the task structure is such that the group’s performance is the sum total of its individuals’ performances. The group’s efforts produce a summation effect, which means that the group is always more efficient than its best individual member: five men can lift a bigger stone than the strongest of them single-handed. However, the group’s overall power

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will not grow linearly by adding to the numerical strength of this group, because coordination of individual performances becomes increasingly difficult (cf. Zajonc 1966, 102-103). There is the added problem that in a larger group, individuals are demotivated because the responsibility for performance is divided between several members. Ekman’s second category of task structures is one where the group’s performance is the average of the contributions of individual members, such as a group decision reached as a compromise on the basis of various suggestions. In this case we have a levelling effect, as a result of which group performance may be either better or worse than that of the best individual. If in a judgement the group members’ individual assessments deviate in both directions from the correct answer, the group’s compromise comes closer to the correct answer than the best individual estimate. The deviations have levelled out each others’ effect. But if individual assessments are systematically either higher or lower than the correct answer, then the compromise of these is further from the correct answer than the most accurate individual assessments (cf. Zajonc 1966, 100-101). It has also been found (Eskola 1961, 112-114) that a member whose assessment comes closest to the right answer does not, in the case of systematic bias, enjoy the power that usually comes with the status of expert because his opinion deviates from the dominant one (even though it is wrong) in the group. Finally, Ekman distinguishes a category of tasks where group performance is the same as its best member’s result, as in a quiz where a team scores when any of its members knows the right answer. Let us assume there are three persons with equal knowledge and two of them form a team against the third. The mere statistical effect means that, given a sufficiently large number of questions, the group will always beat the individual. It is also possible to calculate the optimal way to divide a certain task - such as memorizing various types of data in a quiz - between members to achieve as great a statistical effect as possible (see Zajonc 1966, 104-108). These few examples from classical and more recent sources should suffice to prove that an analysis of groups, masses and peoples as entities will not get very far by studying social influence and face-to-face interaction. Our analysis must be extended to the structural conditions and organization of action. These factors add up to more than mere social influence. They are social psychology par excellence; and it is impossible to gain a proper

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understanding of them if we use the same theoretical and methodological tools for the study of groups and masses as for dealing with individual personality.

3. Is There a ‘Group Mind’?

Groups and masses, when thought of as individuals, are also attributed with thoughts and feelings. A small nation may ‘think’ it is best to live in peaceful coexistence with a big neighbour although it ‘feels’suspicious of it. What, in social psychology’s terms, do these figures of speech actually mean? In a very small group, thought may refer to the notions held in common by all members. In this case the laws of social influence and face-to-face interaction provide a satisfactory explanation of the emergence of the ‘group mind’. In bigger groups and among peoples, we need a different explanation. If a people is said to ‘hate’ another people, this feeling is not necessarily shared by all, nor does it have to assume precisely the same form in all citizens. On the other hand, this kind of feeling may be handed down from one generation to another; the individuals now bearing the hatred are different from those who bore it earlier. To explain the group mind in this case, we need the concept of culture, which is beyond the individuals and which does not assume the form of the individual. Collective thought is embodied in culture in the same way as individual thought is embodied in practical activity (see p. 144). One of the most famous works in the tradition of social psychology that is interested in intergroup relations is Sherif‘s series of experiments at a summer camp for American boys (Sherif and Sherif 1953; Sherif et al. 1961). In one version of the experiment the boys formed one group immediately after arriving at the camp. This stage lasted about a week, during which they made new friends and developed a common culture: they had their own slang, jokes and secrets, special ways of working, etc. Even in this fairly small group that was set up artificially, common thought was externalized and became a common culture. The group was then divided into two. Interaction now continued separately in both groups and followed its own paths, as did the formation of culture. The groups developed conceptions about themselves and about

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the other group and its members. Sociologists have coined the term ethnocentrism for attitude combinations that consist of identification and positive attitudes towards one’s own group (ingroup) and negative attitudes towards other groups (outgroup). Ethnocentrism is what emerged in the attitudes of the boys in Sherif’s experiment. In the second version of the experiment the boys were divided into two groups from the very beginning, and were not told that there was another group at the camp. As soon as the boys learned about the second group’s existence, this started to influence the formation of culture in both groups. A competitive spirit and ethnocentrism began to gain ground. Having held back the boys’ desire to compete for a while, the camp leaders let them loose and arranged various competitions between the groups. The ethnocentric element - name-calling, mischief, etc. directed against the other group - increased markedly in both group cultures. How could the hostility between the groups be reduced? Sherif rejected one alternative after another. Giving truthful and positive information about the other group is unlikely to have any effect, because hostile groups do not accept such information. It would be in conflict with the prevailing ethnocentric culture. Appeal to moral values seemed useless: the boys arranged religious services together, but soon after the sermon they returned to hostility. Individual competition across group lines, such as in the Olympic Games, easily fosters competition between groups if hostile group-formation lurks in the background. Conferences of leaders tend to be useless too, because hostility tends to override the leaders’ desire for agreement. A common enemy may bring the groups together for a while, but there is no guarantee that cooperation will be resumed once the enemy has been defeated (Sherif and Sherif 1969, 254-255). Sherif succeeded in diminishing hostility between the groups by arranging various jobs for the boys that interested both groups but that neither could manage alone. For instance, the camp’s water supply system was ‘sabotaged’, and the boys had to trace the cause of the breakdown and repair it together. A series of cooperation episodes like this one seemed to lead to a gradual lessening of hostility. However, as Doise (1978, 103-105) points out, it remains unclear whether in the end there were two groups that cooperated, or whether they joined into one single group once a common goal had been set. The latter is in fact a very likely alternative in an experimental situation where

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the groups share no goal or identity outside the situation. This is why experiments do not give a very accurate prediction of what would happen to ‘natural’ groups for whom the goals created in the experiment are secondary to those they have outside the situation, and who have a culture of their own from the outset. The model with which we have explained the ‘group mind’ is the same as S h e (1978) uses when discussing the concept of ‘human essence’. It is a popular notion that both animal and man develop in accordance with given internal conditions, in interaction with the environment, towards sorne sort of biological essence, to ‘animality’ and ‘humanity’. However, at least as far as humans are concerned, this is easily disproved. Distinctive forms of human behaviour like sitting down in a chair or eating with a spoon do not develop out of specific genes that make people sit in chairs or eat with a spoon. S h e therefore rejects the concept of speculative philosophy that in every individual there is an abstract general human essence, which in each case is realized in a way distinctive to that individual. It is justified to speak about a human essence, but it must be understood as ‘eccentric’, an amassment external to the human individual, not within him. The idea of a culture that stands outside the group and that its members appropriate does not exclude the possibility of individual thought and action. There is a uniqueness in every individual’s way of speech, even though language is a collective product of much older origin than the individual himself. This book is a product of individual writing, yet it would not have been possible without the ideas and writings of innumerable researchers both past and present. “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living”, Marx (1958, 247) wrote; but it is in this nightmare that the active individual finds the raw material for creating new elements to the tradition out of which it itself arises. We started this section by referring to House’s (1977) definition of the ‘third face’ of social psychology, according to which this tradition is concerned with “the relations of macrosocial structures and processes to individual psychological attributes and behavior’ ’. The model of interaction between socially produced culture and individual action that we have been outlining above, is valid even when “culture” is replaced by the words ‘ ‘macrosocial structures and processes”. Allport (1954) quotes Comte’s question as one of social psychology’s historical starting-points: “How can

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the individual be at once cause and consequence of society?” An analysis that limits itself to social influence cannot answer this question. What we need is a social psychology that concerns itself with cooperative interaction by which people change the circumstances under which they develop into human beings.

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Chapter 2 The Experiment in Social Psychology: Alcohol Research as a Case in Point Oili-Helena Y1ijoki Before going any further in our theoretical analysis it is our intention in this chapter to see how useful and effective the laboratory experiment - the method so successfully used in the natural sciences - has been in social psychology. The specific problem we shall be dealing with is the use of alcohol: its effects and causes, which in several theories are bound together in a causal relationship (people drink because alcohol has this or that effect). If we have to conclude that the laboratory experiment does not work in social psychology, then we have at least two possible explanations. Either the method is simply not applicable to social psychological research, or the theoretical assumptions made about the nature of the problem and about the causal relations involved have been ill-defined. Experiments in alcohol research have drawn on both natural scientific (pharmacological) and social psychological (cognitive) theories on the use and effects of alcohol. So here we have an excellent opportunity to use the logic of experimentation ourselves in trying to see whether the experiment works differently with different baseline assumptions. Our primary concern is not with the use of alcohol and the problems that are related to drinking. Instead, this chapter is intended as a case study on one of the most important methodological problems faced by social psychology.

A. The Pharmacological Approach With very few exceptions, early social psychological studies of the effects of alcohol have approached the problem from a pharmacological perspective. They have been exclusively concerned with the drug effects of alcohol on the individual, his emotions and behaviour, but they have omitted to

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consider the role of consciousness or the social setting. It is assumed that the pharmacological properties of alcohol bring about changes in the individual’s emotions and behaviour that are beyond his control. The individual drinker is thus perceived as a passive object of physiological processes. Working on these premises, experimenters representing this tradition have not considered the selection of subjects a major problem. It makes no difference whether they are alcoholics, social drinkers, or abstainers. And animals will do just as well. Rats, mice, cats and monkeys have all been used in alcohol experiments; as a matter of fact, as Freed (1975) has pointed out, animals are often preferred to humans because they give the experimenter an opportunity to so manipulate variables that the individual differences typical of human drinkers are minimized. It is believed that with minor reservations, the results obtained in animal experiments can also be applied to humans. One of the major difficulties of most pharmacological alcohol studies is the absence of a link to tie the theoretical groundwork to the actual laboratory settings. There has also been a striking lack of continuity from one experiment to the next, which makes it more or less impossible to make relevant comparisons (see e.g. Levine et al. 1975). All that they have had in common is their pharmacological approach, and even that rarely seems to be an elaborated theoretical framework but more of a self-evident choice that no one is willing to question.

1. The Effect of Alcohol on Emotions

It is generally assumed that the pharmacological effects of alcohol on emotions are favourable. Mayfield, for instance, says that most theories on alcoholism are based to some extent on the premise that intoxication favourably alters affect; and that this alteration is understood as either euphoria or an alleviation of disturbing effects (Mayfield 1968). In the former case it is assumed that alcohol induces positive emotions directly, in the latter case indirectly. Alcohol is typically associated with both ceremonial and informal events; one of its main purposes is to make sure that festive occasions are successful. However, there has been very little research into the lay concept

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of alcohol as an euphoriant drug (McGuire et al. 1966; Kastl 1969; Smith et al. 1975). A wide variety of settings and subjects are represented in these few studies, but in all the approach is strictly pharmacological. The subjects have been given alcohol and then asked to say what they feel. Interviews and observation have also been used to assess the effects of alcohol on the individual. The possibility that some other factor apart from alcohol may have something to do with the changes is not taken into account. Although these experiments have lent some support to the euphoria hypothesis, it has never become widely acknowledged or developed into an influential research tradition. On the other hand, the idea that alcohol favourably alters affect through the alleviation of disturbing emotions has undoubtedly generated more debates and studies in experimental social psychological alcohol research than any other hypothesis. This idea is commonly known as the tension-reduction hypothesis (TRH), the hypothesis par excellence of the pharmacological approach. The TRH states that alcohol reduces tension and thereby makes it easier to relax, which consequently strengthens the drinking reaction in stressful situations. It is believed that the physiological processes set into motion by alcohol will cease punishment (reduce tension and other disturbing emotions), as a result of which the individual is expected to learn to drink alcohol whenever he wants to reduce tension. So in accordance with the concepts of learning theory, it is hypothesized that the favourable pharmacological effects of alcohol reinforce the drinking response, or encourage the individual to repeat the response which was rewarded. The tension-reduction hypothesis has been tested in numerous experiments, both with animals and with humans. A classic among these studies is that performed by John Conger (1951). It consisted of a series of three experiments, the first of which was an attempt to determine the effects of alcohol on albino rats in a simple approach-avoidance conflict situation. First, an approach tendency was established in the rats by training them to run down a straight alley to get food. Once the rats had learned this, a conflicting tendency to avoid the feeding area was built up by giving them an electric shock as soon as they started to eat the food. Then, after the rats had received enough shocks to establish a balanced approachavoidance conflict, they received an injection of either alcohol or water. The rats were then placed at the end of the alley again. The rats in the

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alcohol group immediately ran down to the other end of the alley and ate the food, while the rats in the non-alcohol group required several trials before they ate the food. In his next two experiments, Conger provides further evidence in support of his conclusion that alcohol tends to reduce tension. Also, he mentions in passing that it might be possible to apply his results and the TRH to the effect of alcohol on humans. He repeats this proposition more forcefully in a later article. Referring to behaviourist theory of learning, Conger says that the drinking response is learned because it is rewarding and because it leads to a reduction in drive and in tension. A reduction in the strength of fear and anxiety may in turn reinforce the learning of the drinking habit and cause alcoholism. (Conger 1956) A vast number of experiments attempting to determine the tensionreducing effects of alcohol on animals have been performed since Conger’s studies. Cappell and Herman (1972) have reviewed and critically evaluated several dozens of experiments based on the TRH. While the experimenters have used a wide variety of behavioural indices to test the hypothesis, they say, it seems that support for the tension-reduction hypothesis is provided only by those experiments such as Conger’s that deal with tension in an approach-avoidance conflict situation. Otherwise the results tend to be at variance with the hypothesis. Cappell and Herman thus conclude that “while the TRH may be quite plausible intuitively, it has not been convincingly supported empirically”. The TRH has also been tested in experiments with humans, but here too a major part of the studies fail to support the hypothesis. What is more, if evaluated from a purely pharmacological point of view, no consistent pattern emerges from the results. So all in all, as Marlatt (1976, 274) has pointed out, it seems that experiments with humans have produced results thzt are even more contradictory and confusing than those obtained in animal experiments. In fact the settings used in experiments with animals do not differ very much from those used in experiments with humans. For example, in a study by Zeichner and Pihl(1978) of the effects of alcohol on the response of human subjects to stressful stimuli, the setting, with minor modifications, might just as well have been used for animals. The subjects of the experiment, 20 social drinkers, were first administered segments of a continuous pure tone through headphones, at different sound pressure levels.

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When they began to fmd the tone aversive, they were required to terminate it by pressing a button. The subjects were then given alcohol in three separate drinks. Forty minutes after the commencement of drinking, the test was repeated. Therefore in ths study, the pressing of a button was the only part of the experiment that required the subjects’ initiative. When compared with animal experiments, the only difference was that instead of needing to be taught to press the button, the subjects could be given verbal instructions. Zeichner and Pihl conclude from their experiment that alcohol has no effect on aversive threshold. Their result does not lend support to the TRH, according to which alcohol should relieve the stress caused by noise and in this way raise the aversive threshold. It is nevertheless interesting to note that the subjects reported feeling relaxed after drinking alcohol, but that this still had no effect on their response to stressful stimuli. The biggest problem of the TRH is that there seems to be no consistency whatsoever between the results obtained in the numerous different experiments. In some cases it has been found that alcohol works precisely as predicted by the TRH and reduces tension (e.g. Mayfield 1968; Steele e t al. 1981), in others its effects have been precisely the opposite (e.g. Dengerink and Fagan 1978; Keane and Lisman 1980). In a way this ambiguity also emerges from the experiments carried out by Kalin et al. (1965) and Williams (1966). Both of these experiments were concerned with changes taking place in the emotions of male students during stag cocktail parties. In contrast to many strictly controlled laboratory experiments, the setting of these studies bore a closer resemblance t o reallife situations. Rather than having a set of detailed instructions to observe, the subjects were invited to an informal living-room discussion where alcoholic drinks were served. It is also taken into consideration that this is a very typical setting of social drinking. In the experiment by Kalin e t al., the students wrote TATS at three points during the party, whereas the subjects in Williams’s study directly reported their feelings before the party, after a couple of drinks and at the end of the party. Both experiments lend support to the tension-reduction hypothesis, but only partly. According to the study by Kalin e t al., a drink or two did not - contrary to the TRH - relieve anxiety or fear; it took six drinks or more, or what the authors call “heavy drinking”. On the other hand, Williams reported a significant decrease in anxiety and depres-

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sion at low levels of alcohol consumption, whereas heavy drinking tended to reverse these changes. The approach in these two experiments is unmistakably pharmacological. They measure feelings before, during, and at the end of the party - and explain any changes observed by reference to the amount of alcohol consumed. Yet there is no doubt that the results differ, even though direct comparisons are difficult because of the differences in methods. But in any event there seems to be good reason to question at least the basic version of the TRH, that irrespective of the amount of alcohol consumed, there will be a reduction in all kinds of tension in all people under all conditions, and that this can be explained by the pharmacological properties of alcohol. The confusion has only been heightened by studies using the method called experimentally induced intoxication. This method has been used to identify changes in the behaviour and emotions of alcoholic subjects confined to a clinic during periods of both sobriety and intoxication. The assumption is that there are decisive differences between the behaviour and feelings of alcoholics when intoxicated and when sober, and that they tend to forget their actual behaviour and feelings shortly after the termination of intoxication. This explains why alcoholics’ reports of their own drinking episodes are considered insufficient. In studies using experimentally induced intoxication, one session takes several days or even weeks. It consists of three stzges: a pre-drinking stage, a drinking stage, and a withdrawal period. The subjects are restricted to a closed research unit where experimenters mzke observations and interview them. The method was first tested by Diethelm and Barr (1962) and its most notable use since then has been by Mendelson and his co-workers. Contrary both to the TRH and to common beliefs, it has been found in these studies that alcohol tends to make alcoholic subjects more anxious and depressed (McNamee et al. 1968; Tamerin and Mendelson 1969). Tamerin and Mendelson have reported that during the initial phase of drinking their subjects felt more relaxed and less inhibited, but this was soon followed by increased depression, feelings of guilt, and psychic pain. This result supports the findings of Williams in his study of male students, where higher consumption levels led to greater depression and anxiety. Steffen et al. (1974) have used experimentally induced intoxication in a slightly different setting. In addition to examining the subjects’ own expressions of anxiety and distress, they have used physiological

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measurements to determine the effect of alcohol on muscular tension. In accordance with the TRH, they found a negative correlation between mcscular tension and blood alcohol concentration. However, the reports of the subjects themselves suggest that the relation between tension and alcohol is actually the opposite: the more intoxicated the subjects were, the more tense they felt. In this regard these observations are similar to those of Mendelson and his co-workers who only used observations and selfreporting. The evidence produced by Steffen et al. makes it clear that different methods of measurement may yield different results (which is what happened in the study by Zeichner and Pihl 1978). It thus seems doubtful whether physiological measurements can completely uncover the full scope of the individual’s feelings. It is also necessary to question the baseline assumption made in studies dealing with experimentally induced intoxication that mood alterations can be explained away by reference to alcohol only. For example, this assumption fails to recognize the possible mediatory role of environmental factors: alcoholics confined to a clinic are socially isolated and tested in a setting that could hardly differ more from their normal living environment. Perhaps the finding that they tend to become more anxious and depressed as drinking advances should be explained not by reference to the pharmacological effects of alcohol but to the incessant surveillance and observation they are subjected to; the sterile and strange environment they have to live in; or the boredom and apathy that accompanies confinement to an institution. The experiment that Wilson et al. carried out in 1980 is also troubled by serious methodological problems. In the setting developed by Wilson and Abrams, the subjects are first given a dose of alcohol determined on the basis of body weight and then seated in an armchair. Electrodes are attached to the subject for making physiological measurements. Then, in front of a video camera, the male subjects speak to a woman confederate with a view to making a favourable impression. The woman has been instructed not to talk during the interaction. The behaviour of the subjects is classified by eight observers and the subjects also complete a questionnaire to describe their feelings. The most striking thing about this setting is that it specifically forbids the subject’s counterpart to respond in any way in what the experimenters call a “social interaction test”. This makes it hard to see what interaction really means in this context.

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All the subjects in this experiment were male students, and three different doses of alcohol were used: placebo, 0.5 g and 1.0 g per kg body weight. Wilson et al. found a negative correlation between the amount of alcohol consumed and heart rate, meaning that thus far the experiment supported the TRH. The observational measure of the subjects’ behaviour also lent support to the hypothesis, but in this case the dose effect was more complex and it differed according to the sex of the raters. The four mzle raters observed the least social anxiety at the highest alcohol dose, but also viewed the subjects as more anxious after the 0.5 g per kg dose than after the placebo. By contrast, the four women raters noted less social anxiety after the low dose of alcohol than after the placebo. However, they perceived the subjects to be most anxious after the high dose of alcohol. The measures of anxiety in the questionnaire failed to show a s i w i c a n t dose effect. It emerges clearly from this experiment too that the results vary depending on the method applied, suggesting serious reliability problems. The authors also stress that although they attempted to hold constant their subjects’ expectations regarding the differential doses of alcohol by administering the alcohol under the same expectancy set, this was unsuccessful. The subjects’ estimates of the amount of alcohol they had consumed differed significantly across the three dose levels. Wilson et al. therefore conclude that it is important not to assume that the instructions produce the intended effect, but to check the expectations. This conclusion does not fit into a strictly pharmacological framework. Whereas they conducted their experiments in pharmacological settings, the authors venture to discuss factors such as people’s expectations and drinking situations. This is also reflected in the conclusions of Wilson e t al. (1980) concerning the validity of the TRH: “( ...) the effect of alcohol on social anxiety is not a simple one. It is clear that it is no longer useful to ask whether alcohol reduces tension, but rather to investigate under what conditions, at what doses and on what measures it reduces tension.’’ We have so far dealt with experiments that have been interested in the effects of alcohol on anxiety. The following briefly reviews a few studies that have been concerned with the other basic assumption of the TRH: that tension or anxiety tends to enhance the consumption of alcohol. Higgins and Marlatt (1973 and 1975) have done two important experiments on the basis of alcohol taste rating tasks. Various levels of anxie-

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ty were first induced in the subjects, who were then requested to compare the taste of different alcoholic drinks. The true purpose of the experimenters was to determine whether anxiety increased the consumption of alcohol. In their first experiment, Higgins and Marlatt (1973) tested 20 non-abstinent male alcoholics and 20 social drinkers. Anxiety was induced by threatening the subjects with either a painful or a non-painful electric shock. The results showed that alcoholics consumed significantly more alcohol than social drinkers, whereas no connection was found between the anxiety manipulation factor (the intensity of electric shocks) and the amount of alcohol consumed, which contradicted the tension-reduction hypothesis. The subjects in their second experiment (Higgins and Marlatt 1975) were 64 male students, classified as heavy social drinkers. Anxiety was induced by leading half of the subjects to believe that after the tasting experiment, they would take part in a second experiment in which they would be evaluated by women. The other half did not expect to be evaluated in the second study. In this experiment Higgins and Marlatt found that subjects expecting to be evaluated drank significantly more alcohol than the lowerfear control subjects. An earlier study by Miller et al. (1974) has also shown that social stress tends to increase alcohol consumption. These results are interesting because the tension-reduction hypothesis is built upon an assumed pharmacological effect of alcohol that is supposed to apply with any source of anxiety. However, in the light of the results above it would seem that alcohol is only used to relieve a specific kind of amiety (such as social stress), not all kinds of anxiety (such as physical pain). Higgins and Marlatt are convinced that anxiety may increase the consumption of alcohol. This does not happen automatically, however: “( ...) drinking will increase only in those situations which the drinker defines as stressful and in which he believes that alcohol will reduce this stress or tension” (Higgins and Marlatt 1975, 649). Although the approach adopted in the tasting experiments has been pharmacological, the contradictions emerging from the results have diverted attention to the role of the subjects. They are no longer perceived as puppets that can be manipulated at will to experience stress or to drink alcohol, but as rational, conscious individuals who are capable of interpreting things and events and of controlling their behaviour. Holroyd’s (1978) study of male students’ consumption of alcohol in an

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experimental party situation is particularly interesting in this connection. Holroyd selected his subjects from amongst those students who in a preliminary questionnaire scored either high or low in a test of social anxiety. Additionally, half of the subjects received positive evaluations of their social competence before the party, and the other half received negative evaluations. Holroyd concludes that socially anxious subjects and those who received negative evaluations of their social competence drank less alcohol than did subjects less socially anxious and those who received positive evaluations of their social competence. This result is at variance both with the TRH and the findings of the studies reviewed above that suggested a positive correlation between social stress and alcohol consumption. Not surprisingly, then, Holroyd maintains that there is no simple, straightforward relationship between social anxiety or stress and alcohol consumption. Instead, it would seem that it is the individual’s expectations regarding the effects of drinking in relation to alternate responses to a given stressor that determine the connections between social stress and drinking behaviour. In other words, the conclusion in this experiment is that the pharmacological model of the relationship between anxiety and alcohol is not adequate. As we have seen in the foregoing, experiments to test the validity of the tension-reduction hypothesis have not been able to give an unequivocal answer. Obviously the fact that several different definitions of anxiety have been used has merely added to the confusion. In any event it is clear that there is not sufficient evidence in support of the basic version of the TRH according to which the pharmacological effects of alcohol reduce tension in all people under all conditions and at all consumption levels. Nor is there reason to believe that the tension-reducing effects of alcohol are rewarding, leading to a reinforcement of drinking behaviour, or to the automatic resort to alcohol in stressful situations. There are simply too many studies that refute these assumptions. It should be clear then that the whole tension-reduction concept needs to be completely revised. As Lindman (1983b, 259) concludes from his own experiments: “At this point my own main conclusion is a strong doubt whether it is at all meaningful to ask ‘Does alcohol reduce fear?’ in the hope of a general answer.”

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2. The Effect of Alcohol on Behaviour

It is generally believed that alcohol affects not only the inner emotions of the individual but also his visible, external behaviour. Research into the effects of alcohol on behaviour has mainly concentrated on the connections between alcohol and aggression, risk taking, sexual arousal, and the facilitation of social interaction.

Aggression The belief that alcohol enhances aggression is one of the most popular notions related to drinking. The idea is supported by statistics indicating that various criminal acts, such as homicide, violent assault, and rape, are very often committed under the influence of alcohol. There are two popular explanations of the connection between alcohol and aggression. First, it is assumed that all people are basically aggressively motivated, but aggressive action is checked by various social restraints. Alcohol is assumed to dissolve these restraints and let aggression loose. Second, it is assumed that alcohol promotes aggressive behaviour directly, irrespective of inhibited aggressions (Bennett et al. 1969). Both of these theories hold that the pharmacological properties of alcohol induce directly or indirectly - aggressive behaviour in all people under all conditions. Compared with the host of experiments that have tested the tensionreduction hypothesis, there has been fairly little serious research on alcohol and aggression. Among the experiments that have been done, a crude distinction can be made between two different types: either the subjects drink alcohol in a relatively informal setting and the experimenters attempt through observation and interviews to determine their level of aggression; or, in a laboratory setting, the subjects administer electric shocks to other persons by pressing one of several buttons that each produces a different shock intensity, representing different levels of aggression. The theory that alcohol increases aggression has received a fair amount of empirical support. In experiments using an informal setting, it has been found that there is more interpersonal aggressive behaviour at experimental parties where alcohol is available than at those where non-alcoholic drinks are served (Boyatzis 1974). Likewise, it has been reported that dur-

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ing and followiig a period of experimentally induced intoxication male alcoholics are more hostile, provocative and irritable, while during sobriety they are passive and inhibited (Tamerin and Mendelson 1969). With some reservations, the experiment by Kalin et al. (1965) also lends support to the theory that alcohol tends to increase aggressiveness: images of physical aggression increased in TAT tests written at the beginning of the party, then began to decrease, but increased again after heavy drinking (seven drinks or more). A number of experiments have been carried out that attempt to determ h e the relationship between alcohol and aggressive behaviour in terms of the intensity and duration of electric shocks administered by the subjects. In the experiment arranged by Zeichner and Pihl(1979), the subjects were told that they would be tested for reaction time while their ‘partner’ (actually an operant-conditioning apparatus) would be tested for pain perception. From an adjoining room, the partner delivered tones at different loudness levels to the subject wearing headphones. The subject was told to respond by pressing, as rapidly as he could, one of five buttons that delivered electric shocks of different intensities to the partner. Half of the subjects were told that they would be stimulated with malicious intent (that the partner would deliver tones according to shock intensity), whereas the other half were told that the partner had no control over the tones delivered. Jt was found that the subjects who had drunk alcohol applied higher shock intensities than those who had not had alcohol. It is particularly interesting to note that the intoxicated subjects administered shocks of equal intensity regardless of whether the loudness of the tone depended on shock intensity, i.e. whether or not the partner was capable of counteraggression. By contrast, placebo subjects as well as those who received no drink tended to be more aggressive when the tone in their headphones varied randomly. Zeichner and Pihl conclude that behaviour under the influence of alcohol is controlled not by the consequences of behaviour but only by stimulus intensity. It is possible, they point out, that alcohol may lead to indiscriminant aggressive response. (See also Zeichner and Pihll980) On the other hand, Taylor et al. (1976) have shown that subjects are also capable of taking situational factors into account: alcohol subjects administered higher shock intensities than non-alcohol subjects only when the situation was made threatening to them.

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However, there are also results that fail to support the theory that alcohol induces aggression. In the study carried out by Bennett et al. (1969), sixteen male students were recruited to act as teachers who adminnistered electric shocks to their student whenever he made an incorrect response. The learner was a confederate who did not actually receive the shocks. Bennett and his co-workers found no difference between alcohol and non-alcohol subjects in the intensities of shocks delivered. They write: “It seems safe to conclude that alcohol as a pharmacological agent, in the amounts used here, does not lead to aggression. However, alcohol is not ordinarily consumed as a drug but as a libation, usually in a social setting. In this context alcohol could easily become a cue for behaviour that would otherwise be unacceptable, or at least it might become an excuse. Thus the folklore might be correct and alcohol may lead to aggression, but functioning as a cue rather than a pharmacological agent.” The evidence in support of the theory that alcohol enhances aggression is not particularly convincing. Above all, the few experiments that appear to confirm the theory are fraught with methodical problems. While aggression has typically been measured by the intensity of electric shocks delivered by the subjects, it has often been pointed out that high shock intensities are not necessarily indicative of high levels of aggression. In fact, it is possible that the implicit demand characteristics of the setting determine the subjects’ behaviour and lead them to respond in a way that corresponds to the experimenter’s expectations. This interpretation also provides an interesting alternative explanation of the finding made in experimental parties that the consumption of alcohol tends to increase aggression: instead of assuming that the pharmacological properties of alcohol automatically make people violent, these results could be interpreted by reference to the male subjects’ beliefs and notions of how they are expected to behave in such situations.

Risk taking Another popular notion related to alcohol is that drinking makes people more liable to take risks. It is believed that alcohol boosts courage and lets people face extreme dangers and difficulties without fear. On the reverse side, it is believed that greater risk taking may also lead to rash and foolhardy daring and consequently to serious accidents, bankruptcy, etc.

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There are surprisingly few experiments that have put these assumptions to the test. The main issue has been whether alcohol distorts perception of the risk involved in the situation (Cohen 1960) or whether alcohol makes people more willing to take greater risks even when the probabilities of success are clear and when it is highly unlikely that alcohol could have distorted perception (Teger et al. 1969). In an experiment by Hurst et al. (1969), it was found that when the probability of success was high, alcohol led to greater risk taking. If the chances of success appeared slim, alcohol had no effect on risk taking; in some cases it even tended to discourage risk taking. Evidence concerning the connections between alcohol and risk taking is thus not only scarce but also very contradictory. It is impossible to tell whether alcohol leads to greater or lesser risk taking - or neither. It is also noteworthy that the few experiments actually performed have measured risk-taking propensity in very different ways. In Cohen’s study bus drivers were asked to choose the smallest opening through which they would attempt to drive, Teger et al. asked their subjects to advise a hypothetical person faced with a difficult decision whether to choose a risky or non-risky option, and the subjects in the study by Hurst et al. participated in gambling. Additionally, there are methodological problems: for example, many of the subjects “believed the experimenter expected them to be riskier when they were drunk than when they were sober” (Teger et al. 1969).

Se.mal arousal There is a whole range of myths and adages that - from a predominantly masculine perspective - support the common notion that alcohol has an effect on sexual arousal. The basic version is that alcohol is intimately bound up with sex (wine women and song), but there is also awareness of the problems involved (as Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth, “it provokes the desire but it takes away the performance”). According to Farkas and Rosen (19761, the Shakespearean view of the effect of alcohol on sexual performance is supported by experiments with animals, but they also point out that there has been very little research with humans. In this respect their own experiment is significant. It is a first detailed attempt to determine the effects of alcohol on human sexual responses and it has inspired numerous

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experiments both in the pharmacological and the cognitive school. Farkas and Rosen examined sexual arousal to an erotic film in 16 male students in four different trials (BAC 0.0, 0.025, 0.050 and 0.075%). Once the correct BAC had been achieved, the subject undressed and reclined on a bed facing a movie screen. Heart-rate electrodes and a penile strain gauge were then attached. After stable heart rate recordings had been obtained, five minutes of instrumental music was played, followed by the projection of a 15-minute erotic film. The same film was used during each sessicn. The subjects also completed questionnaires. Farkas and Rosen reported that a small dose of alcohol (less than 0.050%) slightly increased sexual arousal to the film. This, however, was fairly modest in comparison with the reversed effects that larger doses had on erection. Subjective estimates followed the same pattern as physiological measurements: the highest subjective estimates of sexual arousal were obtained at low levels of intoxication and vice versa. Alcohol also diminished sexual arousal in male subjects in the experiments by Wilson et al. (1978) and Briddell and Wilson (1976). The approach in all of these experiments is pharmacological. The assumption is that the drug effects of alcohol invariably affect, through the mediation of physiological processes, the individual exposed to sexual stimuli, irrespective of his habits, the environment, etc. The individual himself has no active role, and apparently the fact that the experiments have been conducted in sterile laboratory environments has not been consid.ered a problem. No one seems to have thought of the possibility that if the effects of the same film were observed in normal settings at the cinema, without the demand characteristics inherent in the laboratory setting, the result might be very different.

Interaction People commonly expect alcohol to make them more sociable, to facilitate mixing. This assumption follows logically from the theory that alcohol reduces tension, makes people lose their inhibitions, and creates euphoria. However, there also seems to be a conviction that the pharmacological effects of alcohol directly strengthen people’s want for intimacy and promote their skills in intimate interaction. Although this is a fairly widespread idea, only a handful of experiments have been done to test it.

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In studies of experimentally induced intoxication with alcoholic subjects it has been found that alcohol considerably facilitates social interaction. When under the influence of alcohol, the subjects were much more sociable than when sober. There was also a strong feeling of belonging to “us alcoholics”, of being “someone” (McGuire et al. 1966). While in some experiments the subjects tended to become more anxious and depressed, they did not become withdrawn but actually entered more readily into social interaction: they enjoyed each other’s company, did favours for each other, and tried to establish contacts with the clinic staff and other patients. Upon termination of the drinking period, the subjects returned to their predrinking rigid and distant behaviour (McNamee et al. 1968; Tamerin and Mendelson 1969). Rohrberg and Sousa-Poza (1976) have tested the assumption of facilitated interaction with 16 male subjects classified as social drinkers. The subjects were randomly paired and instructed to talk about five given topics. The purpose was to see how alcohol affected selfdisclosure, i.e. the amount and depth of information that the subjects gave about themselves. Rohrberg and Sousa-Poza conclude that the amount of self-disclosure (the total time spent in discussion) was not affected by alcohol. By contrast, two observers felt that the dyads who received alcohol disclosed more intimate and confidential matters about themselves than did the control group who only received orange juice. In other words, alcohol served as a ‘social lubricant’ and affected the depth of selfdisclosure. Lindman (1983a) also found that social interaction was affected by alcohol consumption. In this experiment, it was shown that everyday rules of conversation were violated. It is usually considered good form that only one person should talk at a time; who talks when is determined by what is known as a ‘turn-taking mechanism’, through the exchange of subtle cues or signals. However, Lindman’s subjects were unconcerned with these mechanisms. There was a significant increase both in the number and mean duration of interruptions during conversations. Since there were no control groups in Lindman’s experiment it is impossible to say whether a similar non-adherence to the rules of conversation would have been found without alcohol. The question is nevertheless intriguing: To what extent can the results be attributed to the inevitable physiological effects of alcohol and to what extent to the gripping flow of the conversation itself? Lindman (1983a, 5) is himself unwilling to accept

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interpretations implying that his results could be explained by the disinhibitive pharmacological effects of alcohol. He distances himself from the strictly pharmacological school and makes it clear that a relevant interpretation must be based on cognitive mechanisms.

3. Summary For proponents of the pharmacological approach, alcohol is a drug that, like any other drug, has a variety of effects. In humans, much in the same way as in animals, alcohol is believed to have a definite and direct impact on emotions and behaviour. Changes occurring in emotions and behaviour are investigated as if they were caused solely by the pharmacological properties of alcohol and its physiological effects. The pharmacological approach is based on a concept of man which is mechanistic and allows for no intentionality whatsoever. The human being is a passive object of influence that responds automatically to alcoholic stimuli as described by the simple S R formula; he is at the mercy of the drug effects of alcohol. Jn its early days social psychological alcohol research was dominated by pharmacological studies, and today many experiments are still being carried out within the same framework. However, the trend in recent years has clearly been towards more sophisticated settings and away from the straightforward pharmacologcal assumptions. Crude generalizations have also had to give way. Questions are now being formulated in a much more de!icate and complex manner, and the possible role of mediatory mechanisms and factors is attracting more serious attention. There have consequently been growing demands that reference no longer be made to the effects of alcohol in general but to the effects of a specific dose of alcohol; or even of certain blood alcohol concentration levels. Likewise, a lot more attention is being paid to the drinkers, their drinking habits and other characteristics. For example, there have been experiments to clarify the possible differential effects of alcohol on the mood of men and women (Robbins and Brotherton 1980). It has also been shown that alcohol reduces feelings of pain among people drinking alone in a pub, whereas it has the opposite effect among people who are used to drinking at home with their family or friends (Brown and Cutter 1977).

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Theories explaining the effects of alcohol have also become much more complex. For instance, Hull (1981) has completely reconstructed the tension-reduction hypothesis and proposed what he calls a self-awareness model of the causes and effects of alcohol consumption. According to this model, alcohol does not serve to reduce tension directly as in the TRH, but. rather serves to reduce cognizance of a potential source of tension. It interferes with higher order information encoding processes fundamental to a state of self-awareness. Therefore, alcohol inhibits self-relevant encoding processes and decreases the correspondence of behaviour with standards of appropriate conduct and also decreases negative selfevaluation following failure. This in turn is considered a sufficient condition to induce and sustain alcohol consumption. Another example worth mentioning is Russell’s and Bond’s (1980) amplification hypothesis, according to which alcohol does not affect emotions directly but in a way determined by the emotional state of the individual prior to commencement of drinking; that is, depending on this state, the effects of alcohol may lead in any direction. The above examples go to show that the contradictions arising from the results of pharmacological experiments have led to new and more complex views - views that nevertheless still fall within the pharmacological category.

B. The Cognitive Approach In recent years social psychologists have increasingly abandoned those settings where emotional and behavioural change following alcohol consumption is considered as due only to physiological effects. More attention is now being paid to people’s conscious, cognitive regulation of their reaction in addition to the pharmacological effects of alcohol. At least three perspectives can be distinguished within what may be termed the cognitive approach: emphasis is placed on (1) situational factors, (2) expectations of the effects of alcohol, or (3) on the use of alcohol as an attributional object. In the first case, it is assumed that people’s interpretations of the physiological changes produced by alcohol depend essentially on the context within which these interpretations are made; hence the key importance given to drinking environment. In the expectancy perspective, it is assumed that responses are regulated by the individual’s expecta-

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tions and beliefs concerning alcohol. And finally, attribution theory offers an interesting explanation of why people drink: it is held that alcohol provides people with an acceptable excuse for frowned-upon behaviour or probable failure. All perspectives within the cognitive approach agree that emotional and behavioural changes occurring under the influence of alcohol should not be explained by the pharmacological properties of alcohol, but by interpreting these changes against the active role of the individual. That is, the human individual is not regarded as a passive and helpless object of physiological processes, as in the pharmacological approach, but as a more or less active subject. It follows logically from these premises that experiments within the cognitive approach cannot be done with animals.

1. Situational Factors

We have already referred in passing to the possible role of situational factors in mediating the effects of alcohol. Experimenters representing the pharmacological approach have not however controlled for the drinking environment in their research designs, but in want of explanations for contradictory resdts it has sometimes been concluded that the confusion must be due to intervening situational factors that distort the pharmacological effects. The few pharmacological studies that refer to situational factors make no serious attempt to explain their specific role in emotional and behavioural change. In the cognitive approach, the focus is precisely on explaining this role. This is done to a very great extent on the basis of Schachter’s theory of emotions, which has figured prominently in social psychological alcohol research. In particular, the article by Schachter and Singer in 1962 is reviewed in almost every study that falls within the category of cognitive analyses. The three main arguments of Schachter’s theory are as follows: First, given a state of physiological arousal for which the individual has no immediate explanation, he will describe his feelings in terms of cognitions available to him in the situation. Second, given a state of physiological arousal for which the individual has a completely appropriate explanation, he will have no need to evaluate his state and therefore no emotions will

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be induced. And third, in the absence of real physiological arousal there will be no emotions (e.g. Schachter and Singer 1962). Applications of Schachter’s theory to alcohol research have mainly been based on his analysis of the use of marijuana. Schachter (1964) says that marijuana, as a pharmacological substance, induces certain physiological symptoms, such as increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure and an unusually large appetite. An individual trying marijuana must first learn to identify these physiological effects. Also, he must learn how to interpret these effects ‘correctly’; the physiological symptoms are neither pleasant nor unpleasant but can be interpreted either as an illness or as ‘getting high’. The cues for the ‘right’ interpretation must in turn come from the environment. Finally, Schachter believes that the individual has considerable latitude in labelling his physiological state, in identifying his feelings, but he adds that limits do exist. For instance, it is most unlikely that a person with appendicitis will interpret his state as being caused by euphoria or anything else except a serious illness. Schachter’s thoughts on the effects of marijuana have led to similar ideas in alcohol research: the drug effects of alcohol are not directly responsible for changes in emotions and behaviour, but only for inducing a general, diffuse physiological state. Cognitions arising from the drinking situation are then the cues by which the inividual labels his state. The assumption is accordingly that emotional and behavioural change following alcohol consumption is in fact due to the combined effect of alcohol and the situation, i.e., of pharmacological and cognitive factors. Perhaps the most important application of Schachter’s theory in alcohol studies is the experiment by Pliner and Cappell(l974). The authors point out that whereas the interaction of cognitive and pharmacological factors has been experimentally demonstrated in the case of marijuana, amphetamine, and even aspirin, hardly any research has been done into alcohol. Pliner and Cappell are concerned in their study with how the effects of alcohol differ between social and solitary drinking situations. The subjects in their experiment were 60 males and 60 females, who were informed that the purpose was to study the effects of alcohol on creativity. The subjects were first asked to complete a questionnaire to give initial mood ratings. Then they were given an alcoholic or a placebo drink. Next the subjects were seated either alone or in groups of three around a table where they listened to a popular humorous recording,

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which they were told would stimulate creative thinking. In fact the purpose was to allow time for blood alcohol levels to peak and for the subjects to adapt to the experimental setting. The subjects then analysed the content of cartoons with captions, during which their behaviour was observed through a one-way mirror. Finally, the subjects completed the mood scale again. As they had expected, Pliner and Cappell found that the subjects who had taken alcohol and who were tested in groups labelled their pharmacological state as a change in affect, whereas subjects who were given alcohol but who performed the task alone experienced their state as physical symptomatology. Among those who had been tested in groups, subjects who had received alcohol reported feeling significantly friendlier and happier and less bored than placebo subjects. Similar differences were not found among the group of subjects working alone. The findings with regard to physical symptoms were precisely the opposite: in social situations there were no differences between alcohol and placebo subjects, but in solitary situations subjects who had received alcohol reported that they thought less clearly and felt dizzier than the placebo subjects. The general conclusion was thus that the label given by the subjects to their physiological state was determined by the context within which drinking occurred. Pliner and Cappell also found evidence to support another of the predictions they had made on the basis of Schachter’s theory. They hypothesized that the manipulation of the situation would be effective only to the extent that a pharmacological state induced by alcohol was present. Subjects who worked socially reported significant changes in affect only when they drank alcohol. Similarly, subjects who worked alone felt less clear thinking and dizzier than subjects in the social situation only when the drink contained alcohol. Pliner and Cappell believe that their results support Schachter’s theory. They conclude that alcohol and the environment interact to determine the affective response to the drug. Pihl et al. (1981) and Polivy and Herman (1976) also take Schachter’s theory as a starting-point. They report that their experiments lend support to the interactionist view that the pharmacological properties of alcohol and the drinking situation together determine the effects of alcohol. Schachter’s theory would thus seem to open interesting perspectives to explaining the effects of alcohol. It has provided a framework for convincing interpretations of the many contradictory results obtained in phar-

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mzcological experiments and also provided a solid basis for studies aiming to determine the role of cognitive and environmental factors in emotional and behavioural change following alcohol consumption. It is true that Schachter’s theory has not actually served as a framework for very many experiments, but it is frequently referred to. The application of Schachter’s theory involves serious problems, however. The theory holds that if the individual has an appropriate explanation for his physiological symptoms, no emotions will be induced. This means that if after receiving alcohol the individual is capable of identifying his physical symptoms as being caused by alcohol, emotions will not arise because he can simply tell himself: “I feel a bit strange, but I suppose it’s just because I’ve been drinking alcohol”. Only in the absence of an immediate explanation, when the individual is striving to find one in the environment from amongst the numerous possibilities allowed for by his symptoms, only then will feelings emerge. Interestingly, Schachter’s arguments about the effects of marijuana contradict his theory of emotions. He says the individual learning how to use the drug first has to learn to identify the effects of marijuana, and then to learn to make the ‘right’ interpretations of these vague symptoms. So Schachter is saying that emotions emerge even if the individual has learned to identlfy his state as being caused by marijuana. This, in a very strict interpretation, is indeed contradictory of his theory of emotion. On the other hand, an even looser interpretation leaves us with the problem of whether the individual cognitively labels his state as due to the immediate situation, as the theory presumes. Although alcohol may well induce a physiological state that is diffuse and emotionally non-specific, it is unclear whether the individual wrongly attributes this state to the circumstances surrounding alcohol use, or whether he can identlfy his state as being due to the pharmacological effects of alcohol (see Vuchinich et al. 1979; Vuchinich and Tucker 1980). In other words, it would seem more likely that the individual does not regard the cognitive labels as the cause of his feelings, but as interpretations of them. This distinction has not been made in Schachter’s works, nor indeed in any of the alcohol experiments that are based on his theory. Likewise, alcohol studies using Schachter’s theory have failed to differentiate between cognitive labels and the individual’s expectations of the emotional and behavioural effects of alcohol. Although reference is made

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in most cases both to situational factors and to the subjects’ expectations, they have been dealt with as if they were synonymous. Vuchinich, Tucker, and Sobell (1979) consider this a major shortcoming because cognitive labels and expectations are in point of fact two completely different things. A strict application of Schachter’s theory of cognitive labelling presupposes that the individual is not aware of the true source of the physiological changes he undergoes following alcohol consumption. If he were, he would not seek an explanation in the situation. On the other hand, for expectations to be effective the individual has to believe it is alcohol he has been drinking and that it produces this or that effect. In this case it is reasonable to assume that the individual has been fully aware of the true source of his physiological state. This is why it is important to determine to what extent cognitive factors regulate the effect of alcohol through the mediation of cognitive labelling and, on the other hand, through expectations of the effects of alcohol. This conceptual and theoretical confusion is also reflected in practical experimentation. It is not always easy to see what these experiments have proved - the conclusions as to what must have happened in the subjects’ heads are little more than guesswork based on Schachter’s ideas. The concept of man behind the theory of cognitive labelling is somewhat mechanistic. It is assumed, first, that people lack the tools for a deeper understanding of their own state and second, that they are at the mercy of the environment, in that they always attribute their state to the circumstances surrounding them. This seems to imply that by manipulating the situation, a person who has consumed alcohol could easily be made to feel and behave in just about any way possible because, as Schachter says, the same physiological state can be labelled in several different ways.

2. Expectations The basic assumption in the approach that gives prominence to individuals’ expectations is that alcohol is not just any medical drug; it has a very specific role which is intertwined with culture. In this respect the expectation perspective differs radically both from the pharmacological approach and from cogrutive labelling, because neither of these differentiates between alcohol and other medical drugs. Of course, pharmacologists point

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out that alcohol has its own particular effects, but these effects are physiological, just as those of other drugs. In cognitive labelling alcohol is likewise understood as a medical agent: it merely generates a diffuse physiological state that could actually have been caused by any substance. There are many expectancy experiments that use Valins’s (1966) extension of Schazhter’s theory as a starting-point (e.g. Wilson and Lawson 1976). Valins believes Schachter is wrong in maintaining that the development of emotions requires actual physiological arousal. Emotions may also develop if the individual merely believes he is in this or that state. According to Valins, if the individual believes non-veridical information about his state is genuine, this leads to the cognitive labelling of this imagined state and thus to the development of an emotion. In recent years the role of beliefs and expectations has received increasing attention in experiments using a balanced placebo design, which was first used in alcohol studies by Marlatt, Demming and Reid in 1973. The balanced placebo design means that half of the subjects receive alcohol and half a placebo, and that half of the subjects in both of these groups believe they are being given alcohol and half that they are having a non-alcoholic drink. Four groups can thus be compared: (1) told alcohol/given alcohol (2) told alcohol/given placebo (3) told placebo/given alcohol (4)told placebolgiven placebo This design makes it possible to distinguish between the pharmacological effects of alcohol and the effects of the mere expectation that alcohol has been consumed. As mentioned, the first experiment using the balanced placebo design was carried out by Marlatt et al. (1973), who tested 32 alcoholics and 32 social drinkers in a typical taste-rating task. Half of the subjects were given a drink consisting of vodka and tonic, and the other half only tonic. In both groups, half of the subjects were told they were expected to rate three different types of vodka and half that they were to rate three different types of tonic. The drinks were then prepared with the subjects present. The subjects who expected they would be drinking alcohol saw the experimenter pour vodka from three different bottles into three decanters. For subjects who were told they were expected to rate different tonic qualities, the same procedure was followed with bottles of tonic. However,

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in the told alcohol/given tonic and the told tonic/given alcohol condition, the contents of the bottles had been changed in advance. The drinks had been carefully tested to find a mixture in which the presence or absence of alcohol could not be reliably detected on the basis of tasting alone. Moreover, before the actual tasting, the subjects were asked to rinse their mouth with a mouthwash that contained alcohol in order to dull the sense of taste. Marlatt et al. found that the only significant determinant of the subject’s consumption level and estimates of alcohol content at the end of the task was his expectation of the contents of the drink. Consumption was considerably higher among subjects who believed their drinks contained alcohol. On the other hand, the actual alcohol content of the drink did not significantly affect the amounts consumed by either group of subjects. It is noteworthy that this result applied to alcoholics as well. Loss of control drinking, in the form of increased consumption by alcoholics who were given alcohol, did not occur during the drinking task. So in contrast to the ‘triggering mechanism’ hypothesis, a drop of alcohol did not activate the addictive process. Even among alcoholics the amount consumed depended only on their expectations of what they were drinking. This was an important result. It was the first time the experimental tradition had seen evidence that the subject’s expectations - not the pharmacological properties of alcohol - might in fact be the determining factor. A new wave of experiments followed this finding, aiming to identify the role of expectations in emotional and behaviourd change by means of the balanced placebo design. These experiments have produced convincing evidence that cognitive factors play a crucial role in the determination of emotions and behaviour following moderate consumption of alcohol. Whatever the actual content of the drink, most subjects who have been told they have received alcohol have shown increased aggressive behaviour (Lang et al. 1975), increased sexual arousal (Wilson and Lawson 1976; Briddell et al. 1978; Lang et al. 1980; Lansky and Wilson 1981; Abrams and Wilson 19831, and changes in emotions (Abrams and Wilson 1979; Vuchinich et al. 1979). On the other hand, when given alcohol but told the drink they have received does not contain alcohol, the subjects have shown no emotional or behavioural change. Therefore, irrespective of the pharmacological properties of alcohol, expectations have in most experiments been the sole determinant

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of the subjects’ responses. Or, to put it shortly: cognitive studies have shown unequivocally that the pharmacological approach does not provide a fruitful basis for experiments of the effects of alcohol on human beings. However, with the growth of expectancy experiments we have also seen more and more results that fail to substantiate the basic premises of the cognitive approach; results indicating that, although led to believe they were given alcohol, the subjects’ responses have not been affected (Wilson and Lawson 1978; Levenson et al. 1980; McCollam et al. 1980; McCarty et al. 1982; Korytnyk and Perkins 1983). Considerable variations, and in some cases completely opposite results, have been obtained with different subjects - in particular between men and women - and with different methods of measurement. So while the numerous experiments have pointed to the inadequacy of the pharmacological approach, they have also raised some very awkward questions. Within the cognitive tradition there have been some serious attempts to straighten out these incompatibilities by bringing new elements into focus. At the same time, growing attention has been paid to the limitations imposed by the balanced placebo design in terms of the dosages of alcohol that can be used. Because it is impossible to conceal the true content of drinks with higher proportions of alcohol, only relatively small amounts can be used (Abrams and Wilson 1983). However, as Levenson et al. (1980) point out, larger doses may give excessive weight to the physiological effects of alcohol. However, little effort has been made to tackle the host of difficulties encoiintered in these experiments on the basis of methodological theorizing. The problems have merely generated new experiments, the rationale being that any problem can be solved if only a sufficient amount of experimenting is done. It seems as if experiments form an endless, self-sustaining chain. The balanced placebo design has provided a new and inspiring, ready-to-use tool for easy and convenient experiments to decide whether alcohol or expectancy is more important in this or that kind of behaviour. No one has felt it necessary to question the designs of the experiments or the ways in which the problems have been formulated. Jt is clear, however, that the brief criticism presented above of the pharmacological approach also applies to experiments using the balanced placebo design. As a matter of fact, studies of the role of expectancy very often use precisely the same designs as the pharmacological approach

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(taste rating task, social interaction test, administering electric shocks, viewing erotic films) with the exception of expectancy manipulation. But the settings are equally unnatural. Although it is emphasized in the cognitive approach that the effects of alcohol are mediated by the drinking situation and by expectancies, this approach still fails to consider how these factors are related to the subjects’ awareness that they are participating in a scientific experiment. Additionally, most experiments remain at a very low level of abstraction and are imprecise in formulating their basic concepts. The very idea of expectancy and its mechanisms remains vague. As we saw above, experiments drawing on Valins’s theory have hypothesized that, irrespective of the actual content of the drink, subjects who believe they have received alcohol will reason that their physiological state has changed and will then cognitiveiy label or misattribute this assumed state on the basis of situational stimuli. As Vuchinich and Tucker (1980) point out, this is a very problematic assumption. In a told-alcohol condition, the subject believes he is in a state of physiological arousal, but at the same time the condition produces an adequate explanation of the cause of the arousal. Because the subject believes he has consumed alcohol, it is most unlikely that he would not consider this state as being caused by alcohol. This is one reason why very few experiments can be regarded as strict applications of Valins’s theory. While it is accepted that emotional and behavioural change will be induced by the subject’s mere belief that he is receiving alcohol, there are doubts about the indirect effect of this belief through cognitive labelling. Instead, it is assumed that following an alcohol instruction, affect and behaviour are directly regulated by the individual’s expectations regarding the effects of alcohol. The problem is that in some cases cognitive labelling has also been used to describe this latter process, and this has obviously caused conceptual confusion. Jn experiments using the balanced placebo design, the aim is to make the subject expect either an alcoholic or a non-alcoholic drink - not to manipulate his beliefs about the effects of alcohol. These beliefs, however, occur in many forms: in different experimental situations alcohol expectancy has led to increased aggression, sexual arousal, euphoria, or reduced tension. Therefore Vuchinich et al. (1979) conclude that the individual’s expectancy alone cannot determine his responses, but operates in conjunction with the context surrounding the use of alcohol, with the salient en-

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vironmental stimuli. In other words, they hold that those beliefs will be activated that are most suitable for the particular context. However, in different individuals the same situation may evoke different expectations, a fact which has clearly been neglected in the experiments. Finally, mention should be made of an important difference between the expectancy perspective and the pharmacological approach (and to some extent even the cognitive labelling school), i.e. their image of man. In the former the human subject is regarded neither as a helpless object of the pharmacological properties of alcohol or of physiological processes, nor as a creature that blindly labels his feelings according to this or that situation. Instead, his responses are considered as being essentially determined by his beliefs and expectations, which in turn are deeply-rooted notions in a given culture to which the individual has been socialized. Thus it is reasonable to argue that in the expectancy perspective, the human individual is basically a social being that abides by the values and norms of his community.

3. Attributions One explanation offered for the behaviour of subjects in experiments using the balanced placebo design is that alcohol expectation provides an acceptable excuse for a response which might otherwise be considered inappropriate or even immoral (such as aggression or sexual arousal to a homosexual film). This assumption is based on attribution theory, according to which people continuously explain the activities of others and try to fmd out the reasons for their behaviour - which means people are also aware that their own behaviour is being monitored by others. Given the further assumption that people regard what others think about them as important, it is clear that they consciously try to give a good impression of themselves. Alcohol therefore serves as a useful attribution object, a temporary and external cause of deviant behaviour. It is easier to put the blame for aggressive behaviour, for example, on alcohol than on one’s own inherently violent nature. A typical assumption of the attribution perspective is that people may consciously or unconsciously decide to start drinking in order to have a good excuse for their unacceptable responses. This of course opens an in-

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teresting insight into the causes of drinking in general. Most experiments based on attribution theory have studied the use of alcohol as a self-handicapping strategy. The first reports were published by Berglas and Jones (1978) and Jones and Berglas (1978), who suggest that usually people wish to receive accurate feedback on how they have performed, but in situations where they are likely to fail they tend to adopt a self-handicapping strategy in order to protect themselves against such feedback. Self-handicapping, according to Berglas and Jones, is any activity that makes it easier to externalize failure (to find a plausible excuse for it) and to internalize success (to get the credit for success). Suitable excuses in the self-handicapping strategy include drugs such as alcohol, which are generally believed to impair performance. If you fail, it is easy to say “I had a few drinks too many”. But if, contrary to expectations, you do happen to succeed, then all the better: “I did fine despite being drunk”. So whatever the outcome, the self-handicapped cannot lose. Putting these thoughts to the test in an experimental setting, Berglas and Jones informed their subjects that the purpose of the experiment was to determine the effect of two drugs on intellectual performance. First, the subjects took part in an IQ test, in which half tried to solve unsolvable tasks, the other half solvable tasks. All subjects, regardless of how well they had actually performed, were told that they had succeeded brilliantly. Then came the important part of the experiment: the subjects, who were led to believe that they were going to participate in a second test to determine the effect of the drug they took, were asked to choose one of two drugs, one of which was supposed to impair performance and the other to improve it. The actual purpose of the experiment was to see whether the subjects who had performed tasks that were mostly unsolvable, and who were told that they had performed brilliantly, would resort to self-handicapping and choose a drug that was said to impair performance. It was believed that in this situation the subjects felt their success was merely due to chance and that they could therefore not be sure they would succeed in the second test. In other words, it was assumed the subjects thought they would probably fail in the second test, and would therefore choose a drug impairing performance in order not to risk their reputation. The drug would provide them with a good excuse for failing to reach the same high standards as in the first test. If they chose the drug that was supposed to aid performance, they would be under pressure to do even better than in the first test so

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as to avoid any doubt that their brilliant performance was not just due to good luck. According to the results, the male subjects in the random success condition responded precisely as predicted: they chose the drug that impaired performance. No variation was found in this respect between those situations in which the success was made known to the other subjects and those in which the results of the first test were only told to the subject himself. Berglas and Jones thus concluded that keeping up one’s reputation is important not only in the eyes of others, but also in one’s own eyes. Women responded differently: they chose the drug that improved performance. This, the authors propose, was because women did not believe their success was anything else than good luck in the first place. So, unlike men, women had no need for an excuse for failure or lowered performance in the second test. However, Berglas and Jones also consider it possible that had the test been administered by a woman, the situation might have been different; thus they concede that their subjects actively interpreted the context in which they were being tested and that they might in fact have sensitively responded to factors not controlled for in the setting. Rerglas and Jones did not use alcohol to test their assumptions, yet they repeatedly point out that alcohol is one useful tool in a self-handicapping strategy. The idea is that other people know alcohol impairs performance and will therefore take this into consideration when judging the behaviour of others. So when one is no longer sure of success, alcohol provides a means of maintaining one’s reputation. The blame is put on alcohol, not on the individual. The use of alcohol as a means of self-handicapping has been investigated by Tucker et al. (1981). The procedure was similar to the one used by Berglas and Jones, but, between the IQ tests, the subjects were allowed to consume alcohol at their own rate (the self-handicapping option) and/or to study materials for the next test (the performance boosting option). Contrary to the self-handicapping hypothesis, the subjects in the random success condition spent a large part of their time between the tests studying and drank only slightly more than the subjects whose success was genuine. Tucker et al. then carried out another experiment in which the option of studying for the second test was no longer available. The results from this second experiment supported the self-handicapping hypothesis. The subjects who were told they performed well in the test but had in reali-

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ty not managed to solve the tasks, drank more than the subjects who did well and were told so. Tucker et al. conclude that Berglas and Jones were right in suggesting that alcohol would work in the same way as their ‘medical drugs’. However, they do make an important reservation when they argue that the use of alcohol as a tool for self-handicapping is essentially limited by the non-availability of a more suitable coping strategy, such as studying and practising before the threatening situation. In addition, Tucker et al. make some remarks on the more general problem of alcoholism. They suggest that if people realize their successes in life are not due to their own skills, or if they feel they are deprived of access to adaptive strategies to enhance their performance, they are likely to develop an alcohol problem. The idea of alcohol as an attribution object opens new perspectives to social psychological alcohol research. It seems to take us one step further than the expectancy perspective. Both approaches start out from the same idea: that expectations of the effects of alcohol are entrenched in the surrounding culture. However, unlike the expectancy concept, attribution theory does not attempt to find out how these expectations affect emotions and behaviour, or whether their impact is greater or lesser than that of the pharmacological properties of alcohol. Instead, the focus is on the way in which these expectations are made use of; not on the way the expectations affect the individual, but on how the individual tries to master his life by using these expectations. Attribution theorists also have a very different concept of man. The human individual is not perceived as a passive and helpless object of physiological processes, as in the pharmacological approach. He is not bound to the situation as an interpreter of his own feelings, as in cognitive labelling; nor does he necessarily act in strict accordance with the norms prevailing in the community, as in the expectancy approach. Rather, he anticipates situations and aims to influence them. The human subject is held to be capable of anticipating the consequences of his behaviour and the effects of this behaviour on his reputation, both in his own eyes and in the eyes of his fellow men. If he has reason to suspect that the anticipated consequences may have adverse effects on his reputation, it is assumed that he will consciously attempt to change everyday interpretations of the causal relationships by drinking alcohol, because he knows that others living in the same culture will blame alcohol for his behaviour rather than his

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personal qualities. In short, the human subject is regarded as capable not only of interpreting things and events, but also of affecting and changing interpretations. An obvious pitfall of attribution theory is that it easily leads to gross exaggerations; it may seem as if all human behaviour is a conscious and deliberate pursuit of maximum self-benefit. The Norwegian scholar Fekjaer (1982), for instance, says that alcohol is the most widely accepted and most commonly used attribution object in our Western culture, with uses ranging from finding an excuse for things that should not have been done to things that remained undone. Additionally, referring to the writings of Berglas and Jones, Fekjaer points out that alcohol is used as an excuse for failure. He also maintains that the popular acceptance of alcohol as a general attribution object is the main reason why the alcohol problem is so extensive. This, conversely, means that if alcohol were not accepted as an excuse for frowned-upon behaviour, avoidance of responsibilities, and failure, we would be free of most of our alcohol problems. This,however, is a very simplistic view, and it fails to consider the many factors that lie behind the use and effects of alcohol. It also implies an extremist concept of man. The human being would seem to be preoccupied wit.h his own interests and reputation, avoiding responsibilities, and constantly breaking the norms of appropriacy. Yet it remains unclear what the shiinning of responsibilities and ‘inappropriate’ behaviour actually reflect, and whether they are regarded as some sort of ‘basic needs’ - whether for instance the human being is seen as an inherently evil and malicious creature engaged in a never-ending search for outlets for his aggressive drives.

4. Summary

The main tenet of the cognitive approach is that changes in affect and behaviour following alcohol consumption are not determined solely by the pharmacological properties of alcohol. This does not mean that the cognitive approach denies the importance of these properties or the physiological effects of alcohol. It simply postulates that the complex relationships between alcohol and human behaviour cannot be explained by the S-R formula, but that, above all, it is also necessary to take into account

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the role of cognitive factors. The three focuses of the cognitive approach - situational factors, expectancy, and attributions - form a relatively coherent entity. Expectations of the effects of alcohol are intertwined with contextual factors. The individual must interpret the situation and environment in order to form an idea of how he believes alcohol will affect him in that particular situation. Attribution fills in the rest of the picture. It is assumed that on the basis of common expectations, the individual is capable of using alcohol to his own benefit. The basic ideas of the cognitive approach have received most support from experiments using the balanced placebo design, which at the same time have proved the orthodox pharmacological view untenable. It has been repeatedly shown that whereas alcohol per se has little or no direct effect on behaviour, the mere expectation of receiving alcohol tends to determine responses. That is, emotions and behaviour following (moderate) consumption of alcohol do not seem to be determined by alcohol, but by a variety of cognitive factors, expectations and beliefs. In recent years there has been growing unanimity among alcohol researchers that cognitive factors must not be neglected in attempting to establish the effects of alcohol on behaviour and affect. Strictly pharmacological experimenting is of course still being done, but the results testifying to the major role of cognitive factors are simply too convincing to be overlooked. As a result, there has been a definite shift in emphasis from the pharmacological to the cognitive approach. Rut the growth of the cognitive approach has also led to new problems. Expectancy has not always affected responses, and some of the results have even been mutually contradicting. This, unfortunately, has so far not led to deeper theoretical and methodological analyses. Instead, as in the pharmacological tradition, all that seems to interest scholars is experimenting.

C. Problems of Social Psychological Alcohol Research The laboratory experiment has been by far the most popular method of social psychological alcohol research, both in the pharmacological and the

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cognitive approach. Reports have been published at more or less regular intervals and seem very much like serialized novels. Although some social psychologists have felt uneasy about the designs of the experiments, there has been virtually no criticism of the principles and concepts underlying the method. However, it is clear that experimental alcohol research in social psychology suffers from the same shortcomings as the traditional experiment in general (e.g. Harr6 and Secord 1972; Israel and Tajfel 1972; Armistead 1974). The main concern is with measuring quantifiable changes in animal or human subjects, but the active role of humans in interpreting the situation surrounding them is largely neglected. Human individuals are treated as passive objects whose options are limited to an absolute minimum; who are rarely told the true purpose of the experiment; who are often deceived by the use of experimental confederates; and who almost always are male undergraduates. The aim is to reach the standards of accuracy set by modern natural science. Therefore the methods of the natural sciences are imitated as far as possible. For example, it is widely held among experimentalists that physiological measurements produce a much more reliable and objective picture of changes in affect than self-reporting, which is considered too ‘subjective’ and unreliable. The natural science ideal has been so overwhelming that in some cases animals have been used as substitutes for humans in order to prevent subjective elements and inter-individual differences from distorting the results. Animals can be raised in laboratories, to make sure their past experiences are precisely the same. Animals do not make the mistake of interpreting the unnatural laboratory setting, nor do they have any preconceptions of what it is like to participate in a scientific experiment. Animals meet the established criteria of the perfect subject more fully than any human individual ever can. Growing suspicions about the generalizability of results obtained in animal experiments have recently led to a significant reduction in the use of animals as replacements for humans, but the basic principles and concepts of scientific experimenting have remained more or less intact. While there now seems to be general acceptance of the fact that humans differ in essential respects from animals and other living creatures, this has so far not been translated into an approach to the study of man that genuinely

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recognizes the qualities that distinguish people from the rest of the living world. On the contrary, it is still believed that relevant results can only be produced if these distorting factors are held constant and excluded from the analysis. However, as was pointed out in the ’crisis’ debate, to bracket off the uniquely human qualities of man is not possible. Although it might seem to the observer that the subject is merely carrying out the tasks required of him, he is in fact continuously interpreting events and situations. This must be reflected in his response. It is of course possible that the use of a cover story and the experimentalist’s confederate may lead him to making erroneous interpretations; but right or wrong, these interpretations still mediate his response. If, for instance, the subject believes he is punishing a learner by administering electric shocks to him, the cues in the situation may lead to the interpretation that powerful shocks are required because they promote the learning process. So if the subject decides to administer high-intensity shocks, it is wrong to consider this as indicative of spontaneous aggression - the use of false information and confederates has simply turned against itself. Critics have also argued that the artificial situations created in laboratory experiments are a mockery of real life, and that the results can therefore not be generalized to life outside the laboratory. However, Greenwood (1983) insists that this criticism, although it touches upon an important question, misses the mark. Isolating a phenomenon for scientific analysis is in fact part of the logic of experimenting, he says. Likewise, it is not always that positive instances can be found for a set of results, but this does not necessarily make them invalid. The same applies to the natural sciences. The results of an experiment indicating that water causes corrosion cannot be refuted by the real-life finding that this seldom happens (thanks to anti-corrosive paints). According to Greenwood, the problem of the social psychological laboratory experiment - and at the same time the factor that distinguishes it from the natural scientific experiment - is that the phenomenon extracted from real life and brought into the laboratory hardly retains its identity but assumes a different meaning when made the object of a scientific experiment. Unlike water or rust, which are water and rust whether examined in the laboratory or outside it, the phenomena that social psychology concerns itself with are always permeated by meanings which

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may be radically changed in the experimental setting. This means that human action cannot be sliced into small parts without loss of meaning. Meanings are inseparable from contexts of action. Accordingly, a different context means that the meaning of a response will change. Trying to impress a person of the opposite sex may well mean different things in a scientific experiment and in a bar; and administering an electric shock in a laboratory setting is not necessarily an aggressive act. In all, it is unclear what these experiments have actually measured. The laboratory experiment is indeed a social event in its own right. It is characterized by a given structure where the experimenter represents an omniscient authority with sovereign control over and sole responsibility for everything that happens in the laboratory. The subjects, knowing that they are taking part in an experiment and thus playing their respective role, are expected to put their trust in the experimenter. The authoritative structure of the experiment makes for certain rules and expectations of how the laboratory experiment is to be carried out and what is required of the subjects participating in the experiment. Although the role that experimenters have in mind for their subjects is a passive one, in point of fact the subjects play out this role very actively. For example, it has often been noted that suhjects try to uncover the experimenter’s hypothesis and attempt to anticipate what kind of results he wants; and then, working on these assumptions, they try to help the experimenter by responding in a way that confirms the working hypothesis. The responses of human subjects are thus largely determined by an awareness of the expectations attached to their role as participant-in-experiment and the consequent pursuit of maximal performance in this role. There has also been criticism that would retain the experiment but would like to see improvements in the use of the method. In particular, the choice of subjects has been considered problematic. This is also applicable to alcohol studies: the vast majority of the subjects have been male American undergraduate students of psychology. The obvious explanation is that students have been readily available at reasonable cost. However, it is clear that the results obtained in experiments with groups as homogeneous as this cannot be considered applicable to all cultures. It is reasonable to assume that even within one culture, university students have different expectations of alcohol than, for example, elderly people. There is no doubt that bias has also been generated by the almost ex-

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clusive concentration on men. In the rare cases that women have been studied, the results have tended to be quite the opposite to those obtained with men. The differences have not escaped the experimenters, but for some reason they have not been considered worthy of further investigation - despite the fact that they may well have opened up new perspectives on the differential meanings of alcohol and expectations of the effects of alcohol among men and women. In spite of the growing criticism of the traditional laboratory experiment, it has become increasingly popular in social psychology when compared with other methods (e.g. Greenwood 1983, 237). Its position is very firm. Judged on the basis of a questionnaire study, the majority of social psychologists engaged in research work are not prepared to admit that their discipline is in crisis in the first place (Nederhof and Zwier 1983). Therefore it is not surprising that the questions raised by the crisis debate have hardly reached such peripheral areas of social psychology as alcohol studies. Jt is important to note that the pharmacological approach is in a sense completely immune to the criticism presented above. As we saw, the baseline assumption in this tradition is that alcohol, through physiological processes, invariably produces emotional and behavioural change. This means that it is totally irrelevant who the subjects are, what they are required to do in the experiment, how they interpret the situation, and what kind of expectations they have of playing the subject’s role. Because humans are considered to lose their unique features when under the influence of alcohol, these can just as well be neglected. The laboratory experiment, or any method for that matter, cannot therefore be a neutral tool. Importantly, it is built upon a certain concept of the research object, in this case a concept that adheres faithfully to the pharmacological ideals. But in as much as it has been proved that the premises of the pharmacological approach are untenable, it is impossible to bypass the problems involved in the laboratory experiment. On the other hand, the critique of the traditional experiment is justified in the case of the cognitive approach. Here it is stressed that changes in affect and behaviour can be adequately described only if the individual’s expectations and his interpretations of the situation are taken into account. Yet in empirical designs the importance of cognitive factors is still neglected. Rather than accepting the fact that even in an experimental

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situation human subjects take the initiative, make their own interpretations, give meanings to things, experimenters tend to design the setting much in the same way as in the pharmacological approach. This is an important contradiction, not only with regard to the future of the entire pursuit of social psychological alcohol research, but also because it reflects the meagre interest that has been shown in methodological and theoretical questions. The main problem lies apparently in how cognitive factors are understood. In the laboratory experiment, it is assumed that the drinking environment and general expectations of the effects of alcohol directly determine the behaviour and affect of the individual. If the experimenter has attempted to create an informal and cheerful atmosphere, it is automatically believed that this is how the subjects will interpret it; and accordingly, that this interpretation activates the expectation that alcohol provokes mirth. The experimenter’s interpretation is the law, as far as the subject is concerned. Situational factors and expectations, in this perspective, are clearly beyond the control of the individual. His only option is to adapt. A definition of the situation is implanted in the subject’s mind, which then automatically switches on a particular expectation of the effects of alcohol. This is why there is no need to bother with the subject’s own interpretations or beliefs. It is assumed that following alcohol consumption, an individual living in a given culture can feel and behave in one way and one way only. So the cognitive factors included in the laboratory experiment actually become reduced to more or less ‘pharmacological’ factors. Indeed, the difference between the cognitive and the pharmacological approach is much smaller than one might be inclined to believe at first glance. True, there are major differences in how changes in affect and behaviour are understood - either as arising from a biochemical or from a cultural and contextual basis - but the concepts of determination are very similar. Although the introduction of cognitive factors does revise the straightforward S R formula by bringing in a new element (S 0 R), the basic idea underlying this kind of explanation remains intact. In both approaches the human being is ultimately reduced to a response automaton whose changes in behaviour and affect following alcohol consumption are assumed to be predictable on the basis of laws that can be gradually uncovered - through experimentation. The human will is categorically denied, as are any

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thoughts that the human being might not fit into the S-R formula or any of its various modifications. However, cognitive factors cannot be ‘pharmacologized’, because neither the drinking situation nor people’s expectations of the effects of alcohol are decisive as such. For example, a few drinks in cheerful company does not necessarily make for all-round cheerfulness; it may also lead to increased depression and anxiety. Likewise, different people have different ideas of the effects of alcohol. Even though different people may have interpreted the essential features of some situation in the same way, this does not necessarily mean that they have the same expectations of the effects of alcohol. Interpretations and expectations arise out of the individual’s biographic situation, of how the individual from his or her particular situation perceives and interprets the drinking situation and alcohol as part of it. At the same time it must be pointed out that the meanings given to alcohol by the individual are for their part derived from the reserve of meaning potentials that alcohol incorporates in a particular culture. Cognitive factors are not only subjective, but also reflect the social nature of the human being. Unless the individual is attached to a network of social relationships, he will not learn to identify alcohol as the culture object it has developed into, nor to regulate the meanings he gives to it within the confines of the meaning potentials. All the different meanings borne by alcohol in a given culture are in the final analysis the main determinants of the role played by alcohol in human praxis, of how it is used and what effects it has. Although alcohol is a substance whose chemical composition knows only one form, in human use it is intertwined with and permeated by a variety of cultural meanings; so much so that we might say that different people drinking alcohol are not always performing the same act. And although different situations may be placed under the same category on the criterion that alcohol is being consumed in all of them, the similarities between those situations may be fairly superficial. What has been said above is not to deny the pharmacological properties of alcohol. Alcohol is of course one of many drugs that, in excessive use, can even be lethal. Alcohol has certain physiological effects which are amplified in proportion to the amount consumed. This does not, however, mean that the pharmacological effects of alcohol are the determinants of

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emotional and behavioural change in humans. It is interesting to note that even the effects of alcohol on the central nervous system are not yet fully known. Although intoxication is regarded as the main effect of alcohol on the central nervous system, it is still unclear how this physiological state is actually induced (e.g. Ylikahri 1977, 94-95). The relation between these physiological processes and human behaviour and affect must obviously be much more complicated. To sum up: because alcohol as a pharmacological substance does not lead to a specific ‘alcohol behaviour’ or ‘alcohol emotions’, an absolute distinction between responses made under the influence of alcohol and during sobriety is untenable. For this reason it is not possible to give a clear-cut explanation for the determination of behaviour and affect under the influence of alcohol. Instead, the question of the effects of alcohol must in the final analysis be answered as part of the question: What determines human behaviour and affect in general? In other words, the effects of alcohol do not constitute a separate social psychological phenomenon with its own laws. They are an integral part of the wider problem of how human responses are determined. It follows that the whole concept of ‘the effects of alcohol’ is in this context misleading, suggesting as it does that the consumption of alcohol leads to given emotional and behavioural changes and that these changes are induced by the pharmacological properties of alcohol. Both assumptions are wrong. Nevertheless, they are firmly entrenched in experimental alcohol studies. Although neither pharmacological nor cognitive experiments have managed to uncover any laws, the search is still on. Orthodox S-R thought is gradually receding into the background, but the basic formula is still there. There seems to be a firm belief that further elaborations of this basic model will eventually reveal the single factor that in the end determines the effects of alcohol. This in turn means that attention tends to focus on the individual. For instance, it may be assumed that there are different types of humans, which can be distinguished on the basis of physiological or psychic factors on which alcohol has differential effects; or that social background determines the effects of alcohol on the individual. Along these lines, experimenters can go on forever, testing the possible role of endless factors in determining the effects of alcohol. Although it is widely accepted that the S- R and S- 0- R formulae are

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of little more than historical interest, they are still the focus of social psychological alcohol experiments. It is also interesting to note that Tolman incorporated what he called intervening variables in the S-R formula as early as the 1930s, but in alcohol research it was not until 1973 and the balanced placebo experiments that cognitive factors became included. This reflects the considerable time lag before the general theoretical debate reaches different peripheral fields of social psychological research, such as alcohol studies. Finally, to revert to the question we had at the beginning of this chapter - Is the laboratory experiment applicable to social psychology? - our discussion above has made it clear that this question is inseparable from the question, What is social psychology concerned with, what is its research object? These two questions are organically bound together, as all ontological (what is reality l i e ? ) and epistemological (how can we learn about that reality?) questions are. Jnsofar as social psychologists wish to carry on their search for connections between the use of alcohol and behaviour or emotions, for example, they should at least admit that there are no necessary, universal relations to be discovered but only empirical regularities. Experimenters would find a far more interesting object of study in the meaning structures created by their subjects, rather than in those they have created themselves: What does alcohol mean to different individuals living in different ‘alcohol cultures’, what kind of rules and roles can be discovered in drinking episodes? To 6nd their way beyond the taken-for-granted type of regularities and into the meanings and interpretations adopted by the individual, researchers will need methods other than the traditional laboratory experiment. Another alternative to the endless search for determining factors is also conceivable. Social psychologists could turn to the core of their discipline and through original theoretical work attempt to clarify the basic principles of human interaction and in this way to establish the proper research object of social psychology. Through these efforts they might be able to discover some kind of basic system constituting the essence of all social psychological knowledge. If successful, this pursuit would open completely new vistas for the use of the laboratory experiment in social psychology, because it would make the method and the research object fully compatible.

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References Abrams, D. and Wilson, G. (1979) Effects of alcohol on social anxiety in women: cognitive versus physiological processes. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 88, 161-173. Abrams, D.B. and Wilson, G.T. (1983) Alcohol, sexual arousal, and selfcontrol. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45, 188-198. Armistead, N. (ed.) (1974) Reconstructing social psychology. Suffolk: Penguin Education. Bennett, R.M., Buss, A.H. and Carpenter, J.A. (1969) Alcohol and human physical aggression. Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 30, 870-876. Berglas, S. and Jones, E.E. (1978) Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 405-417. Boyatzis, R.E. (1974) The effect of alcohol consumption on the aggressive behavior of men. Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 35, 959-972. Briddell, D.W., Rimm, D.C., Caddy, G.R., Krawitz, G., Sholis, D. and Wunderlin, R.J. (1978) Effects of alcohol and cognitive set on sexual arousal to deviant stimuli. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87, 4 18-430. Briddell, D.W. and Wilson, G.T. (1976) Effects of alcohol and expectancy set on male sexual arousal. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 85, 225-234. Brown, R.A. and Cutter, H.S.G. (1977) Alcohol, customary drinking behavior, and pain. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 86, 179-188. Cappell, H. and Herman, C.P. (1972) Alcohol and tension reduction. Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 33, 33-64. Cohen, J. (1960) Chance, skill and luck. The psychology of guessing and gambling. Baltimore: Penguin Press. Conger, J.J. (1951) The effects of alcohol on conflict behavior in the albino rat. Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 12, 1-29. Conger, J.J. (1956) Alcoholism: theory, problem and challenge. 11. Reinforcement theory and the dynamics of alcoholism. Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 17, 296-305. Dengerink, H.A. and Fagan, M.A. (1978) Effect of alcohol on emotional responses to stress. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 39, 525-539. Diethelm, 0. and Barr, R.M. (1962) Psychotherapeutic interviews and

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Keane, T.M. and Lisman, S.A. (1980) Alcohol and social anxiety in males: behavioral, cognitive, and physiological effects. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 89, 213-223. Korytnyk, N.X. and Perkins, D.V. (1983) Effects of alcohol versus expectancy for alcohol on the incidence of graffiti following an experimental task. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 92, 382-385. Lang, A.R., Goeckner, D.J., Adesso, V.J. and Marlatt, G.A. (1975) Effects of alcohol on aggression in male social drinkers. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 84, 508-518. Lang, A.R., Searles, J., Lauerman, R. and Adesso, V. (1980) Expectancy, alcohol, and sexual guilt as determinants of interest in and reaction to sexual stimuli. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 89, 644-653. Lansky, D. and Wilson, G.T. (1981) Alcohol, expectations, and sexual arousal in males: an information processing analysis. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 90, 35-45. Levenson, R.W., Sher, K.J., Grossman, L.M., Newman, J. and Newlin, D.B. (1980) Alcohol and stress response dampening: pharmacological effects, expectancy, and tension reduction. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 89, 528-538. Levine, J.M., Kramer, G.G. and Levine, E.N. (1975) Effects of alcohol on human perlormance: an integration of research findings based on an abilities classification. Journal of Applied Psychology, 60, 285-293. Lindman, R. (1983a) Alcohol and social cognition: experimental studies in social drinkers. Paper presented at the Finnish-Soviet symposium on cognitive processes. Turku. Lindman, R. (1983b) Alcohol and the reduction of human fear. In: Phorecky, L.A. and Brick, J. (ed.) Stress and alcohol use. Elsevier Science Publishing Co. Marlatt, G.A. (1976) Alcohol, stress, and cognitive control. In Sarason, I.G. and Spielberger, C.D. (ed.) Stress and anxiety. Vol. 3. New York: Hemisphere Publishing. Marlatt, G.A., Demming, B. and Reid, J.B. (1973) Loss of control drinking in alcoholics: an experimental analogue. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 81, 233-241. Mayfield, D.G. (1968) Psychopharmacology of alcohol. I. Affective change with intoxication, drinking behavior and affective state. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 146, 314-321. McCarty, D., Diamond, W. and Kaye, M. (1982) Alcohol, sexual arousal, and the transfer of excitation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42, 977-988. McCollam, J.B., Burish, T.G., Maisto, S.A. and Sobell, M.B. (1980)

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Alcohol’s effects on physiological arousal and self-reported affect and sensations. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 89, 224-233. McGuire, M.T., Stein, S. and Mendelson, J.H. (1966) Comparative psychosocial studies of alcoholic and non-alcoholic subjects undergoing experimentally induced ethanol intoxication. Psychosomatic Medicine, 28, 13-26. McNamee, H.B., Mello, N.K. and Mendelson, J.H. (1968) Experimental analysis of drinking patterns of alcoholics: concurrent psychiatric observations. American Journal of Psychiatry, 124, 1063-1069. Miller, P.M., Hersen, M., Eisler, R.M. and Hilsman, G. (1974) Effects of social stress on operant drinking of alcoholics and social drinkers. Behavior Research and Therapy, 12, 67-72. Nederhof, A.J. and Zwier, A.G. (1983) The ‘crisis’ in social psychology; an empirical approach. European Journal of Social Psychology, 13, 255-280. Pihl, R.O., Seichner, A., Niaura, R., Nagy, K. and Zacchia, C. (1981) Attribution and alcohol-mediated aggression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 90, 468-475. Pliner, P. and Cappell, H. (1974) Modification of affective consequences of alcohol: a comparison of social and solitary drinking. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 83, 418-425. Polivy, J. and Herman, C.P. (1976) Effects of alcohol on eating behavior: influence of mood and perceived intoxication. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 85, 601-606. Robbins, S.J. and Brotherton, P.L. (1980) Mood change with alcohol intoxication. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 19,149-155. Rohrberg, R.G. and Sousa-Poza, J. (1976) Alcohol, field dependence, and dyadic self-disclosure. Psychological Reports, 39, 1151-1161. Russell, J. and Bond, C. (1980) Individual differences in beliefs concerning emotions conductive to alcohol use. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 47, 753-759. Schachter, S. (1964) The interaction of cognitive and physiological determinants of emotional state. In: Berkowitz, L. (ed.) Advances in experimental social psychology. Vol. 1. Academic Press. New York. Schachter, S. and Singer, J.E. (1962) Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state. Psychological Review, 69, 379-399. Smith, R.C., Parker, E.S. and Noble, E.P. (1975) Alcohol and effect in dyadic social interaction. Psychosomatic Medicine, 37, 25-40. Steele, C.M., Southwick, L.L. and Critchlow, B. (1981) Dissonance and

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alcohol: drinking your troubles away. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41, 831-846. Steffen, J.J., Nathan, P.E. and Taylor, H.A. (1974) Tension-reducing effects of alcohol: further evidence and some methodological considerations. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 83, 542-547. Tamerin, J.S. and Mendelson, J.H. (1969) The psychodynamics of chronic inebriation: observations of alcoholics during the process of drinking in an experimental group setting. American Journal of Psychiatry, 125, 886-899. Taylor, S.P., Gammon, C.B. and Capasso, D.R. (1976) Aggression as a function of the interaction of alcohol and threat. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, 938-941. Teger, A.I., Katkin, E.S. and Pruitt, D.G. (1969) Effects of alcoholic beverages and their congener content on level and style of risk taking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 11, 170-176. Tucker, J.A., Vuchinich, R.E. and Sobell, M.B. (1981) Alcohol consumption as a self-handicappingstrategy. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 90, 220-230. Valins, S. (1966) Cognitive effects of false heart-rate feedback. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4, 400-408. Vuchinich, R.E. and Tucker, J.A. (1980) A critique of cognitive labeling explanations of the emotional and behavioral effects of alcohol. Addictive Behaviors, 5, 179-188. Vuchinich, R.E., Tucker, J.A. and Sobell, M.B. (1979) Alcohol, expectancy, cognitive labeling, and mirth. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 88, 641-651. Williams, A.F. (1966) Social drinking, anxiety, and depression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3, 689-693. Wilson, G.T., Abrams, D.B. and Lipscomb, T.R. (1980) Effects of intoxication levels and drinking patterns on social anxiety in men. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 41, 250-264. Wilson, G.T. and Lawson, D.M. (1976) Expectancies, alcohol, and sexual arousal in male social drinkers. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 85, 587-594. Wilson, G.T. and Lawson, D.M. (1978) Expectations, alcohol, and sexual arousal in women. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87, 358-367. Wilson, G.T., Lawson, D.M. and Abrams, D.B. (1978) Effects of alcohol on sexual arousal in male alcoholics. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87, 609-616.

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Chapter 3 The Psychological Foundations of Social Psychology Klaus Weckroth A. In Search of the Object of Psychology Durkheim (1952,381 wrote in Suicide that sociology is possible only insofar as it has an object all its own; it must “take cognizance of a reality which is not in the domain of other sciences”. In most disciplines this is usually taken for granted: anthropology concerns itself with cultural development, pedagogics with education, library science with the use of libraries. Psychology, however, is routinely defined as the study of the whole man, as a science of “every aspect of human behavior from conception to death” (Psychology Today 1983, 17). In Shotter’s (1975, 45) words, “the stock answer to the question of how it is distinguished from other closely related disciplines is now and has always been that psychology concerns itself with the whole man, the integrated individual”. This inflated concept no doubt has its roots in the history of human thought. Psychology has emerged as the master discipline amongst the human and social sciences by virtue of its preoccupation with what are often regarded as the main pillars of human life and society: the psyche and the individual. Early philosophers set out to explain the mystery of life using the concept of ‘soul’, the force that was believed to make living things alive. The connection of the ideas of soul and of life meant that it was possible to envisage ‘the science of the soul’ as ‘the science of life’, and the psychologist as the ‘scientist of human life’. There is also a close link between psychology and the individual; as Doise (1978, 3) writes, the psychological approach consists in an attempt to explain things “in individual terms”. Among all the more or less mysterious

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phenomena of human life, the individual seems to stand out as something completely unique: nothing is quite as real as the individual; you can actually see and touch him. This is basically why even the most radical sociological concepts see the individual as the “true bearer” of social events (Simmel 1959, 311). And even if you argue that society “does not consist of individuals”, you have to admit at least that it “expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand’ ’ (Marx 1973, 265). Since all human activity seems to boil down to actions of concrete individuals, there is “reasonable doubt” about the conclusiveness of sociological explanation. So perhaps, just perhaps, the knowledge that psychology has made available about the individual covers every aspect of human life. The status of psychology as the master science seems to be fairly well established. In this chapter it is our intention to find out exactly how well established it is: can psychology really concern itself with the whole man? If not, how should the object proper of psychology be designated? And how will our understanding of social psychology be affected if we succeed in outlining this new object?

1. Why the Whole Man Won’t Do Psychology differs from most scientific disciplines in that it takes the study of the whole man as its immediate starting-point. However, it is by no means the only discipline that entertains or has entertained this ambitious project. In a critique of the premises of traditional sociology, Georg Simmel notes that the new science of society, following the discovery that “all individual phenomena are determined by innumerable influences stemming from their human environments”, appeared amid the initial enthusiasm as “the all-inclusive discipline, covering ethics, history of civilization, aesthetics, demography, political science and ethnology” (Simmel 1959, 311). The school of sociobiology is in turn convinced that biological evidence is applicable to all levels of human activity. And modern social psychology is by some writers defined as being concerned with “virtually every aspect of human interaction” (Baron 1974, lo). The very fact that scientists representing so many different disciplines can all picture themselves studying the whole man raises the question of

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whether there is any point in building the identity of an individual discipline upon such a project. As the growth of scientific knowledge boosts the selfconfidence of new disciplines, the dream may come true and we will have to try to distinguish psychology as the discipline concerned with the whole man from all the other disciplines concerned with the whole man. But how effectively can new knowledge be produced on human life if there is no division of labour between the different disciplines, if everyone investigates everything?

Notions of chance The reason why the human sciences are on the brink of full chaos lies largely in the failure to allow for chance in the explanation of human life. This applies to psychology in particular. Freud, for example, believed that it is possible to find a rational explanation for dreams, slips of the tongue or pen, and lapses of memory in contradictions of the unconscious. If I lose my keys, I have probably done it ‘by mistake on purpose’; the explanation lies not in chance, but in an unconscious will to stay away from home: “Let us now call in someone who knows nothing of psychoanalysis, and ask him how he explains such occurrences. His first reply will certainly be: ‘Oh! that’s not worth explaining: they’re just small chance events.’ What does the fellow mean by this? Is he maintaining that there are occurrences, however small, which drop out of the universal concatenation of events occurrences which might just as well not happen as happen? If anyone makes a breach of this kind in the determinism of natural events at a single point, it means that he has thrown overboard the whole Weltanschauung of science. Even the Weltanschauung of religion, we may remind him, behaves much more consistently, since it gives an explicit assurance that no sparrow falls from the roof without God’s special will. I think our friend will hesitate to draw the logical conclusion from his first reply; he will change his mind and say that after all when he comes to study these things he can find explanations of them. What is in question are small failures of functioning, imperfections in mental activity, whose determinants can be assigned.” (Freud 1976, 53) Rehaviourists are equally convinced of the irrelevance of chance. Skinner (1971, 147) says that the time will come when psychologists know everything about the functioning of the human individual and are able to

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manipulate his development at will: ‘’Beyond interpretation lies practical action. Contingencies are accessible, and as we come to understand the relations between behaviour and the environment, we discover new ways of changing behaviour. The outlines of a technology are already clear. An assignment is stated as behaviour to be produced or modified, and relevant contingencies are then arranged. A programmed sequence of contingencies ma.y be needed. ’ ’ The view that an answer must exist to every complex phenomenon of human life is also the baseline assumption in concrete research. In alcohol studies, for instance, there is a firm belief that some day we will have “an answer to every question” (Siegler et al. 1968). And since “nothing happens by chance” (Paolino and McCrady 1977, 32), it will eventually be possible to explain why out of two individuals with similar backgrounds, one became an alcoholic or a criminal and the other not; a conviction that, interestingly, further strengthens the position of psychology as the master discipline. As it becomes clear that all unemployed people do not become alcoholics and that all adolescents from broken families do not become criminals - that the explanation cannot be found in social factors - the search moves on to the domain of psychology, to differences between individuals. The tendency to exclude chance events from scientific explanation is not shared by all disciplines. The astronomist, for example, does not ask why a particular meteorite enters the earth’s atmosphere, for this event is governed by pure chance. Evolution theory is in turn partly based on the idea of chance genetic mutations. And Harris (1978,291) has argued along similar lines in his study of cultural evolution: “The determinism that has governed cultural evolution has never been the equivalent of the determinism that governs a closed physical system. Rather, it resembles the causal sequences that account for the evolution of plant and animal species. Retrospectively, guided by Darwin’s principle of natural selection, scientists can readily reconstruct the causal chain of ada.ptations that led from fish to reptiles to birds. But what biologist looking at a primitive shark could have foreseen a pigeon? What biologist looking at a tree shrew could have predicted Homo sapiens? The intensification of the industrial mode of production and the technological victory over Malthusian pressures undoubtedly portend an evolution of new cultural forms. I do not know for certain what these ill be, nor does anyone else.”

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Methodological implications of chance How, then, could we allow for chance in the human sciences and in psychology? Jn nature all phenomena are interrelated in one way or another. However at the same time only part of real-life events observe biological laws, part of them observe physical laws or chemical laws, etc. The point is that as far as individual sciences are concerned, physical and chemical processes, for example, are from biology’s point of view governed by chance. Therefore they lie beyond the immediate concern of the biologist. The same applies to the relationship between historical events and physical processes. The course of history may be altered by the physical process in which water freezes: A political figure misses a meeting because the radiator of his car bursts. The meeting reaches a decision it would not have made had the missing person attended. The reasons for the absence of one committee member must of course be researched by the historian who wants to find out why this decision was made, but as soon as he learns about the radiator, he must stop. The only way history and the historian can prevent themselves from falling to pieces is to disregard the question, “Why did the radiator crack?” (quoted in von Wright 1967) So how does this fit in with the key role of psychology as the master science? Was not psychology, the science of the psyche and the individual, supposed to expand and make an impact on all other disciplines concerned with the nature of man? Georg Simmel (1959) makes an important distinction when explaining why sociology cannot be the study of the whole man. It is true, he says, that every discipline concerned with man should proceed from the fact that human life is always life in society. However, a sociology advocating this point must be regarded as a new method spreading to other human sciences (and comparable in this respect to induction or statistical methods, for example). Sociology is not an independent science until it has found a specifically sociological perspective on the study of man. To define sociology as the all-inclusive discipline is simply to “dump all historical, psychological and normative sciences into one great pot labeled ‘sociology”’; all we get is “a new name” (Simmel 1959, 311). This applies to psychology as well. Although the psyche (which is the root in the English ‘psychology’, the science of the psyche) has by now been rejected as the universal explanation of all life events, it is still the key

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to understanding central aspects of human life. As we saw in chapter 2, alcohol researchers have found it difficult to make headway without reference to cognitive factors. If human activity is in essence conscious, then it is only logical that all the scientific disciplines concerned with the various forms of this activity avail themselves of the knowledge that psychology has produced about human consciousness. As a method, as a concept of the conscious nature of man, psychology can and should spread out and influence other human sciences. As a concrete independent discipline, it needs a perspective of its own on the basis of which a distinction can be made between psychological and non-psychological phenomena. Without this distinction and without ‘chance’, psychology is just as helpless as Eco’s (1983, 30) hero: “We are already hard put to establish a relationship between such an obvious effect as a charred tree and the lightning bolt that set fire to it, so to trace sometimes endless chains of causes and effects seems to me as foolish as trying to build a tower that will touch the sky”. What, then, would be the aspects of human life at the centre of such a psychological perspective? If sociology investigates man from the point of view of society (or more specifically, from the point of view of its economic structures, social facts, forms of collectivity), and biology studies man from the point of view of evolutionary development, then from what particular angle should psychology approach man?

2. Interaction of Man and Environment? Darwin’s theory of evolution had a major impact not only on biology and the natural sciences, but also on the human sciences. If, as Darwin showed, organisms develop in interaction with their environment, surely this should apply to human individuals too? And if so, surely psychologists should take G.H. Mead’s advice and make “the relation between organism and environment the basic model for psychological research” (quoted in Joas 1985); proceed from interaction between the individual and his environment. A definition that labels psychology as the scientific study of man’s interaction with the environment - or of ‘behaviour’ - is however not accurate enough because it fails to make the crucial distinction between

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psychological and non-psychological life events. The problem is that everything in life is interaction and people interact with their environment at several different levels. First, there is physical interaction. The human individual is a physical object in the same way as any other real object. He is subject to the laws of gravity, he breaks on impact with a harder object, and so on. Second, the human individual is in continuous chemical interaction with the environment. Human life is not possible without metabolism: oxygen, food and light from the environment are chemically transformed within the organism and then fed back into the environment. Third, human interaction with the environment is based on various biological reflexes. For example, a mosquito bite is automatically responded to by a slap of the hand. Fourth, there is social interaction, which is also part of the everyday life of all humans: we cooperate with each other, influence each other’s opinions, communicate with each other. Fifth and finally, every human individual interacts with the surrounding culture in that he speaks a certain language, observes certain rules and customs, adopts certain roles; and plays his own part in shaping all of these. With these different levels of interaction, the question we have to ask is: At what level of interaction shouldpsychology operate? If we attempt to tackle all the levels we will be making the same mistake as the psychologist who proposes to study the whole man. On the other hand if we focus on one level of interaction, then our psychology will not have an object of its own. It will transform into physiology, sociology, cultural anthropology - or into biology, which in fact is what has very nearly happened. The biological discovery in the nineteenth century that diseases were caused not by evil spirits but by germs and viruses led many psychologists to believe that their attempts to solve the mystery of life could be furthered by diligent application of the same method and the same concept of the nature of man’s interaction with the environment. Consider, for instance, the question “Why do people behave aggressively?” Psychology had made little progress with the concept of soul and with statements of the kind that aggression is due in large part to people’s inherent malice or their twisted desires. Therefore the search for a more satisfactory answer turned to the ‘viruses’ of the environment: Does heat cause aggression? Does alcohol induce aggressive behaviour? What effect does TV violence have on human aggression? What are the combined effects of alcohol and TV violence? If human activity can be explained along these lines, then psychology is in fact

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not an independent discipline but, as Kurt Lewin (1935,l) wrote, “a part of biology’’. Whether or not psychology can be regarded as an independent discipline depends on the answer to the question of whether there exists some form of interaction that differs from chemical, biological, etc. interaction and that therefore is not the specific concern of any other science. In other words: if chemical interaction consists in metabolism, biological interaction in adaptation through reflexive action, social interaction in communication and the adoption of roles, what does psychologicalinteraction between man and environment consist in? If man is conceptualized as an organism in biology, as an object in physics, as an audience in communication theory, and as a consumer in economics, how does psychology conceptualize man?

B. Subject and Action One important aspect of man’s interaction with the environment is encapsulated in the concept of action. Humans not only react to environmental stimuli but they also force the stimuli to react to themselves; that is, people do not adapt themselves to the environment but adapt the environment to themselves. When an animal is driven further north, adaptation to the colder climate takes place through structural changes, such as the development of an extra layer of fat or feathers. When humans move north, they make clothes for themselves, build a house, and heat it to keep themselves warm. The human individual is therefore not only an object, an organism, a bearer of different roles, a consumer; he is also a subject who produces life events and shapes the environment. The key role that subjectivity plays in human life is perhaps most clearly seen in the process of its emergence. A newborn child is totally at the mercy of his environment. He will cease to exist as a biological organism unless there is an adult to cater for all his needs; he cannot eat unless food is put straight into his mouth. From the biological womb, the child is thrown into what might be called a psychological womb. He is inside adult activity. It is here, in the psychological womb, that the development of subjectivity begins. First, the child learns to master sounds, lights, objects in his environment - a stage whose importance can hardly be d&d by anyone who has seen the ex-

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pression on the face of a child who has just learned how to switch on the lights. At stage two, having gained command of some of the more basic events, the child breaks loose from the psychological womb. The subject is born when “John” gives way to “me” and “I”; this is the stage at which the child wants to do everything by himself, to brush his teeth, to dress himself, to buy his own ticket on the bus. The adult who tries to help (or who forgets he should not interfere) will elicit a response in the child that in the psychological literature is considered to reflect his “negativism”. The main distinctive feature of action is its orientation to a @ec$c object; we cannot think unless we are thinking of something, nor can we perceive unless there is something to perceive. In classical psychology this aspect of human action was discussed by Wundt, Titchener, Helmholtz, and James, who all dealt extensively with the concept of attention. As James (1890, 960) observed: “I can only do one thing at a time. A God who is supposed to drive the whole universe abreast may also be supposed, without detriment to his activity, to see all parts of it at once and without emphasis. But were our human attention so to disperse itself we should simply stare vacantly at things at large and forfeit our opportunity of doing any particular act. Mr. Warner, in his Adirondack story, shot a bear by aiming, not at his eye or heart, but ‘at him generally’. But we cannot aim ‘generally’ at the universe; or if we do, we miss our game. Our scope is narrow, and we must attack things piecemeal, ignoring the solid fulness in which the elements of Nature exist, and stringing one after another of them together in a serial way, to suit our little interests as they change from hour to hour.’’ It is easy to put this theory to the test by looking at the following reversible figures (Fig. 3.1.). After a while all three drawings show a change of figure with regard to perspective. For example, we view the reversible staircase (A) alternately from above or from below and thus see its base at either the bottom or top of the figure; but it impossible to see both aspects simultaneously.

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Figure 3.1. Three reversible figures

While we are working on the assumption that human activity is always directed towards a specific object, it must be accepted that progress in action requires a succession of new objects. The advance of action is a movement very much like the human stride on two feet: a new cycle cannot begin until the previous one is completed and one of the feet is touching the ground. The objects of action are stringed together in a chain complex in the same way as the changing subjects in a long conversation (cf. p. 41). The development and advance of action is thus a process of continuous internal expansion, a process in which objects and thus actions are replaced by others. This, as we shall see below, has important methodological consequences for the study of action, as well as for psychology as a whole.

1. The Study of Action In explaining why psychology cannot be a branch of biology, Herbert Spencer (1870, 133) says that the biologist investigating biological phenomena does not have to pay continuous attention to the environment because “the great mass of purely biological phenomena may be displayed €or some time by an organism detached from its medium, as by fish out of water”. In the study of psychological events, Spencer says, the situation is different: “We cannot explain a single act of a fish as it moves about in the water, without taking into account its relations to neighbouring ob-

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jects”. Individual acts, therefore, must be explained in relation to individual events in the environment. The idea that every form of behaviour must be connected - whether directly or through an ‘organism variable’ - to some event in the environment in its own particular, non-random way has been the guiding light of most of twentieth century research within the human sciences and psychology. The search for relevant connections has been carried on by first differentiating between ‘individualacts’ constituting everyday activity - remembering, thinking, using alcohol, TV viewing, reading - and then investigating their relation to ‘neighbouring objects’. How does alcohol affect human thought? How does TV violence affect human aggression? How does the actual or imagined presence of other people affect the individual? How does mass communication affect people’s thought? It is like putting together the pieces of a jigsaw-puzzle: the aim is to find out which environmental event goes together with this or that individual act. In the search for the causes of the use of alcohol, for example, it is assumed that drinking is a “discrete system of behavior” (Sarbin and Nucci 1973); therefore there is no need to take into account the findings of research into TV viewing or jogging or any other “system of behaviour”. If psychological factors such as anxiety and stress fail to explain the use of alcohol, the search moves on to biological (age, sex, serotonin), physical (noise, temperature, the tempo of music), cultural (way of life, meanings), social (mass communication, unemployment, relations of production) factors; and so forth towards a more satisfactory explanation. However, even this is not good enough if the explanation happens to apply to some other response as well. For instance, tests designed to idenhfy potential alcoholics are considered problematic as long as they measure only the individual’s general inclination to addiction and fail to “differentiate (future) alcoholics from (future) drug addicts’’ (Sher and Levenson 1982). The pieces of the jigsaw-puzzle have not however snapped into place. Social psychologists have been trying to solve the problem of social influence for almost a century: Does the real or imagined presence of another person or other people facilitate or impair the individual’s performance? No one has come up with a definitive answer. Chapter 2 already discussed some of the problems of alcohol research. In studies of aggression, it is reported that erotic stimuli either increase or decrease aggressive behaviour (e.g. Baron 1974); that the consumption

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of alcohol sometimes makes people more aggressive, sometimes it doesn’t (e.g. Taylor et al. 1976); that in some cases the presence of a weapon increases aggression and in others it lessens aggression (e.g. Buss et al. 1972). The effect of emotional state, imagination, cognitive processes, etc. as intervening variables has also been tested, but with meagre results (see e.g. Tedeschi 1979). The results of memory tests are equally confusing. Sometimes anxiety seems to facilitate memory performance, sometimes it impairs it (e.g. Hockey 1978); visually presented materials are sometimes easier to remember than verbally presented materials, sometimes the opposite is true (e.g. Gadzella and Whitehead 1975); and sometimes subjects tend to remember the last words on a list, sometimes the first words (e.g. Petrusic and Jamieson 1978). Research using various social background variables as a basis for predicting an individual’s use of narcotic drugs has also run into a blind alley. In one experiment the most important factor is the use of alcohol among friends, in another the time at which the individual left home and became independent, in yet another a “low sense of responsibility” or some other personality trait (see e.g. McCord 1972; Mendelson and Mello 1979). Added confusion is caused by the finding that the same factors seem to explain other forms of deviant social behaviour as well: “One of the puzzling features in the etiology of deviant behavior is the frequency with which behaviors that are interpreted in different ways appear to be produced by similar background conditions” (McCord 1981). So far the efforts to discover lawful connections between individual acts and environmental events have failed: whatever aspect of human behaviour they are concerned with, experimenters more often than not start their reports by pointing to some “puzzling discrepancies” in earlier studies. This does not necessarily mean that their work has been wasted: much of the testing they have done has produced valuable information for such practical purposes as social planning. However, for purposes of detecting necessary, lawful connections, there is reason to doubt that the search has been based on false premises. The first thing that must be accepted is that human action is not composed of separate pieces, of discrete systems of behaviour, but it is a complex totality that is in a process of continuous transformation and that has its own development. This means that action must enjoy sufficient irt-

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dependence from external events. A bricklayer, for instance, would hardly get very far if he stopped to look at every bird that flew by. Stimuli can be ignored only if actions are tied more closely to one another than they are to events in the environment. In this case an individual stimulus does not exert its influence on an individual act but on a series or sequence of actions, and therefore the meaning of this stimulus changes according to the relations between the acts. Alcohol researchers have often wondered how it is possible that the same factors seem to lie behind both alcoholism and the exact opposite, giving up drinking (strict family control, demanding job, etc.). Can the causes of alcoholism really be the same as those of the decision to give up drinking? Yes they can. In fact to argue the opposite - that certain factors always and under all conditions give rise to alcohol problems while others invariably prevent alcohol problems - is the same as to argue that “because plowing was useful and good for the field before the sowing, it is equally so now, when the crop has come up” (Leo Tolstoi). If it is accepted that any event in the environment may be connected to any action, i.e. that S- R relationships are always governed partly by chance, then the conclusion we must draw is that people can use alcohol for the same ‘reasons’ that they can commit crimes and watch television: for whatever reasons they may have. The endeavour of psychologists to produce individual acts in response to various combinations of stimuli has a lot in common with the attempts by alchemists in the Middle Ages to make gold out of lead by exposing it to different influences in moonlight: the problem is that you can never tell whether the experiments should be done during daylight or in the dark of night. We do not know whether the philosopher’s stone will be found in the tempo of country music (Bach and Schaefer 19791, in the different effects of vodka and whisky (Taylor and Gammon 1975), or in the colour of the experimenter’s eyes. Since gold can only be made of gold and action only of action, there is hardly much point in continuing the search for lawful connections between stimuli and responses. There are of course some reasons that underlie the use of alcohol more often than others: usually people drink to alleviate stress or to have fun. And data about these ‘usual’ reasons are “doubtless of the greatest signficance to the historian or to the practical school man” (Lewin 1935, 20). However, if we want to discover necessary, lawful connections rather

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than probabilities, we should concentrate on the relations of actions with each other. This means the formula we should be working with in psychology is not stimulus- response (S- R) or stimulus- organism variable response (S 0 R), but very simply response response (R- R’) . But notice: even here ~ 7 evrrill not always find lawful connections; we will not find a ‘cause’ behind every response.

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2. Action and the Future

The conventional notion of cause and effect in which both are given one ‘objective’ meaning is ill-suited to the description of human activity. This is because environmental events have not only a biological, cultural, and social meaning, but also a psychological meaning, which is determined by the relation of this or that event to the object of action at each moment in time. An important point with regard to the explanation of human activity is that when objects of action are replaced by new ones, not only the meaning of events taking place here and now is changed, but also the psychological meaning of earlier actions and earlier life events. The past, in a sense, is visible through the future. Let us assume that a person contracts an incurable disease which makes rapid progress, but without visible symptoms. The psychological effects of this biological event depend to a great extent on whether or not the person is aware he is going to die. If not, it is reasonable to assume that there will be no changes in his action - the ‘cause’ has no ‘effects’. But if the person learns he has no hope of recovery, he will hardly be able to continue his life as if nothing had happened. It is likely there will be changes. But what kind of changes? Suppose this person returns home from the hospital and finds a bottle of whisky on his kitchen table. He has never drunk in his life but he has heard that alcohol ‘helps to forget’; so he empties the whole bottle, and becomes a drunk for the rest of his life. Can we say that this illness is the cause of his alcoholism?What would have happened if there had been a Bible on the table? Wouldn’t the same ‘cause’ have brought about a very different kind of ‘effect’? And what if there had been a pistol on the table and the person had shot himself. Would the illness have been the cause of suicide?

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It does not seem very accurate to argue that, as in this case, the illness was the cause of alcoholism, because it might just as well have been the cause of suicide or discovering Christ or whatever. It was not until ufer the person began to drink that the illness became the cause; ufer this stimulus had acquired a psychological meaning in relation to the use of alcohol. The effect, in a sense, comes before the cause; the effect makes its own causes. This, importantly, means that it is impossible to find deterministic mediations that exhaustively explain human action. In fiction this is nothing new. The novelist who has decided what is going to happen to his hero will drop clues here and there and lead his reader into believing that there is only one possible outcome; and then in the end he will surprise the reader by making the hero do what was least expected. In science, however, all unpredictable developments and surprises go down in the book as defeats. This is why the scientist who learns that X did not become a successful sportsman but an alcoholic must turn back and make the alcoholism look like the inevitable and logical result of X’s earlier life events. The first sign came in 1975 when X took his first hangover tonic, then in 1977 came his divorce, in 1980 he lost his job, he started suffering from loss of memory, and began to drink in secret. The scientist is like the weatherman who on a stormy day looks back at the previous day’s charts and finds several clues that bad weather is on the way - yet only yesterday, looking at the same charts, he had forecasted a SUMY day. The novelist is much more modest and humble. Paustovski in his book The Golden Rose tells a story of Leo Tolstoi, which begins with a visitor to Tolstoi’s home asking why the author was so cruel as to make Anna Karenina throw herself under a moving train: “What you say reminds me of a story told about Pushkin. The poet once said to a friend of his: ‘Just think what a trick Tatyana has played on me. She’s gone and got married. Never expected it of her.’ I can say the same about Anna Karenina. My characters sometimes do things I don’t in the least want them to do. In fact they do the things that are done in life, and not what I intend them to do.” Georges Simenon once made a similar comment. He said that he starts writing his books from a certain place, certain people, and above all from a certain problem, an idea related to some sphere of human life. But ..) when I start writing a novel I know nothing about coming events. All I know are the names of the characters, their ages and family relations. I have ab‘ I ( .

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solutely no idea of what is going to happen later.” If novelists are unable to say in advance how characters of their own creation are going to change and develop, how can scientists predict the real development of real people? Or to be more precise: it is of course possible to Predict the development of action, but to know how action is going to develop is a completely different thing. Because all R- R’ relationships are not necessary, we must dig deeper. Science must be based on knowledge, not on guesswork.

3. Psychic and Practical Activity At one time biologists tried to solve the mystery of life by investigating the heart, brain, lungs, all the parts of the human body that were known to sustain life - until it was discovered that the true basic unit of life is much smaller than these complex entities, i.e. the cell and its microscopic mechanisms of transformation. Psychologists have long been working on the assumption that they can solve the mystery of action by research into drinking and jogging, into the reasons why people help or attack others, and other ‘basic complexes’ of action. Empirical research into these complexes has continued to gather momentum, in spite of the conceptual difficulties. The concept of aggression, for instance, basically refers to deliberate offensive action: to rats fighting, to the horse-play of small boys, a husband assaulting his wife, or to war between two nations. While there is deliberate offensive action in all of these, this one common denominator is more important than all the differences only insofar as biological (rats fighting), psychological (the horse-play of small boys), social psychological (domestic violence), and sociological (war) phenomena ultimately observe the same laws. If we adopt this kind of concept as a starting-point for psychological analysis, then we must also be prepared to accept the whole man as our object. But as this is precisely what we do not want to do, we must draw the analogy from biology and start looking for the psychological ‘cell’and its microscopic mechanisms of transformation; concern ourselves with the relationships of acts taking place within the human subject’s system of action. Two levels can be distinguished in this system: psychic and practical activity. We talk of psychic activity when some task arising from everyday

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praxis is carried out primarily using our ‘mental capacity’, our brain; when we try to remember something, when we perceive something, think about something. The psyche is in itselfactiuity. Its relation to the brain is in principle similar to the relation of the activity of walking to the feet, or writing to the hand. When the memory process is at rest (when we are not trying to remember something), memory does not exist in the brain, no more than walking exists in the knees or ankles when we are not walking. It is also impossible to quantify memory as a process. As Roediger and Tulving (1979) suspected, the “memory-span” and other similar questions that have dominated memory research are the “wrong-ones to ask”. Practical activity - walking, reading books, watching TV, etc. - and psychic activity are distinguished by their differential function in the development of the human subject. Subjective development is not possible without a practical connection to reality (as Jean Piaget and others have shown), but it is of secondary importance what form this connection assumes at different times. There does not exist any form of practical activity that must necessarily be included in the individual’s action history. The human individual becomes a subject in command of his own life even if he cannot speak, walk, read books. Because these activities are not necessary parts of subjective action, they cannot be explained in psychological terms. As we shall see below, it would be wrong to say that these forms of activity do not have causes; the causes are just not psychological. In this light it is understandable that all attempts to find a psychological explanation of these forms of practical activity have systematically failed - and will fail. With psychic activity the case is different. In order for the human being to be a subject, he must be able to solve certain psychic tasks. If, for example, he is unable to perceive any events in the environment, he will not be able to act in this environment. All this means that an in-depth analysis of the activity of the subject must be based on the study of the psychic tasks arising from the individual’s action history as well as on the study of the forms of psychic activity necessary for performing these tasks. The following thought experiment is to show that this kind of in-depth analysis is both possible and promising.

Memory, perception, thought Independent production and control of one’s life events is possible only

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when three basic conditions are met: First, the subject must be able to look back to the past, to call to mind past events, to remember. Second, psychic activity requires an orientation to the present, an ability to perceive the surrounding world. And third, to be able to set out goals for future action, the subject must be able to think. While subjective activity in general consists in the control of life events, in these three functions control of certain psychic processes is gained using the tools of language. In the case of children, memory is amazing. Sometimes the child remembers things that adults have forgotten long ago (- “This is the uncle who brought me chocolate”), sometimes it seems as if he cannot remember anything (- “How much is two and two? - I don’t know. It’s four. Now tell me, how much is two and two? - I can’t remember.”). What we have to realize here is that the complex commonly known as memory consists of two qualitatively different parts: controlled and uncontrolled memory processes. Various stimuli remind the child of something, bring to mind impressions, but the child is not (yet) capable of controlling the process. He cannot remember. Adults have both forms of memory. On the one hand they remember things through a controlled effort, on the other hand they are reminded of different things by external stimuli; but not at the same time. The adult can and must control the flow of recollections, because if he had an elephantine memory, he would not remember his own name. Luria (1968) tells a story of a mnemonist who earned his living by performing feats of memory. From a list of 500 or even a thousand words, he never failed to answer the question, “What was the 479th word?” The necessary reverse side of the coin was that the mnemonist had great difficulty in reading: every word he read reminded him of so many things that once he got to the end of a sentence, he could not remember how it had started. Like a child, he belonged “less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice” (James 1890,394). If the aim is to remember, we cannot depend on the reminders provided by the environment. Perception, then, goes together with sensing. Here, a distinction can be made between hearing and listening, seeing and watching. In the latter, sensory images are actively produced by the subject, in the former they are produced by the environment. Finally, the process of thinking consists in the production of mental images, whereas imagination refers to the coming to mind of images whose

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production has to a great extent been influenced by the environment. Thinking, again, is something very special in the child. The child never seems to be satisfied with how things are in reality, but is always inventing ghosts and fairies and new playmates. Nagibin, among many others, has wondered what it is that makes children so imaginative: ‘ ‘Whence this need to create imaginary creatures? Why is the child’s world full of these ‘greenheaded red-tailed’ birds? You would think the world is such a new place to the child, so full of real secrets, that he would not need to invent more of them.” It is widely believed that the child’s innate creativeness is gradually suppressed with increasing age, as children make things up to a lesser and lesser extent. The older the child becomes, the less he invents new things and the more he imitates, reasons, copies, repeats ... This is no doubt true. However, the reason is not the degeneration or disappearance of the child’s creative abilities, but simply the fact that these abilities are now developing in a new direction. Adult thought is in essence systematic production of mental images. Human thought is characterized by logical observation of various rules: grammar rules, concepts, definitions. Offhand, we cannot say what is 476 multiplied by 872; we cannot ‘see’ the answer in the digits. However, we do know that by applying certain rules we can find out. In the thought process humans do create new things, but they do so relying on proven methods. When people think, they do not ‘see’ the future but ‘look’ to the future. It is paradoxical that thought can only develop at the expense of imagination: systematical thought is impossible if imagination is given rein. For instance, if you want to find out the answer to the multiplication above, you have to go by the rules. You will not get very far by using your imagination. When people learn to think, they learn to control the emergence and flow of mental images.

Feeling, needing, wanting The human subject comes into immediate contact not only with the surrounding reality, but also with his own activity. The subject’s relation to his own activity is mediated by the following forms of psychic activity. Feeling is related to the present and thereby to perceiving. The individual feels different things in the course of everyday life: joy, pleasure, grief, anxiety, fear, relief. In a sense, all of these are reflections of how

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well or how badly action is going. The object of action is something that is sensed: it can be soft or hard, smooth or coarse, but it does not necessarily arouse feelings. Therefore feeling is also a form of activity. Feeling comes with action, needing precedes it. A person feels in the course of action, but does things he needs or has needed. Needing is connected to memory. It is on the basis of his past experiences that the subject makes a distinction between necessary and unnecessary actions in different situations. He knows from experience what to do to find a certain book, to make someone angry, to make water boil. Finally, it is not possible to create new events without wanting. A person may need some activity and he may even feel that this activity brings him pleasure, but the continuation of it requires wanting. On the other hand, the individual may want to do things that are not necessary and that do not feel good. Further, it is difficult to want something that has already happened or something that one already has. Putting all these pieces together, we can now present schematically the basic structure of psychic activity:

REMEMBERING

PERCEIVING

THINKING

coming-to-mind

sensing

imagining

NEEDING

FEELING

WANTING

The main concern of psychology lies with these functions and processes and their relationships; this field constitutes the object proper of psychology. In a sense, we are labouring in quite a small vineyard. The question that psychological research should set out to answer concerns the content, quantity and quality of the psychic functions arising from the action history of the individual subject - in the foregoing we have merely outlined the general forms of the basic concepts of psychology. It is important to note that whatever kind of psychological functions and processes we are talking about, they are of course all related to other events in human life, notably to various forms of practical activity. Although these relations fall beyond the concern of psychology proper, the study of these

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relations is one important channel through which psychology, as a method, can branch out and influence other sciences concerned with man. Below we shall attempt to see how psychological interaction and psychic activity are related to other forms of interaction between man and environment; how the subject is related to the biological organism and especially to social roles.

C. Subject and Organism When we noted above that there are two different levels of subjective activity, we bypassed the practical level with only a few comments. Although practical activity is a necessary component of subjectivity, it makes little difference what particular form it assumes at any given time. This is why there is no psychological explanation for practical activities such as jogging, using alcohol, or reading. None of them is necessary for subjective development. This is the key to understanding the relation of psychological interaction to other forms of interaction: if the contents of practical activity are not determined from within subjectivity, then they must be determined from outside it. In this case the most important determinants are biological and social phenomena. Practical activity consists of two levels, bio-practical and socio-practical activity. The contents of bio-practical activity are determined by organic, biological evolution (although the forms of activity do change with history); the form and contents of socio-practical activity derive from socio-historical development (see Figure 3.2). In biological interaction events and phenomena are tied together by lawful connections, As a biological organism, the human individual has 'needs', in the same way as all other biological organisms. Unless the organism has access to food and oxygen, it will cease to exist. However psychology, which is concerned with subjective interaction, can abstract from these biological laws in the same way as the subject can ignore autonomous physiological reactions in acting. When I am running, I take the function of my heart, legs, and arms for granted. When I am thinking of something, I focus my attention on that something and not on my brain. It is not only a question of psychology being able to abstract from

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Figure 3.2. Basic levels of human existence age sex cancer hunger BIOLOGICAL e.g. LEVEL eating drinking sexual intercourse BIO-PRACTICAL e.g. ACTIVITY remembering perceiving thinking PSYCHIC -... ,. ACTIVITY SOCIO-PRACTICAL ACTIVITY e.g. writing reading TV-viewing aggression war class structure strike SOCIOLOGICAL e.g. LEVEL a..

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biological necessities; it must. First, this will save us the trouble of trying to build “a tower that will touch the sky”. And second, there is ‘empirical’ evidence that if we attempt to derive the activity of the subject from biological necessities, we will finish up in a dead end. We are referring here to one of the most influential traditions in the history of psychology in which it is held that human behaviour can be inferred from conditioning and other so-called learning mechanisms. The theory is that, in most cases, a behaviour or response is reinforced by the presentation of a reward; conversely, a behaviour or response is made less likely if it is followed by a punishment. However, in real life this is not always the case. Why? Why do people use alcohol and smoke despite the health hazards? Why do people rob banks and commit crimes even though they know they will be punished if they are caught? If human action grows out of biological needs and adaptation, why do people so often neglect their organic existence? “Why don’t they learn?”, as Hastings (1979, 99) asks: “One of the greatest sources of paradoxes and misunderstandings in the area of social problems is the application of rewards and punishments to change behavior. When these manipulations fail to stop socially destructive activities, we get the sinking feelingthat people are completely irrational, and the cry becomes, ‘Why don’t they learn’?” Is it possible that people knowingly put their health at risk? It seems to be extremely difficult for many scientists to answer this question in the affirmative. Steiner’s (1969) account of the concept of alcoholism, reached

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via transactional anaiysis, is illustrative. He says there is no such thing as alcoholism or alcoholics - there is only the alcoholic’s “role” in a “social game”. In this game, the person in this particular role uses various ‘ ‘scripts” to take advantage of other people: ‘ ‘the payoff of alcoholism is the effect that this behaviour has on others” (Steiner 1969). Doreshtov (1969), one of the many critics, considers this kind of “blood sports” (Osmond 1969) impossible: “According to Claude M. Steiner in his article ‘The alcoholic game’, the people who exhibit the complex of behaviors which identify the syndrome of alcoholism, do not have a disease. They are players in a ‘game’. At least Steiner does not insult them by implying that they are petty gamblers; for in the game these players play, they are risking their lives. It would be superrogatory to cite literature in support of the fact that many of them, many thousands annually, lose their lives playing this grim game.” (Doreshtov 1969) While there clearly has been some difficulty in accepting the ‘game theory’, the ‘illness theory’ has won much wider support. Here, the idea is to find out what is ‘wrong’ with alcoholics and other people who behave ‘irrationally’. The alcoholic is defined as someone who has no control over his drinking; for some reason or another (an extra X chromosome, a character disorder, bad company, oppressive environment), he is unable to act according to the basic psychological principle: his “body wisdom” (Williams 1961, 18) is seriously disturbed. But if theory is at variance with reality, the problem is not in reality but in the theory. As far as psychology is concerned, there is nothing strange in health being occasionally relegated to a secondary status in the individual’s life. Subjective action, as was already pointed out, follows a logic of its own - one that is not the same as biological logic. The main difference is that while organic development is fuelled by food, subjective activity feeds on objects. As a subject, all the human individual needs is “an independent will - no matter what the cost of such independence of volition, nor what it may lead to” (F.M. Dostoyevsky); therefore he has never had enough, therefore the adaptation of the subject is not possible in the same way as the adaptation of the organism. The biological logic of satisfaction does not apply to man as a subject because action thrives on dissatisfaction. A person who has everything he ‘wants’ has no goals to pursue. At this point he ceases to exist as a subject. This profound difference between biological and psychological interaction

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leads to some interesting ideas. It means, for instance, that by investigating autonomous physiological reactions or reflexes we will learn absolutely nothing about the activity of the human subject; a study of the heart of the rat can help us to learn more about the functioning of the human heart, but we cannot draw inferences to human violence from fighting rats. As Robinson (1979,288) points out, this means that “classical conditioning falls beyond the range of psychology, notwithstanding its (purely) historical role in the emergence of modem psychology”. But if psychology cannot be reduced to biology, is the opposite possible? To what extent can biological phenomena be subordinated to the logic of subjective activity? Bio-practical activity forms a kind of buffer between the subject and the organism. The organism delegates nutrition and reproduction to the subject and thus becomes dependent on the subject: the organism breathes and circulates blood independently of the subject, but unless the subject eats and drinks, the organism will die. By eating and drinking certain substances the subject can more or less directly manipulate the function of the organism. What we do not know is to what extent reflex action (such as breathing) can transform into bio-practical activity; for instance, we do not know to what extent “medicine riterally creates diseases, defines syndromes and tells people how to ‘do’ these diseases” (O’Keefe 1982,329). There are various psychophysical disorders that bear witness to the power of the subject; but could it be possible that “most people ultimately die for social reasons’’ (O’Keefe 1982, 309)?

D. Subject and Personality It was pointed out above that there does not exist a psychological explanation for the different forms of practical activity. The following example shows that this is true of socio-practicalactivity as well; it shows why there is no psychological explanation for “why we do what we do”. Kurt Lewin (1935) in his major work dealt with the ‘crisis’ of psychology and attempted to find a solution by comparing the development of psychology to that of physics, more particularly to two of its dominant lines of thought, the Aristotelian and the Galilean. According to the Aristotelian

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way of thinking, all objects can be categorized on the basis of their modes of being. For example, there are falling objects such as stones, and rising objects such as balloons. Since the essential nature and thereby the behaviour of a particular object is determined by its category, primary attention should be given to identifying the characteristics that distinguish objects belonging to different categories. The Galilean way of thinking works on totally different premises: “The outlook of a B m o , a Kepler, or a Galilei is determined by the idea of a comprehensive, all-embracing unity of the physical world. The same law governs the courses of the stars, the falling of stones, and the flight of birds” (Lewin 1935, lo). In other words, it is understood that the Aristotelian search for distinguishing features in objects and the building of categories is completely futile. Psychology is still to some extent captive to the Aristotelian way of thinking. For example, distinctions are routinely made between normal and deviant behaviour. Whether the case is alcoholism, suicide, mental illness, crime, or homosexuality, it is believed that the people involved in this or that form of deviant behaviour are a species of their own (alcoholics, criminals, homosexuals); they react differently. Or, in a study of domestic violence, the assumption is often made that there are two kinds of parents: those who abuse their children and those who do not. The next logical step is to find out “what social and psychological characteristics discriminate those parents who abuse or neglect their children from those who properly care for their children” (Bowles 1980, 1). However, this line of empirical research is fraught with problems. In the first place, it has proven extremely difficult to make a distinction between the experimental and the control group. In criminology, for instance, there is ample evidence that crimes are committed not only by Criminals: “the concept of a criminal or criminally predisposed group is a social and legal artifact” (Doleschal and Klapmuts 1975, 49). Likewise, researchers concerned with what is called deviant sexual behaviour are increasingly agreed that people cannot be divided “into two clear-cut groups - homosexuals and heterosexuals” (Coleman 1978, 71). Second, even in the case where two groups have been formed (e.g. alcoholics vs. others), no distinguishing characteristics have been found. The search for a special ‘alcoholic personality’, for instance, has failed: “for every study reporting the alcoholic an ‘oral character’, ‘dependent’, ‘masochistic’, or the ‘masked depressive’ on the basis of projective test results or depth interviewing,

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another three fail to find such distinguishing characteristics” (Nathan and Harris 1975, 332). The reason for this is that there quite simply does not exist a group of people that could be labelled alcoholics: “alcoholics are different in so many ways that it makes no difference” (Keller 1972). In the human sciences too there is growing awareness that something is very wrong with the Aristotelian way of thinking. However, if the Galilean way of thinking is to take over, we must be able to show how the individual human being is affected by social laws. If every human being can either rise or fall, then clearly the explanation for neither can lie in the individual; it must lie in the ‘social laws of gravity’. But how do these social laws work? To find an explanation of socio-practical activity, we must step out of the system of action and investigate the extremely complex relationship of subjective activity to societal and historical development. During the twentieth century sociology, anthropology and social psychology have produced increasing evidence that that ‘social facts’ exert a “coercive power” (Durkheim 1962, 2) on the individual. There is also evidence that this force is to a certain extent of the same nature as that causing people to eat. If someone decides to go on a diet or on hunger strike, or if he wants to fast for religious reasons, he can resist this force and refuse to eat. Unemployment, for example, is a social fact that, through the role that the unemployed have to adopt, imposes certain demands on these people. It does not, however, affect the actions of the unemployed in any one fixed and lawful way. Some take to drink while others do not, some begin to suffer from psychic problems and others not. Mass communication is a social fact that places certain requirements on its audience, yet it may affect subjective activity in almost any way. In all of these examples social reality is a challenge to which the subject responds by way of practical activity, but the kind of action he decides to pursue is not directly determined by this challenge. Social reality is thus something external, part of which the subject may take as given, part of which he may ignore, and part of which he may ascribe different meanings to - and by doing so shape it to suit his own purposes. This is not, however, the only way social reality exerts its influence. It is also one of the building blocks necessary for subjective development.

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1. Subject and Human Action It was emphasized above that subjective activity is in essence an objectdirected pursuit. It is impossible to think without having something to think about. The attainment of the object of action is possible only insofar as action is ‘adapted’ according to the object’s special characteristics (if I want to write something, I must use the sharp end of my pencil). Therefore it might be suggested that the objects of action are the main determinants of action, that they exert a “coercive power” on the individual. Consider all the possible objects of the human subject’s action: the bulk of them are the result of human activity. Paper and pencils, tools, machines, houses, cars, towns, computers - they are all man-made. These things have not come about by accident. Each and every one of them embodies an idea. The pencil is for writing with, houses are built to give shelter, matches are for lighting fires. The ideas that have emerged in social activity have been transformed through this activity into material objects. Objects and tools contain in themselves an idea of how they can be used for controlling one’s own actions and environmental events, and also much of the specific experience of humans. In animals their specific experience is transmitted to their offspring in their genes. This is why a newly hatched chicken that has never seen a falcon will instinctively run for its life when it sees one. A particular environmental stimulus evokes a particular instinctive response. This is why animals can swiftly adapt to often so extremely hostile environments. Humans are not born with the knowledge that their parents have built up. The experience that man as a species has gained in the course of history is situated outside every individual (cf. Skve 19781, and therefore it has to be adopted. This is a task every individual must undertake if he is to become a human being in the psychological meaning of the word. And what is more, this is a task we must undertake time and time again, because the experience and thus the complex of action we are required to assimilate is in a continuous process of historical transformation. In the industrialized world of the 198Os, we must learn how to use a vast array of mechanical and electric devices - in primitive society people had to learn how to set traps, to dry meat, to tan hides. Practical activity is a form of human activity that changes with history.

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Socio-practical activity arises out of these objects, the products of social activity. This is clearly illustrated in Bondarenko’s (1979, 109-110) study: If you ask a small child who has just learned to comb his hair to pick up a stick and show you how he combs his hair, he will not be able to do this. He can only comb his hair if he has a comb in his hand. At this stage of development action is intimately bound up with the object out of which the action arises. At the next stage the child will be able to show you with the stick how to use a comb, but not with a spoon: spoons are made for eating, not for combing. Then, at the final stage of development, the child can show you how he combs his hair with or without any object. He has now learned to abstract the idea of the action out of the object. In brief: man continuously shapes the reality surrounding him through his actions. For the next generation to be able to act in the midst of this new, changing reality, it must assimilate the ideas crystallized in this reality. This is one important way in which subject and social reality meet. In the process of learning how to do various things, the young person comes into contact with all human history that has gone before and comes to stand on the shoulders of all earlier generations.

2. Subject and Interaction Once the subject has learned the rudiments of socio-practical activity, he has free access to an immense arsenal of actions accumulated in the course of humankind’s history. He can comb his hair, read and write, drive a car, consume alcohol, use a computer ... When the subject starts to make choices between alternative actions, social reality enters the picture in a very different way. The human subject has control over his own actions. This means that when he does something, aims at a certain goal, he will ask himself why he has chosen this particular goal. Very often the rationale of one activity lies in some other activity: I go to the library and pick up a book because I intend to read it, I read the book because I am hoping to pass my exams, I am taking the exams to get my degree and hopefully a good job. However, the rationale of actions can be found in others only to a certain extent. Everything I do during my years of studying can be explained by my ambitions to get a good job. But how do I explain the next 30 or 40

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years I shall be spending at work? The problem is this: “All action, actual and intended, cannot be means to an end. Some action must quahfy as an end in itself” (Boden 1978, 44). The subject must make clear to himself what his priorities are among the different actions. He must set for himself a goal in life. The difficultyin making this choice is that, intrinsically, all actions are equally important to the subject. With every new action we gain command of our life and thus every action extends the scope of our subjectivity, and may even prove vitally important in certain situations. This is why “I” needs help from the outside to make the choice. One way to choose between alternative actions that are equally important is to let chance decide. Buridan’s ass starved to death facing two equally desirable hay-bales, but man can always toss a coin to decide which to eat. I can also leave my fate in the hands of Destiny, or look for signs auguring things to come. Against this background it is possible to understand such phenomena as “learned helplessness” or even suicide; if all other means fail, I can force the answer out by “gambling with death” (Taylor 1982, 157-158): “Those who engage in such suicidal confrontations are in the common state where the uncertainty they are faced with cannot be resolved unless such risks are taken. Conventional means of validation (including contests) have proved non-revelatory, and no longer can anything in this world validate what they are. Therefore, something outside the self is consulted in an Ordeal to determine whether or not that self has any validation in life: ‘the world’, ‘fate’, ‘chance’, ‘luck’, or ‘God’ isprovoked into makinga decision one way or the other.” Another way to get help is to turn to the organic level. Take a situation where the subject has to decide whether he wants to become a research scientist or a professional musician; both are equally tempting alternatives. If he does not want to draw lots (and he will hardly do that if it is a very important decision), he could put his respective ‘natural talents’ in the scales. He may believe the choice has already been made in his genes (or in any event somewhere in the past) and try to find out what they have decided by testing himself. In this case the subject would be precisely as self-sufficient as in Maslow’s “self-realization” (Maslow 1965) or in Heller’s “self-determination” (Heller 1985). The need for selfdetermination is backed up by “the need for practising one’s ability to

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develop endowments into talents” (Heller 1986, 18). The answer would be found vithin the “self”. To think in terms of natural talents is very Aristotelian: you became a guitarist because you had a talent for playing the guitar; you became a criminal because you had an extra X chromosome. Besides, even if we assumed that some sort of natural talents did exist, it is hard to believe they would be so very specific; can there really be different genes for playing the guitar and playing the lute? There is, however, a third way to solve the problem of choice between alternative actions. Of key importance here is the connection of the subject’s socio-practical activity to social interaction. Subjective development is a process where the human individual is born as a self, as I and me. At the very moment of his psychological birth the child wants to do everything by himself, to dress himself and to buy his own ticket on the bus. The subject does everything by himself, but not in a social vacuum; the I not only assimilates different forms of human activity, but also, to a lesser or greater extent, has to take into account other concrete 1’s. However when other people and social reality in general become the subject’s consultant in making choices, we are already at the threshold of a new form of development. The stage at which I becomes part of the social subject, of us, signifies the beginning of the development of the subject’s personality. The answer to the question ‘why do I work for 30 or 40 years of my life’ is: ‘I do it for you’. This ‘you’ should be understood broadly, as referring to a collective ‘will’ to which the subject resorts: it may be a friend, a group, an idol, a party, an organization; it may be You, a generalized system of social values placed in heaven. But it may also be one concrete human individual. The feelings of ‘madly in love’ that are glorified in myths and in the arts are from this point of view merely a practice of personal existence. As reason cannot give the answer, it is thrown overboard for the sake of you: “You are my all the world and I must strive To know my shames and praises from your tongue. None else to me, nor I to none, alive, That my steel’d sense or changes right or wrong. You are so strongly in my purpose bred That, all world besides methinks are dead.” (W. Shakespeare)

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This ‘smallest possible us’ is very special, but not mystical. What makes you and me so special is that both of us are ‘irreplaceable’: if you go away, we will no longer exist and the subject ceases to be a personality. In groups of three ‘we’ will continue to exist even if one member of the group decides to leave (see e.g. Alberoni 1983 for an analysis of this side of love and loving). This is the underlying basic structure of jealousy, a phenomenon associated with social interaction: if I leave, ‘they’ will live on. It is in this personalization that the subject can find a rational basis fo choosing between alternative actions: in turning from one’s own will to the social will, or in Weberian terms, in turning from means-end rationality to value rationality. It is of course paradoxical that this is the only way a rational choice can be made. T o be rational, I cannot be “a case of ‘I prefer A to B and B to C and therefore I shall choose A”’ - I have to become a “conformist” who tries “to meet the others in their choices” (UllmanMargalit 1977, 93). That is, from our point of view actions are no longer of equal importance. If you can drive a car but do not know how to use a computer, we both will benefit if I choose to learn how to use computers. If there are three blacksmiths in the village but no one who can drive, I can refer to the ‘will’ of the community and choose to become a driver. The we does not force the subject into making his choice - it provides the logic upon which the subject can safely make a rational choice; a logic that comes very close (or at least much closer than the logic of fate and chance) to the one that guides the subject’s own activity, the logic of cooperation. This is why “the innermost of the empirical selves of a man is a self of the social sort” Uames 1890, 301). The relation between action and cooperation is important in more than this one way. We have already mentioned that action is fuelled by its objects. If action runs out of objects, it will cease to exist. Cooperation has another important task in making sure there is a ready supply of objects for future activity. Subjective activity, when invested in cooperation, is in a sense an investment in the future. Since the subject will perish if he has no goals to pursue, activities that have no immediate end become particularly important to him. While action in general is characterized by its goal-directed nature, the action at the core of personality - the action that is important for ‘us’ - is distinguished by its lack of immediate goals and its perpetuity. The term best suited to describing this kind of activity is work. It is clear

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that there are some basic criteria that must be met for a particular activity to qua& as work. These criteria change with history. For example, in a society where norms and rules are relatively homogeneous and stable, where divorces are either not granted at all or are only granted in exceptional cases and where children generally continue the work of their parents, it is possible to build a personality on and around one’s family, to take the family as one’s life-work. In our “dissatisfied society” where “the individual has become the sole master of his or her achievement, accomplishment and fate, if not in reality, at least in the dominant imagery’’ (Heller 1985, 306), new forms of work must emerge. If, as in most of today’s societies, divorces are a commonplace and if the children are going to leave their parents anyway once they have grown up, then obviously it is necessary to look elsewhere for an ‘eternal life project’. In a society where unemployment is imminent and where people retire sooner or later anyway, wage labour does not qualify as ‘work’ as readily as in a society where people have to work in their own fields till the very end to earn their bread and butter. This means there are always new personalities in the making. In certain conditions drinking qualifies as ‘work’ and as a basis for personality because ‘we drunkards’ have this ‘eternal problem’; supporting Arsenal qualifies as ‘work’ and is a basis for personality because the club has its own fans and because it will go on playing every Saturday until the end of time (see e.g. Marsh e t al. 1978). The role of ‘fate’ also changes in the course of history. The extent to which people need the help of chance when making a choice between alternative actions differs between societies (depending, for example, on the importance assigned to ‘individual freedom’ in the particular society). It is not only by chance that people usually regard falling in love as something that is beyond the control of their will: “Our love is not in our grasp; it transcends us, pulls us and forces us to change” (Alberoni 1983, 43-44). Nor is it by chance that people have so widely accepted the idea that each individual’s ultimate fate is predestined. There are not very many alcoholics, for instance, who object to being told that they are ‘born alcoholics’ or that they have an ‘incurable disease’. In some situations people actually hope that Fate will come to help them by taking over and arranging an accident to save them the trouble of making what they feel is an impossible decision. As we have seen, the subject comes into contact with the surrounding

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social reahty in several different ways. First, ‘social facts’ are something external, something to which the subject adapts or chooses not to adapt. Second, subjective activity can arise only out of social action. The adult’s activity forms a ‘psychologicalwomb’ from which the child gradually breaks loose. Third, the development of subjective activity consists in the assimilation of the specifically human experience crystallized in things and objects produced in and by human activity. And fourth, the subject comes into contact with social activity when he resorts to the logic of cooperation in his choice between equally important actions, in adapting his own actions to the objects of cooperation.

E. On Cooperation In the foregoing we have been discussing the logic of cooperation. This concept is a helpful tool in the social psychological analysis of the subject’s relation to social reality. Social interaction among humans can be regarded from several different perspectives. It can be approached from the point of view of verbal and non-verbal communication, social exchange, imitation, observance of rules, etc. Social psychology obviously cannot concern itself with all these different aspects of social interaction. If it did, it would run into the same kind of difficulties as the psychology that proposed to deal with all forms of interaction between the individual and his environment; it would be trying to do the impossible. So again, what we need to do is demarcate one essential form of interaction as the object of a social psychology proper. This is a task that can only be solved on the basis of theoretical reasoning. Empirical research will lead us nowhere as long as it operates with the kind of ambiguous and loosely defined concepts upon which social psychological experiments are currently based. The problem is that the same word may refer to a wide range of phenomena, sometimes even to completely opposite things; it simply means too much to mean anything at all. As every researcher has to define his conceptual tools from his own particular angle and in his own particular way, his results will not be comparable with those of other experimenters. It is quite astonishing how often psychologists and social psychologists accept this kind of conceptual sloppiness and carry out studies and produce reports without really knowing what they are studying or reporting about.

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Various writers have attempted to resolve the confusion surrounding many of the central concepts of social psychology, such as those of norm and group. Ullman -Margalit (1977; cf. p. 271, for instance, has done Some very interesting theorizing around the concept of norm. According to Ullman-Margalit, norms are an important part of human life. Norms have emerged as a means of coping with the problems encountered in day-to-day life. And because these problems and the situations in which we encounter these problems differ from case to case, the norms must be different as well. Ullman-Margalit (1977, 9) starts from the assumption that “certain types of norms are solutions to problems posed by certain interaction situations”. There exist at least three kinds of norms: The purpose of PD norms is to make people stick to agreements they have made; coordination norms help people to coordinate their activities; and norms of partiality are necessary in a “status quo of inequality” to prevent attempts at change. The concept of group has in turn been taken under closer theoretical analysis by Petrovski (1984, 164-165), who distinguishes various kinds of small groups by means of two questions. He asks, first, to what extent are intergroup relations mediated by the group’s common goal? And second, to what extent is it possible to couple the group’s action to societal activity? Petrovski produces five different groups, which he places in the vector field shown in Figure 3.3. Vector C represents the degree to which intergroup relations are mediated by common goals; vector A describes the correspondence of the group’s activity and societal life; and vector B the noncorrespondence of the group’s activity and societal life. Petrovski calls Group I a collective. The group members are so tied to each other that the success or failure of the whole group in the pursuit of its goals depends on one individual, and vice versa. The group’s pursuit of its goals is consistent with the demands of social development in general. As an example of Group 11, Petrovski takes an organized group of criminals, such as the mafia. The mediating object in the activity of Group I1 is contradictory of the interests of society at large. In Group I11 the members pursue goals that are contradictory of society’s interests, but they are not dependent on each other in this pursuit; and in Group IV, such as a group of tourists, the independent members pursue goals that are consistent with society’s interests. According to Petrovski, the belief of social psychologists that their studies of Group V produce information applicable

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Figure 3.3. Differentiation of small groups

4 .... ...... Q ...... Iv ...... ::

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to all these different kinds of groups is completely ungrounded. Our intention in the last pages of this chapter is to take the two concepts we have outlined above - subject and personality - and attempt a similar theoretical reconstruction of the unit formed by two people, which represents one of the basic units of social interaction. It is not by chance we have chosen to discuss the dyad. Our argument is that the dyad represents not only a simple and small form of social reality, but also and above all the smallest possible unit into which human reality can be analysed without losing its distinctive characteristics. That is, in the same way as Vygotsky (1962, 3-5) pointed out that the unit of water is one single water molecule which consists of its different elements hydrogen and oxygen, we argue that the dyad is the true unit of human reality. The individual, the element of human reality, cannot be the “true bearer” of social facts and thus the unit of human reality simply because the central functions necessary for human history require two people: one person cannot discuss; one person cannot make love.

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This would mean that the problem of the psychological laboratory experiment is not only that it denies the subject the use of certain forms of psychic activity or that its settings are unnatural, but that the subjects have been deprived of the opportunity to work together. It is possible that psychologists have run into difficulties because they have attempted to explain why humans behave the way they do by analysing individuals; to explain why water extinguishes fire by analysing hydrogen and oxygen separately. If all the experiments that psychologists and social psychologists have done on learning, perception, attitudes etc. were repeated with two subjects who could confer, the results would no doubt be very different from what they have been in studies using one subject alone. Using the basic psychological concepts outlined above, the dyad can be approached from several different perspectives. First, the relationship between two people may be seen as a relationship between two organisms; for example, when two strangers bump into each other in the street. Second, it may be a relationship between a subject and an organism, as between a mother and her newborn child. Third, it may be a reiation of two subjects, both of whom have their own plans, as in a game of chess between two players. Fourth, it may be a relation between a subject and apersonality; as the relationship in Honor6 de Balzac’s Eugenze Grandet between a miserly father who enjoys controlling people and his daughter who falls in love. And fifth, it may be a relation of two Personalities (or actually one: when you love me and I love you, we are in love); when we together raise our children or build a home for ourselves. From the point of view of social psychology it is important to note here that the “we-intentions” (Tuomela 1984) behind the fifth kind of “personal interaction” tie together the parties involved in a very special way. Analogies of phenomena occurring at one level of interaction can no doubt be found at all other levels as well. However, the communication that takes place in personal interaction, for instance, differs in essential respects from the communication that takes place in organic or subjective interaction. When two strangers bump into each other in the street, it is impossible to tell what the consequences of this event will be at the level of action (as distinct from the physical or biological consequences, which are directly dependent on the force of the impact). There may be no outcome, it may lead to a quarrel between the two persons, to a third party interfering -

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but all this depends on chance (i.e. on such factors as the weather, the number of people witnessing the event, the time of the day, etc.). It is much easier to predict the course of events when the two people involved are not strangers but know each other (i.e. they are two subjects). In this case, the meeting is not of two objects but of two action strategies. If neither has anything special to do, as the saying goes, they may go somewhere and do something together. Similarly, when I am playing chess with someone, it fairly often happens that I can tell how he is going to react to my move - fairly often, but by no means always. When two people are pursuing a common strategy, their relation is necessary. For example, if two people go to a party together, it is rather difficult to know how A will react to B saying, “It’s rather late”. Following this statement, they may leave the party, they may have a row, or they may stay on as if nothing had ever been said. But if the two persons intend to travel together early next morning, the statement will have one necessary effect: if they are really going to travel, they will leave the party. Accordingly, if two people are having lunch in a restaurant, it is more or less unimportant what they are talking about. If two people are building a house together and intend to finish it some day, they must necessarily talk with each other about various things related to the construction work. It is here that social psychological knowledge may be uncovered. So what kind of internal necessities are included in personal interaction? It would seem likely that the inner necessities of this interaction cannot be identified until the various forms of psychic cooperation (such as communicating, adopting attitudes, observing rules) are distinguished from “practical intersubjectivity” uoas 1985). It is possible that here too, only certain forms of psychic cooperation are necessary constituents of cooperation proper, while any form of practical cooperation can be replaced by any other form. And further, the central role of different ‘tools’ (e.g. places, objects, melodies) in personal interaction suggests that psychic cooperation arises out of practical cooperation, in basically the same way as psychic activity arises out of practical activity. “- ‘Tomorrow’, she repeated. - Tomorrow there would be no more beds, no more bedrooms in Manhattan. They would need them no longer. Nor would they need a jukebox in a little bar. Tomorrow and from tomorrow on they could go anywhere, be at home anywhere. ” (Simenon, Three beds in Manhattan)

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References Alberoni, F. (1983) Falling in love. New York: Random House. Bach, P. and Schaefer, J. (1979) The tempo of country music and the rate of drinking in bars. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 40, 1058-1059. Baron, R. (1974) The aggression-inhibiting influence of heightened sexual arousal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30, 318-322. Boden, M. (1978) Purposive explanation in psychology. Sussex: Harvester Press. Bondarenko, L.I. (1979) Tietoisuuden muodostumisen perusetapit. Kiev: Vischa schola. Bowles, R. (1980). Prologue. In: Cook, J. and Bowles, R. (ed.) Child abuse: commission and omission. Toronto: Butterworths. Buss, A., Booker, A. and Buss, E. (1972) Firing a weapon and aggression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 22, 296-302. Coleman, J. (1978) Homosexuality. In: Wertheimer, M. and Rappoport, L. (ed.) Psychology and the problems of today. Glenview: Foresman & co. Doise, W. (1978) Groups and individuals: explanations in social psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doleschal, E. and Klapmuts, N. (1975) Toward a new criminology. In: Dodge, C. (ed.) A nation without prisons. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books. Doreshtov, B. (1969) Therapy for the nondiseased: comment on “The Alcoholic Game”. Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 30, 939-941. Durkheim, E. (1952) Suicide: a study in sociology. London: Routledge. Durkheim, E. (1962) The rules of sociological method. Third printing. Glencoe: Free Press. Eco, U. (1983) The name of the rose. London: Secker & Warburg. Freud, S. (1976) Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gadzella, B. and Whitehead, D. (1975) Effects of auditory and visual modalities in recall of words. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 40, 255-260.

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Harris, M. (1978) Cannibals and kings. New York: Random House. Hastings, W. (1979) How to think about social problems? New York: Oxford University Press. Heller, A. (1985) The power of shame: a rational perspective. London: Routledge. Heller, A. (1986) On being satisfied in a dissatisfied society. Paper presented at ‘Man in a dissatisfied society’ seminar, 15 May, 1986, Tampere. Hockey, R. (1978) Arousal and stress in human memory. In: Bower, G. (ed.) The psychology of learning and motivation, vol. 10. New York: Academic Press. James, W. (1983; orig. 1890) The principles of psychology. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. Joas, H. (1985) G.H. Mead: A contemporary re-examination of his thought. Oxford: Polity Press. Keller, M. (1972) The oddities of alcoholics. Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 33, 1147-1148. Lewin, K. (1935) A dynamic theory of personality. New York: McGrawHill. Luria, A.R. (1968) The mind of a mnemonist. New York: Basic Books. Marsh, P., Rosser, E. and Harr6, R. (1978) The rules of disorder. London: Routledge. Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse. Foundations of the critique of political economy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Maslow, A. (1965) A theory of human motivation. In: Hamachek, D. (ed.) The self in growth, teaching and learning. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Pren tice-Hall. McCord, J. (1972) Etiological factors in alcoholism. Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 89, 224-233. McCord, J. (1981) Alcoholism and criminality. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 42, 739-748. Mendelson, J. and Mello, W. (1979) One unanswered question about alcoholism. British Journal of Addiction, 74, 11-14. Nathan, P. and Harris, S. (1975) Psychopathology and society. New York: McGraw-Hill. O’Keefe, D. (1982) Stolen lightning: the social theory of magic. Oxford: Martin Robertson.

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Osmond, H. (1969) Blood sports? Comment on “The Alcoholic Game”. Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 30, 945-948. Paolino, T. and McCrady, B. (1977) The alcoholic marriage: alternative perspectives. New York: Grune & Stratton. Petrovski, A.V. (1984). Psykologian teorian ja historian kysymyksia. Moskva: Pedagogika. Petrusic, W. and Jamieson, D. (1978) Differential interpolation effects in free recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4, 101-109. Psychology Today: An introduction (1983). New York: Random House. Robinson, D. (1979) Systems of modem psychology: a critical sketch. New York: Columbia University Press. Roediger, H. and Tdving, E. (1979) Exclusion of learned material from recall as a postretrieval operation. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 601-615. Sarbin, T. and Nucci, L. (1973) Self-reconstruction processes: a proposal for reorganizing the conduct of confirmed smokers. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 81, 182-195. Skve, L. (1978) Man in Marxist theory and the psychology of personality. Sussex: The Harvester Press. Sher, K. and Levenson, R. (1982) Risk for alcoholism and individual differences in the stress-response-dampening effect of alcohol. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 91, 350-367. Shotter, J. (1975) Images of man in psychological research. Suffolk: Methuen. Siegler, M., Osmond, H. and Newell, S. (1968) Models of alcoholism. Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 29, 571-591. Simmel, G. (1959) The problem of sociology. In: Wolff, K. (ed.) Georg Simmel 1858-1918. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Skinner, B. (1971) Beyond freedom and dignity. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Spencer, H. (1870) The principles of psychology. London: Williams and Norgate. Steiner, C. (1969) The alcoholic game. Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 30, 920-938. Taylor, S. (1982) Durkheim and the study of suicide. Hong Kong: The MacMillan Press. Taylor, S. and Gammon, C. (1975) Effects of type and dose of alcohol on human physical aggression. Journal of Personality and Social

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Psychology, 30, 169-175. Taylor, S., Gammon, C. and Capasso, D. (1976) Aggression as a function of the interaction of alcohol and threat. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, 938-941. Tedeschi, J. (1979) Frustration, fantasy, aggression and the exercise of coercive power. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 48, 215-219. Tuomela, R. (1984) A theory of social action. Reidel: Dordrecht. Ullman-Margalit, E. (1977) The emergence of norms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1962) Thought and language. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Williams, R. (1961) Alcoholism: the nutritional approach. Austin: University of Texas Press. von Wright, G.H. (1967) Historiallisista selityksista. Historiallinen Aikakauskija, 65.

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Chapter 4 Social Psychology as an Historical Discipline Antti Eskola

In chapter 1, I concluded that social psychology should concern itself with human interaction and thematize this object from the point of view of cooperation. Social psychology investigates not only episodes where cooperation is visible and successful; it is also interested in episodes of interaction where one would expect to find cooperation but there is none, or where cooperation fails or turns into a conflict. In these cases too, the researcher can approach the episode from the point of view of cooperation. However most of the research done by psychologists, social psychologists and sociologists focuses on forms of human activity that seem to be based on decisions and acts by one individual actor: reading books, TV viewing, drinking, voting. Both the general public and the sponsors of research want to have explanations of why people drink, why they read books, why they vote for this or that party. Does our definition exclude these problems from the scope of social psychology? Or can they also be seen as a form of interaction and thematized from the point of view of cooperation? Below we shall find an answer to these questions in such concepts as ‘way of life’ and ‘mode of life’. These terms refer not to something universal and eternal, but to something that changes with history. Therefore, we shall soon fmd ourselves dealing with a question implicit in the title of this chapter: Should social psychology be an historical discipline? If so, what are the methodological and theoretical consequences? The use of an historical perspective means we will be needing data which informs us about people and their cooperative interaction in earlier societies as well as about the future course and fate of our present society. Now social psychology begins to look quite different from the traditions that were described in chapter 1.

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A. Individual, Mode of Life, History So, to go back a few sentences, can drinking or voting or other similar acts of the individual be regarded as interaction? I became interested in this question some years ago when I was working on a small research team that investigated book reading in Finland (for some of the project’s results, see Alestalo, Eskola, Eskola and KYoskowska 1978; Alestalo, Eskola and Eskola 1981; Eskola 1982). As well as historical data, we had collected material on people’s reading habits by interviewing a large representative sample of the adult Finnish population. There was one particularly hard nut that our methods failed to crack: a group who did not read books at all and who said they would not read even if books were shorter, more useful, more interesting, or easier to read. These people quite simply appeared to have no need to read. We got nowhere by asking further questions about reading. It was clear we would have to change our perspective; but how?

1. The Role of Community in the Individual’s Choices One solution is to use the method of Alexander the Great who solved his own problem by cutting the Gordian knot with his sword: accept that some people read books because it is part of their way of life, and others do not because it is not part of their way of life. The problem will now appear in a completely different light. Where just a moment ago the researcher was speechless and perplexed, his mind is now filled with intriguing questions and new ideas of how to answer them. Is it possible to speak of a distinct intellectual way of life of which reading is an integral part? Or does the technical and commercial intelligentsia have a way of life of its own where there is no room for books? What are the main determinants of ways of life? What kind of historical sources should one use to describe changes in Finnish ways of life? Can one member of a family have a different way of life to that of another? What kind of cultural and educational policies would change people’s modes of life in such a way that reading would become more popular? At about the same time that we found our own solution - not to the problem of non-reading but to the impasse we had reached - Finnish sociologists engaged in alcohol research started looking into the question

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of whether there were ways of life of which drinking was a part and others of which it was not; criminologists realized that the ‘crime’ of tax evasion goes with a different way of life than does the ‘crime’ of manslaughter; physicians became interested in illnesses as a part or consequence of different ways of life. There was a real boom of way of life studies in Finnish sociology, the marks of which are still evident in the latter half of the 1980s. The change in perspective means that reading, TV viewing, drinking, or voting are no longer something made up of individual acts; they are now regarded as forms of societal activity in which the individual does or does not participate. The individual and his practical activity are linked to society and the modes and styles of life that society offers its members. In other words, the problem is now approached from the perspective of the individual’s and society’s cooperative interaction. It is no longer a psychological but a social psychological problem.

Choosing a course of action It is no new experience in science to note that someone else has come to the same conclusion via a different route. In chapter 3 Klaus Weckroth followed the theory of psychological activity and arrived at basically the same conclusion as we did in our study of book reading. Weckroth reasoned along the following lines. In order for a child to develop into a subject in control of his own life, he must learn to master certain forms of practical activity. Whether it is playing the piano or football makes no difference; he can develop into a subject through either. The answer as to whether learning to play the piano is a better choice than learning to play football cannot be arrived at through psychological theory of subjective development. This is why we often turn to biology for an answer. The idea is that A will become a pianist and B a soccer player because they have inherited the respective ‘natural talents’. The biographer looks into the life of his subject’s ancestors for evidence of biological determinism, for some sign that would explain why their descendant became an artist, a mathematician, etc. But if we are perfectly honest, we have to admit that biological factors are very rarely decisive when making the basic choices that determine our course of life (although they may play some role in this). I cannot imagine that very many people who have learned to play the piano have done so

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because they have some natural talent that can only be used for this one form of practical activity. I myself would certainly disagree if someone suggested that a specific gene I have inherited is the main reason I have spent most of my grown-up life writing books. Compared with all the other factors involved in the decision, the role of biological factors must have been very small indeed. Weckroth says that the explanation of one practical activity often lies in some other activity: “I go to the library and pick up a book because I intend to read it, I read the book because I am hoping to pass my exams, I am taking the exams to get my degree and hopefully a good job” (p. 144). In this chain it is always a more general activity (e.g. graduating) that explains an act (e.g. taking an exam). The explanation is legitimate and adequate; it presents no difficult or deep problems. But there comes a point where the chain breaks. If we ask, “Why do you want to graduate in this particular field, why do you want to do this kind of work?”, the answer might be, “I want to work in this trade because it gives me the opportunity of a certain way of life”. It is more or less impossible to answer the next question in the chain with this method: “Why do you want to live in this particular way?’ ’ To find the answer, Weckroth suggests, we have to turn to other people: parents, friends, loved ones, society. When the individual makes the final choice in the chain, he subordinates his will to someone else’s: ‘I’ becomes ‘we’. He submits to his parents’ will, to the will of his loved one, to the will of God; this ‘foreign’ will has become an element of the individual’s personality (as in the matrix on page 44).

Ethical choices “Why do you want to live in this particular way?” comes very close to being an ethical question. It is indeed in many ways a useful exercise to place ethical questions alongside social psychological ones; among other things it may give us some idea of the proximity of the two sciences, ethics and social psychology. For instance, Wittgenstein’s study of the meaning of the word “good” - a pure example of ethical reasoning - is more or less analogous to our discussion above about explaining the acts of individual people. We said for example that up to a certain point acts can be explained by

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other acts and that this presents no difficult or deep problems. Wittgenstein (1965) writes that a sentence indicating that something is “good” can largely be understood relative to some criterion: “If for instance I say that this is a good chair this means that the chair serves a certain predetermined purpose and the word good here has only meaning so far as this purpose has been previously fixed upon. In fact the word good in the relative sense simply means coming up to a certain predetermined standard. Thus when we say that this man is a good pianist we mean that he can play pieces of a certain degree of difficulty with a certain degree of dexterity. And similarly if I say that it is important for me not to catch cold I mean that catching a cold produces certain describable disturbances in my life and if I say that this is the right road I mean that it’s the right road relative to a certain goal. Used in this way these expressions don’t present any difficult or deep problems.” We also said that in the explanation of acts by others, the final explanations in the chain cannot be found within its inner logic but must be drawn from outside the chain. In the same way, Wittgenstein says that no genuine ethical judgement can be contained in words or language, in a statement of facts reflecting reality; it must come from beyond language. A genuine ethical argument implies an absolutely coercive power. What we mean by the expression “the absolutely right road”, according to Wittgenstein, is “the road which everybody on seeing it would, with logical necessity, have to go, or be ashamed for not going”. However, no state of affairs has in itself “the coercive power of an absolute judge”. This is why Wittgenstein feels that reference to Ethics or Religion is only an attempt to “run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless”.

Can the force beyond the individual be explained? The reader familiar with Emile Durkheim’s sociology of religion and morals may be slightly confused at this juncture, where the social psychologist meets the philosopher interested in ethical questions. Durkheim sets himself the same problem: whence the coercive force that we sometimes call an ethical norm, sometimes the will of God? Far from hopeless, he sets out in calm pursuit of an explanation - and believes he has found it. The man who lives according to religion, Durkheim (1975) says, “feels within

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himself a power of which he is not normally conscious”. It is not an illusion; the power must really be there: “To explain religion, to make it rationally intelligible (...) we must find in the world which we can apprehend by observation, by our human faculties, a source of energy superior to that which is at the disposal of the individual and which, nevertheless, can be communicated to him. I ask myself if this source can be found anywhere other than in the very special life which emanates from an assembly of men.” (Ibid.) Durkheim thus comes to precisely the same conclusion as we do in our search for the determinants of the last link in the chain of individual action. The only possible answer is another person, or other people, who become part of the individual’s motivational structure or personality. Durkheim developed his idea in considerable detail in his study of the elementary forms of religious life in the light of the totemic system in Australia. The life of Australian societies, he says, passes alternately through two distinct phases. At times the population splits up into small groups that wander about independently of one another, hunting and fishing; life is slow and even dull. But there are times when the population gathers in certain places for a corroboree, which are intense and exciting events. The individual may work himself into a state of exaltation where he no longer recognizes himself. He feels as though carried away by some sort of external power. Primitive man does not however realize that his feelings and experiences originate from the group. In totemism he relates them to the animal or plant that is his totem. But in reality the totem is the symbol of the group, “the flag of the clan” which, when seen by the clan members, brings back the feelings experienced together. (Durkheim 1976, 214-221) So why is this explanation not good enough for Wittgenstein? After all, Durkheim offers a beautiful interpretation of “the coercive power of an absolute judge”, the explanation of which Wittgenstein considers a hopeless task. It is hard to believe that a wise philosopher would think of ethics in the same way as primitive man, who cannot see the community origin of the demands that religion imposes on him. There must be some deep problems. The truth of course is that Wittgenstein was perfectly well aware of the importance to every individual of the social world: “( ...) it was his philosophical conviction that the life of the human individual and therefore all manifestations of culture are deeply entrenched in basic structures of a

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social nature”, says von Wright (1982, 207) and continues: “The structures in question are what Wittgenstein called ‘Lebensfomzen’, forms of life, and their embodiment in what he called ‘Sprachspiele’,languagegames. They are ‘what has to be accepted, the given’, the unquestioned basis of all our judging and thinking.” This is the point beyond which Wittgenstein does not even try to go; the point beyond which an historical explanation can be found for societal forms of life - or at least where we should be looking for one. “This basis, to be sure, is not eternal and immutable. It is a product of human history and changes with history. It is something man made, and he changes. But how this happens is, according to Wittgenstein, not to be accounted for by a theory, or foreseen. ‘Wer kennt die Gesetze, nach denen die Gesellschaft sich hdert?’ (‘Who knows the laws according to which society develops?’), he asks, and adds: ‘Ich bin iiberzeugt, dass auch der Gescheiteste keine Ahnung hat’ (‘I am quite sure that they are a closed book even to the cleverest of men’).” (von Wright 1982, 207) The philosopher must confine himself to the ‘language-games’ of his own time even if he feels uneasy about this time and its modes of life, Wittgenstein says. Perhaps his failure to understand historical changes stemmed from the feeling that, however much he would have wanted to, he was unable by his teachings to change the ways of life of his own day. 2. Historical and Ahistorical Social Psychology

We have now come to the main question of this chapter; to the question of social psychology as an historical discipline. It would seem that this is what social psychology ought to be. But is this possible? Would social psychology do better to take Wittgenstein’s advice and concern itself only with the ‘interaction games’ of its own day - as it so often has done? And what does “historical” actually mean in this context? In the early 1970s Kenneth J. Gergen raised these important questions in an article that had a challenging title: “Social psychology as history” (Gergen 1973). The natural sciences, he said, have succeeded in finding universal laws because their object is relatively constant. The object of social psychology, by contrast, is affected by the very knowledge the discipline itself produces. The phenomena with which social psychology is

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concerned are also affected by historical factors. This is why social psychological research must primarily be seen as “the systematic study of contemporary history”. Ten years later, Gergen published a book containing some examples of historical social psychology (Gergen and Gergen 1984). The collection is rather confusing in that it is hard to see any consistency either in the ‘social psychology’ or in the ‘historical’ that the book refers to. It is clear that there is need for more theorizing around these questions. Everyone is aware that although nature as we see it today is a result of a long process of evolution, i.e. although it has its own history, there are natural laws that have applied since the beginning of time and that will go on to apply in the future. Is there something fundamentally wrong in the analogous idea that although society as we see it today is a result of a long process of development, i.e. although society also has its own history, there are universal social psychological laws that have applied throughout history and that will go on to apply in the future? Is it not possible to make a similar distinction in society as is made in nature between a surface that changes with history and all that lying below the surface which does not change? It is true that many social psychological ‘laws’ which imitate the form of natural laws do not function the same way as natural laws. Let us quote an example from Lieberson (1985, 63-87), who makes some very interesting comments on the issue. Boyle’s law is a typical example of natural scientific laws. It says that when the pressure of a gas (P) goes up or down, the volume of gas (V) declines or expands accordingly. The relation of P and V is constant (i.e. PV = K). Homans (1950, 112) attempted to formulate a social psychological law of the same kind: “If the frequency of interaction between two or more persons increases, the degree of their liking for one another will increase, and vice versa”. In reality however this ‘law’ does not work as Boyle’s law does, symmetrically in both directions. I may of course learn to l i e someone more if the frequency of our interaction increases, but it is not at all sure that my liking will decline to the initial level if our interaction decreases again. It is just as likely that we become eternal friends. Increased interaction was an historical factor that left a permanent mark on our relationship. The same thing happened in Sherif‘s experiments, as described in chapter 1. The subjects, who had changed their individual norms of estimation for a collective norm, did not drift back to

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their individual norm even after the setting was changed and they were alone again. So Homans failed. However, this does not have to mean that it is impossible to discover social psychological laws that work in the same way as Boyle’s law, or to narrow the focus of the discipline so as to make it “the systematic study of contemporary history”. Say a forest researcher formulates the following ‘law of nature’: “If the force of wind in the forest increases, the number of trees blown down by the wind will increase, and vice versa”. Here too the vice versa is misleading because in reality, the ‘law’ works in one direction only. When the storm abates, the trees that were blown over will not be able to haul themselves up again. The storm was an historical factor which left irreversible traces in the forest. Yet it has also been possible to discover laws in nature like the one formulated by Boyle. By now I can hear the impatient reader crying: show me one social psychological law that can be compared to a natural-scientific law! As a matter of fact we have already discussed one in this book: the law that is contained in the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PI3 game (pp. 44 and 52-55). If either actor in this game takes into consideration his partner’s options and makes his own decision on this basis, choosing the alternative that is best for himself, then without fail the outcome for the two prisoners together is not as good as it could have been. And conversely, all other things being equal, the choices that from a collective point of view lead to the best possible outcome are not the best possible for the two actors taken separately. This is a universal law: If the aim in the PD game is the best possible collective outcome, then a social norm must emerge that forbids either party to confess (cf. Ullman-Margalit 1977). These laws do not change with history but they apply in all circumstances. Nor are they trivial laws. They have important practical consequences seen, for example, in the arms race, whose logic reflects the laws of the PD game. There can be no doubt whatsoever that, both in nature and in society, it is possible to discover (1) empirical regularities that change with history (and which usually show some asymmetrical causality) and (2) general, ahistorical laws, The former should not be confused with the latter. Social psychologists have done this frequently, especially when they have found empirical regularities in laboratory experiments. Apparently it is believed that everything discovered in the social psychological ‘laboratory’ must be

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a general law because it is in the laboratory that most of the natural laws have been invented. However, more often than not these findings are merely empirical regularities susceptible to historical change. The laws lie deeper, behind the regularities. It is a legitimate, perfectly respectable task to describe real-life phenomena and empirical regularities between them, even though they do change with history. However, both the natural scientist and the social psychologist should do more than just that. Social psychology should follow the example of the natural sciences and seek out general theoretical laws too.

3. How do General Laws Relate to Social Life? Is it possible to discover general laws that would describe changes in our ways of life? This was the question we were faced with when we realized that every meaningful act of the individual is in the end bound up with the changing forms of life that society offers to its members.

The place of ‘laws’ in nature and history The attempts of social psychologists to explain practical activity (reading books, drinking, voting) have usually been based on formulae of the kind represented in Figure 4.1. Figure 4.1. Typical model of explanation in social psychology ‘Laws’ f

‘Background variables’ x, y, z etc.

I

A

determine

I

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Practical activity of the individual

The aim is to detect lawful connections between background variables x, y, z etc. and the behaviour and action of the individual. In our reading study we tried to find out how the individual’s education and age determined his reading habits - and we did produce some very impressive graphs (see

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Eskola 1982). It is typical that the ‘laws’ thus formulated are considered to be either general and ahistorical (which they rarely are); or then historical in the sense that the reasons for drinking in the Middle Ages, for example, were at least partially different to the reasons for alcohol consumption today. It is believed that ‘laws’ will be discovered by using this or that method to arrange observations of variations in the practical activity of the individual: either inter-individual variations (as measured by a questionnaire, for example) or variations across different situations (as between different settings in the laboratory). If in Figure 4.1. we replace the words “practical activity of the individual’’ by “biological and physiological functions of the human body”, then it is an adequate description of the place of ‘laws’ in the natural sciences. If a human being is left without food for a sufficiently long period of time (‘background variable x’), he will be sure to die (all ‘biological and physiological functions’ will cease). This is a genuine law: there are no exceptions to it. But it is a biological, not a psychological law. As a psychological being the human individual, in his practical activity, does not necessarily bend to this law. It is true, as an empirical regularity, that if he has not had anything to eat for a long time, he will look for food and start eating. He will take into account the fact that if he does not eat, he will die. The prisoner who goes on hunger strike also takes this biological law into account and takes advantage of it. However in this case it leads to a completely different kind of behaviour: the prisoner refuses to eat for extended periods of time, sometimes to the point where he dies. A realistic model for explaining the relation of the active human individual to general laws is described in Figure 4.2. While nature (including the human body) obeys general laws, the human individual as a psychological

Figure 4.2. Realistic model of explanation in social psychology ‘Laws’ P

~~

In his practical activity the individual

1

takes into account that

I

if x, then y etc.

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being fakes info account these laws (insofar as he is aware of them). We cannot escape general laws, we cannot step outside them, but their place in human activity is different from their place in nature. It is quite possible there are general laws to be found behind historical change as well. However, humankind is not very likely to obey these laws in its development in the way nature obeys natural laws. The impact of these laws upon historical development is mediated by the action of humans, by their taking into account of these laws - in one way or another. Consider for example the argument of Marx and Engels that our mode of life is determined by our mode of production. This, they write (1976, 31-32), is why the mode of production is not merely the reproduction of the physical existence of individuals: “Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. Hence what individuals are depends on the material conditions of their production.” During the period of ‘orthodox’ Marxism, this argument has been understood the party way, as in Figure 4.1.: the mode of production is a ‘background variable’ that in accordance with a general law, mechanically and invariably, determines the mode of life. As Wallerstein (1986) has pointed out, ‘orthodox’ Marxism has a counterpart in the positivist thought of ‘liberalist’ sociology, which also attempts to impose the model of explanation presented in Figure 4.1;only its ‘background variables’ are different (e.g. values instead of material production). In the social sciences and history, however, we have to abandon this formula, in both its Marxist and its ‘liberalist’ version. On the other hand it is clear that with different modes of production people must take info account different laws, which leads to different modes of life. The community that makes its living by hunting must take account of the habits and movements of its prey; in a modem market economy it is the habits of the consumers and the movements of the markets that must be taken into consideration; and this in turn leads to considerable differences in the knowledge and skills that any given generation considers worthwhile handing on to the next generation, for instance. It is indeed both possible and

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advisable to interpret Marx’s and Engels’s argument in accordance with Figure 4.2.

What method is required to discover social ‘laws’? We have now located the place of general laws within nature and society. But how can we unearth the actual laws? The traditional method of social psychologists has been to organize observations made of the discernible world, such as the practical activity of the individual. Is this the method we are looking for? In the world of inanimate objects, visible objects obey laws that are not seen by the eye. The child is interested in these objects, but we cannot find our way beyond them and into the general laws without the help of science. This is an important difference, as Zetterberg (1963, 1) pointed out: “In our childhood many of us enjoyed reading some popular book in physics containing chapters called, ‘Automobiles’, ‘Aeroplanes’, ‘Radios’, ‘Guns’, etc. In high school, however, our physics tests did not have these titles. Now the chapter headings were, ‘Mechanics’, ‘Optics’, ‘Thermodynamics’, etc., and the cars, planes, radios, and guns occurred only as illustrations of the principles valid in these various branches of physics. The remarkable accomplishments of physical scientists made it possible to describe all the phenomena of the physical world in terms of a limited number of laws, which we call the theories of physics. We learned these theories, and had compact descriptions of the operations of planes, radios, guns, and many other things.” Practical activities in social life that correspond to cars, planes, radios and guns would be things like reading books, watching TV, drinking, voting. Beyond these are the general laws that people take into consideration in their activity, in much the same way as cars obey physical laws. The child is interested in visible action in the same way as he is in visible objects. What social psychology must do is lead us beyond the visible surface and into general laws. However, the social psychologist will not find these laws by studying visible practical activity - any more than the laws of nature were discovered by a study of the visible functioning of cars, planes, radios, or guns. Nor even of birds, for that matter, although at one point man did try this

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method as well: “There were many failures before humans successfully learned to fly. After watching birds flap their wings, bold and adventurous individuals built huge winglike structures, leaped off cliffs, flapped their wings vigorously, and broke their necks. There are principles of flight to be learned from watching the birds all right, but the wrong analogy had been drawn.’’ (Lieberson 1985, 3) There have also been bold social psychologists who have set out to discover general laws on the basis of the wrong analogy, flapped their wings vigorously, and broken their necks. This has applied particularly in cases where they have been looking for general laws of social activity in variations observed in this activity. Lieberson (1985, 88-119) shows us very clearly why this cannot succeed. One of his examples goes like this. Assume that a social researcher chooses a number of different objects for a study of gravity: a feather, a small coin, a large coin, a lead ball, a piece of paper, a pencil, a brick, etc. He drops them one after another and measures the time it takes for each to reach the ground; this is the dependent variable (Y). Variation in Y shall be explained by two independent variables: the density (XI) and shape (Xz) of the object. If all goes well, X1and Xz will together explain a considerable part of the variation in Y. But have we found the cause of falling here? Not very likely. The social researcher need not even consider the question of what the causes are that lie behind falling; no idea of the phenomenon known as gravity need come to his mind. The researcher can use the same method to measure different people’s level of socioeconomic status or SES (Y) and explain variation observed in (Y) by the parental family’s income (X,) and father’s education (Xz). Even if these two factors explained a large part of variation in Y, the result does not tell us “why SES characteristics exist nor why the particular system of SES linkages occurs”. (Lieberson 1985, 102) Or, to revert to our reading study again: variations in the reading of books could, up to a certain point, be explained on the basis of our survey materials. But when it came to the more profound question of what books, the system of producing books and reading books really mean in our society - we were unable to tackle this question with our method. These questions should not be new to the social psychologist who has read his classics. Kurt Lewin, in a lecture he gave on “Aristotelian and Galilean modes of thought in contemporary psychology” in 1930 (Lewin

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19351, presented very clearly the same methodological critique we have been outlining above. At this point it is not possible to go into Lewin’s argumentation in any detail; in a nutshell, what he was saying was that general laws cannot be discovered by statistical explanation of empirical observations.

B. Interaction and Cooperation in Precapitalist Society Our purpose above has not been to belittle the significance of empirical observations. In point of fact, observations are the only reliable and fruitful source for any theorizing. Kurt Lewin, for example, got the idea for some of his most interesting experiments from his observations of a waiter in a Berlin cafe (Marrow 1969,27-28). The waiter who served at Lewin’s table had not written anything down, yet he seemed to remember exactly what everyone at the table had ordered. Soon after the bill was paid, Lewin called the waiter over and asked him to write it again. “I don’t know any longer what you people ordered”, he said. “You paid your bill”. The question that this episode invites concerns memory: what is remembering, what does it mean, what is the force that explains this phenomenon? Lewin’s answer is the “tension” which a task generates in the individual’s psychological field and which is released when the task is completed. It was upon this theoretical idea that Lewin and his students designed and carried out one of the most influential series of experiments in the history of social psychology. It is easy to believe that the idea really did evolve from the cafe episode. Because what would have happened if Lewin had set out to study memory processes in the conventional way: explaining variations in remembering between different individuals by their personal traits or qualities (e.g. age) and situation characteristics (e.g. urgency)? No doubt part of the variation could have been explained by using these factors, but then the study would have omitted the fundamental question of what memory and remembering really are about. The fruitful idea of tension would not have emerged, a classical series of experiments would never have been carried out.

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1. Social Bond in Collective Life: Four Cases Let us now try Lewin’s heuristic method for ourselves; let us sit back and watch people interact and cooperate. Because we are concerned in this chapter with historical social psychology we shall be observing people not in a Berlin cafi of the 1930s but people who lived much earlier. The period we intend to focus on extends from the Middle Ages to the advent of modern industry and capitalism in Europe. As we are unable to make our own observations, we will have to make do with second-hand sources: the writings of historians and the people who lived in those days.

First case: Montaillou We shall start with the French mountain village of Montaillou in the early fourteenth century when the local Inquisitor began making detailed inquiries into the life of the villagers. The purpose was to flush out Cathar heretics or Albigenses. All the procedures and interrogations were entered in the Register, which is the main source of Le Roy Ladurie’s (1978) interesting book on the life and people of this medieval village. The kind of life that people led in those days and the sort of thoughts they had may all seem very familiar to the reader of Le Roy Ladurie’s book. Have people not changed at all? Have their relations in interaction remained essentially unchanged? At first glance, some readers may take the book as evidence that we have no need of an historical social psychology. It is important to notice, however, that when he picks up the book the reader already has certain conceptions about life in the Middle Ages, ideas given by history books, novels and films. Perhaps it is this that gives him the impression it is all so familiar? Or perhaps the author of the book has polished and interpreted his material to make it easier for us to understand it? This all changes when we use certain theoretical concepts to help us read and make observations. In The German Ideology Marx and Engels compared earlier modes of production with the present one, paying particular attention to the differences in people’s relations to nature and to one another. When the physical existence of people is reproduced using natural instruments of production, as in Montaillou, individuals are subservient to nature. In this mode of production “the individuals are united by some

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bond: family, tribe, the land itself, etc.”, Marx and Engels (1976, 63) wrote. In modern society, where we use instruments of production created by civdization, individuals are subservient to instruments that are products of labour. We cannot of course step outside nature, but now we are separated from nature by the technical instruments we have developed. The present mode of production presupposes that individuals “are independent of one another and are only held together by exchange” (26id.). Some clear differences begin to emerge compared with the life and thought of our day when looking at life in Montaillou through these conceptual tools. The people of Montaillou were not independent individuals held together by exchange only; the social bond that tied people together was of a different kind. The basic cell of life was not the individual but the peasant family. The Latin word they had for the family, abmus, meant house as well (cf. Marx’s idea that individuals are held together by “land itself”). For the village people, “the family of flesh and blood and the house of wood, stone or daub were one and the same thing” (Le Roy Ladurie 1978, 24). This entity, the domus, was more than the sum of the mortals who made up the household. The house was a moral entity with a personality which lived on after the master himself had died. All the evidence available, Le Roy Ladurie (1978, 30) writes, emphasizes the mystical and religious significance of domus, its central role in each person’s beliefs. Death, a very solitary event in modem society, was in Montaillou a social event regulated by domus. Likewise, the concepts of time and space were based on the collective nature of life and on the people’s close ties to nature. In social psychology textbooks and research, the traditional way of describing the group is by the kind of sociogram shown in Figure 4.3., where a number of dots representing the group members are linked to each other by lines, or relations between the individuals. The lines represent relations of attraction, i.e. who likes whom and who does not; or relations of communication, relations of power, or whatever. The point is that the group is understood as consisting of individuals and various relations between them. The only task remaining is to find the basic relation that holds the group members together, just as gravity keeps them on the ground. Is it liking or attraction? Or power? Communication? Or perhaps exchange? Figure 4.3. is not however a very accurate description of the medieval French village. Perhaps it is not as universal and scientific a representation

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Figure 4.3. Individualist concept of group structure

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as social psychologists have often believed, but a rather limited and ethnocentric one? In the past groups were perhaps more of the kind shown in Figure 4.4., where the circle describing the group is sliced into sections which represent the individual group members. The group does not consist of individuals, but divides into individuals. In the case of Montaillou, the circumference of the circle could represent the primariness of domus in relation to the individuals living in the house. The members are tied together by a bond of this kind that is above them, not by direct relations between them.

Second case: a Karelian extended family Our next example of interaction in precapitalist society comes from Finland prior to industrialization in the late nineteenth century: an old Karelian extended family. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century about one third of all households in Karelia in eastern Finland were houses where several families lived together. The family usually consisted of married brothers or a father’s and his son’s families and sometimes even of unrelated families. The largest households would be made up of dozens of people who were so distantly related that “boys living at one end of the house did not need

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Figure 4.4. Description of collective group

to go further than the other to find themselves a wife” (Voionmaa 1969, 409). Extended families were indeed a phenomenon of precapitalist society: by the early twentieth century there were very few of them left. However, they are not an anthropological curiosity peculiar to eastern Finland. They were also relatively common in Russia and all the way to the Balkan Peninsula in eastern Europe. We suggested above that the basic bond between people could be social exchange. Most social psychological theories of interaction are in point of fact exchange theories (e.g. Homans 1961; Blau 1964; Chadwick-Jones 1976) where people exchange anything from money and love to expressions of mutual respect and contempt. The point is that the man of exchange theories is an egoistic individual whose interaction is guided by the pursuit of maximum benefit, just like the players in the PD game. In calculating the benefit, we have to subtract the costs arising from attaining it; also, the greater the individual considers his investments, the greater the benefit should be. The man of exchange theories is a rational, calculating individual. Nevertheless, selfish though he is, he is satisfied with equal exchange if each of the individuals gains a net profit proportionate to his investment. If he feels he is getting less than the others, he will consider the apportionment unjust and become dissatisfied and ag-

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gressive. So could exchange represent the hard core of all cooperative interaction; does all interaction fit into the universal formula presented by exchange theory? Is exchange the social bond that under all conditions ties individuals together; is it social psychology’s law of gravity? Very probably not. Exchange theory is not as universal and scientific a representation as social psychologists seem to believe. As a matter of fact it is very limited and ethnocentric. No doubt the people of precapitalist Finnish society exchanged commodities and gave presents to each other, but the important interaction relations of the extended family cannot be adequately described by modern social psychology’s exchange theory. The member of the extended family was not the egoistic, self-interested individual of exchange theories, comparing his own benefits with those of others, especially of other members of the same family. The material rewards he received were not related to his contributions to the family’s economy. All did what they could around the house, and earnings from jobs outside the home were also pooled. Most needs were satisfied by common property - even fines were paid from common funds. Voionmaa (1969, 472-473) quotes a description of a Mordvinian family of the nineteenth century: “With the exception of a few trivialities, such as wedding gifts, no family member can have property that is his own, because the bee feeds upon the common comb, not out of his own pouch; (...I everything that belongs to the family belongs in part to him, but again everything that belongs to him must also be the common property of the family. Every family member is provided with clothes, shoes, food and drink at the family’s expense, and can be sure that he need not suffer from hunger or cold for as long as he lives with the family. If, as is often the case, he decides to work to earn some money, it is his duty to give all that he earns to the family’s common fund; he must never hide it, because if he so does, he would actually be hiding it from himself and not from others.”

Third case: Mill sect in western Finland If the individual member of the extended family had behaved like the man of exchange theory, he would have been in serious trouble; and there will be serious trouble for the researcher who attempts to turn exchange

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theory into a universal social psychological theory. This also applies to theories according to which group structure is universally determined by leadership or division of labour, both of which were sometimes lacking in precapitalist communities. One such community was the ‘mill sect’ established by riverside peasants in western Finland. Peasants used to build jointly owned mills beside rapids. Like extended families, these ‘mill sects’ went out of existence with the emergence of capitalism, at the latest by the turn of the twentieth century. It seems unlikely that sociometric descriptions or exchange theories could adequately describe the cooperative interaction within these sects. According to Aaltonen (1944), the formal organization of mill sects was rather loose. They did not usually have a leader, nor was there any distinct division of labour. If someone noticed that the mill was in need of repair, he would usually do the job himself. Meetings were chaired by whoever happened to be around. Minutes were not necessary at meetings because it went without saying that all agreements would be kept. Any member of the faction could represent it in court. The somewhat slack administration of the mill faction was nevertheless adequate and strong enough, “because it was based on equality and the sense of responsibility of every member”, as Aaltonen writes. It would be wrong to say that mill sects and extended families are some sort of anthropological curiosity. Aaltonen points out that the same features can be discerned in other collaboration between people and in selfgovernment. In the early seventeenth century the Estate of the Peasantry did not keep minutes of meetings, nor were matters put to the vote. In those days, “people simply could not understand the idea that the majority could dictate a decision that the minority would have to abide by, and therefore the Peasantry at that time tended to avoid votes: it was also unknown in court administration” (Aaltonen 1944, 203). When people were linked to each other through natural relations and not by a division of labour and exchange it was natural to assume that the group should take a common stand on issues. The group has to reach that opinion through discussion, and then every member of the group can consider it his own. It was not until the spread of the individualistic concept of man that a decision-making procedure became possible whereby a group decision is made mechanically by calculating the opinions of separate, equal and independent individuals.

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Fourth case: The Society of the Broken Dish The extended family of eastern Finland and the mill sect of western Finland disappeared with industrialization and the growth of the capitalist economic system. However, it is possible to find this kind of community, even in modern society. One such community was the peculiar ‘Society of the Broken Dish’, whose story is told by Georg Simmel: “Years ago, some industrialists met for dinner. During the meal, a dish fell on the floor and broke. One of the diners noted that the number of pieces was identical with that of those present. One of them considered this an omen, and, in consequence of it, they founded a society of friends who owed one another service and help. Each of them took a part of the dish home with him. If one of them dies, his piece is sent to the president, who glues the fragments he receives together. The last survivor wiU fit the last piece, whereupon the reconstituted dish is to be interred.’’ (Wolff 1964, 124-125) Figure 4.4. is a perfect description of this community, whose members

are tied to each other not by exchange but a mutual promise to help each other. The piece of broken dish that each member took home corresponds to the totem of the tribes that Durkheim studied: it revives shared feelings and the promise that was made. This society of friends could be called a moral society because its members are bound by a certain ethic. The question now becomes: Is moral activity more generally something that should not be described in terms of exchange? Kohlberg (1981, 409-412) outlines in his theory three levels of moral judgement, each of which is divided into two stages. The first level is “preconventional” moral, where in the assessment of acts one ignores common agreements or norms and aims only to avoid punishment or physical harm. The moral of the individuals of exchange theories would seem to be of this type; something that cannot really be called moral in the strict sense of the word. The kind of moral that Kohlberg calls “conventional” may perhaps also be fitted into exchange theories. Here, the individual seeks social acceptance of his acts and tries to avoid reproach, either in the eyes of his immediate environment or, more generally, as a ‘good citizen’. If we assume that a good reputation is the same as a reward and a bad reputation the ‘cost’ of gaining a reward, conventional moral can be described in the terms of exchange theories. Kohlberg’s “post-conventional” moral represents the level where right

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and wrong, or ethics in the genuine Wittgensteinian sense, is for the first time at stake. Acts are judged relative to moral norm systems, not to what is advantageous or to what the environment expects. Norm systems are regarded as more fundamental than the roles and rules prevailing in society; at the highest stage they are understood as universal ethical principles. Moral that rises to this level is by definition something other than the rational-egoistic behaviour of the man of exchange theories. An individual may do something because it is right, even though the act is harmful to him or he is despised for it. Or he may refrain from doing something because it would be wrong, even though the act would be profitable or he would be praised for it. Any attempt to defend exchange theories by arguing that observation of the general moral norm is a ‘benefit’ and breaking it a ‘punishment’ or ‘cost’ would imply forcing moral action into a totally unnatural schema, because genuine moral thought does not care about the benefit but about abiding by the norm. To better understand this way of thinking, we should analyse man as a rule-abiding actor (as HarrC and Secord, 1972, do). Analogous models of explanation are also found within the area of linguistic activity. Brown (1965, 407; 411), for example, draws a parallel between moral and grammatical systems that can be used for determining which sentences are right and which are wrong.

2. Was Collectivity a Result of Man’s Primitiveness? In the four cases we have just examined - Montaillou, the extended family of eastern Finland, the mill sect, and ‘The Society of the Broken Dish’ our focus was on the character of the social bond that bound individuals to each other. It seems that in preindustrial and precapitalist society, this bond was of a different kind than it is in most groups in modem society. But was this due simply to the fact that in those days people, in terms of their psychic constitution, were different from those of modern society? In other words: is it possible that historical social psychology could be reduced to the changing of man, to historical psychology? T o throw some light on this question, we shall now look at three further cases.

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Finnish man in the sixteenth century First we have a portrait of Finnish man in the sixteenth century by Renvall (1949), a Finnish historian who began his scientific career as a psychologist. He attempted to reconstruct a picture of the psychological structure of man in sixteenth century Finland by studying criminal law and judicial praxis at that time: what kind of crimes did people commit, how were they punished, what was the prevailing conception of gullt, of evidence, of diminished responsibility and extenuating circumstances, how did folk behave in court? On the basis of his materials Renvall concludes that sixteenth century man was so closely tied to his perceptions and immediate environment that if anything sudden happened in the environment, the response too would be very abrupt. In the words of Renvall’s long English summary: “Finnish 16th century man was not an independent individual, but a member of a community, very closely tied to his social environment. His life in general was for the most part the spontaneous community life of relatively primitive man. (...) One of the things that linked 16th century man with his environment was his highly emotional, affective attitude. He was never just an onlooker; he took up an emotional attitude towards everything that entered the sphere of his observations. He was specially sensitive to things that had a disturbing effect on his activities and aspirations. The equilibrium of his mind, supposing a mental state like that existed, was easily disturbed; his weak power of reflection went to the winds and affective indignation took hold of him. (.. .) On the other hand, 16th century man was bound by strong ties to the world around him because of the fact that he lived mainly in the world of his perceptions. His own inner world, the world of his thoughts, had very little self-sufficiency in comparison with his perceptions of the outer world. Consequently, he was far more a part of the field formed by himself and his environment than a separate individual, acting according to the requirements of his own mental world.” (Renvall 1949, 201-203) While it seems perfectly clear that the reactions of sixteenth century man were immediate and abrupt, I am not so sure whether they should be described as affectual; as being based purely on emotions. Perhaps the positive and negative feelings that came with success and failure were simply less controlled and accordingly expressed more openly than we are used to doing (see Le Roy Ladurie 1978,139). More important, man show-

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ed less self-control even in his action; his social responsiuity, which according to Asplund (1987) is one elementary form of social life, was more spontaneous.

‘Experiments’ with nineteenth century Russian Lapps Because of high social responsivity, social influence would not have assumed the same forms in sixteenth century society as it did in Sherif‘s and Asch’s experiments that we described in chapter 1. When man is closely tied to the outside world and his perceptions, his reactions to external stimuli tend to be sudden and violent. This was a distinctive feature of Russian Lapps as late as the early nineteenth century, as the peculiar ‘experiments’ in social influence by the Finnish explorer M.A. CastrCn suggest. On his expeditions he had heard stories about the surprising reactions of the Lapps, and now two Russian merchants offered to verify them: “Before they started they hid all the knives, axes and other weapons that might have been within easy reach. Then, suddenly, one of them stepped in front of the woman and clapped his hands. The woman immediately went for him in a fit of rage, tearing and ripping, hitting him with all her might. Once she had attacked the poor merchant she fell back, breathless, onto the bench. It took her some while to get her breath back. She recovered her equilibrium, and decided firmly never to allow herself to be frightened again. And the next time this happened she only uttered a piercing cry. While she was still rejoicing over the failed attempt, another merchant waved a handkerchief in front of her face, but at the same ran out of the room. Now the woman rushed around from one to another, tossed one on the floor, hit the other, threw a few against the wall, shook others by their hair. (...) We tried to frighten another girl by dropping shingle on her head. She screamed and ran out. We also banged the wall outside with a hammer. The woman was startled, but just at that moment someone covered her eyes and she soon calmed down.” (CastrCn 1870, 135-136) Studies in Asia after the Russian Revolution Finnish explorers (most of whom were philologists) often met with strange behaviour and ways of thinking on their nineteenth century expeditions. They did not however seek a social psychological explanation. They

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thought that Lapps and Samoyeds quite simply were a different kind of people to us; this was a good enough explanation for them. For example, it seemed that the only way these people were able to think was in strictly concrete terms. CastrCn (1870) met a Samoyed who was unable to say “my wife is ill” because in reality she was perfectly well. And when Donner (1979, 56) asked a Samoyed how to say “my river” in his own language, “he angrily replied that the river was not mine and that only Samoyeds were allowed to fish in the river”. Philologists were annoyed about having to work with such stupid people. It is not unusual to hear that people’s living conditions are also a direct consequence of the kind of people they are. This is not only the commonsense explanation; up to quite recently it was the ‘official’ explanation in textbooks too. For instance geography textbooks asserted that “Had Roumania been inhabited by a more enterprising people, it would no doubt today be a prosperous agricultural and industrial country”; or: “Russia is immensely rich in natural resources, but a major part of its income is lost because of an ignorant and lazy people”; or: “Sluggishness has made it (Spain) a poor country” (quotations from Finnish textbooks published in 1920, 1936 and 1951). The Soviet psychologist A.R. Luria started out on a completely different set of assumptions in his study of the early 1930s in which, under the supervision of his teacher Vygotsky, he examined the ‘primitive’ thought of people in outlying regions of Central Asia. His aim was to show that mental processes are historical in origin; that changes in social life and practice also bring changes in cognitive activities. He studied village dwellers in remote parts of the Soviet Union, areas whose socio-economic and cultural structures had not yet been affected by the Revolution. The subject was shown a picture of a group of objects such as a hammer, a saw, a log, and a hatchet. Then he was asked which of these objects did not fit in with the others. If the subject said they all belonged together, Luria would say: “Yet one man says the hammer doesn’t fit here”. This “one man” was concrete enough to be understood by the subject, and he could now go on by analysing why the other man was wrong: you use the saw to cut logs, the hatchet and sometimes the hammer to chop logs. The log is just as necessary as the other objects (Luria 1976, 91-99). Luria’s results are consistent with the theory according to which the form of practical activities that surround people and that they carry out

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through their own everyday acts is reflected in their thought patterns: in how they perceive, think, imagine. In remote areas everyday activities are concrete and directly determined by the object of action. Therefore people named colours according to concrete illustrations: peach, cotton in bloom, tobacco, calf‘s-dung. Self-analysis was equally concrete. When Luria asked: What sort of a person are you? What kind of shortcomings do you have? the answer would usually be: “Yes, well, my clothing’s poor (...I after all, I’m no longer young (...>” (Luria 1976, 24-26; 144-155). These results, however, say nothing about causal relations. They fit into the theory that people think in concrete terms because their way of life centres around concrete objects and concrete acts that are in direct contact with nature. But they also fit into the theory that they live this kind of concrete life because they are simple, primitive people. We need a dynamic, experimental comparison to find out which of these hypotheses is correct. This is exactly what Luria does next. He carried out his study at a time when collectivization and many other radical socio-economic changes, including the emancipation of women, were gradually spreading to the outlying regions of Central Asia in the wake of the socialist revolution. Active kolkhoz workers and women students at a teacher’s school were among the groups who had already been affected by the reforms. He therefore takes them as a control group and investigates their ways of thought too. His results show that these groups had a distinctly more modern way of thinking than the peasants or illiterate women in remote villages, even though they were the same people. The psyche of a people is not invariable; it changes with history, with alterations in living conditions and ways of life. It is wrong to explain social psychological forms of interaction by refemng to people’s thought; both of these change when people are forced to take into account the new laws arising from the new mode of production.

3. How Should the Past be Assessed? The few cases reviewed are but a fraction of the vast material available to historical social psychology; material from different eras, different countries, in different languages. Instead of presenting further examples, we feel it is more important to try to organize the material in some way. The

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medieval village of Montaillou and the Finnish man living in an extended family represent a specific type of community; but what would modem man think of it? There is something in these communities that seems to appeal to people living in the industrial society of today. In those days gone by people lived close to nature and each other in tight-knit communities. Many things that for us are painful and difficult were daily routine for them. Ferdinand Tonnies, in a book written in 1887, calls this kind of community a Gemeinschaft, where people “remain essentially united in spite of all separating factors’’ (Tonnies 1963, 65). In today’s highly differentiated society, where people are often troubled by loneliness and a feeling of detachment, there is a growing need for togetherness, for a feeling of belonging somewhere, a longing for the community of olden days. At the micro level, this is reflected in the popularity of the kind of group work known as sensitivity training (see Back 1972). The individual who in a T-group has experienced strong emotional attachment to the other members of the group hopes this feeling will carry him through the lonely hours of the next few days or weeks, in the same way as the clan members that Durkheim described carried the memory of their last corroboree on their lonely hunts. An example of the longing for the old days at the macro level is the rise of Green movements in Europe. In old communities there was no pollution scare, no dying forests, no threats of a nuclear power plant exploding, no threat of a nuclear holocaust. This is why people want to go back. Tonnies too is sympathetic towards the Gemeinschaft. He feels it is ‘organic’compared with modem society or the Geseflschaft, which he considers a ‘mechanical’ aggregate of separate individuals. In the latter people are no longer essentially united in spite of all separating factors, but “essentially separated in spite of all uniting factors” (Tonnies 1963, 65). In the former type of community people could (and often did) fight like cat and dog yet they remained united by certain collective factors that were above them. In modem society people may be strongly attracted to each other or bound together by official agreement; yet essentially they are separate individuals. The detachment is apparent for instance in the fact that no single person can represent the whole, because the whole is highly differentiated and very complicated: “In the Gesellschaft, as contrasted with the Gemeinschaft, we iind no

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actions that can be derived from an a priori and necessarily existing unity; no actions, therefore, which manifest the will and the spirit of the unity even if performed by the individual; no actions which, in so far as they are performed by the individual, take place on behalf of those united with him.” In the Gesellschaft people’s interaction is characterized by individualist egoism and the possibility to withdraw to private life: everyone is “by himself and isolated, and there exists a condition of tension against all others”. And further: “Their spheres of activity and power are sharply separated, so that everybody refuses to everyone else contact with an admittance to his sphere; i.e. intrusions are regarded as hostile acts. Such a negative attitude toward one other becomes the normal and always underlying relation of these power-endowed individuals, and it characterizes the Gesellschaft in the condition of rest; nobody wants to grant and produce anything for another individual, nor will he be inclined to give ungrudgingly to another individual, if it be not in exchange for a gift or labor equivalent that he considers at least equal to what he has given” (Tonnies 1963, 65). Shortly after the publication of Tonnies’ book Durkheim wrote a review of it in which he took an opposite stand on historical development. According to Durkheim earlier communities were no more organic than today’s societies, and he also emphasized the collective nature of the latter (Loomis 1963, note 27). In his book on the division of labour in society, Durkheim describes as “mechanical” the early community where the division of labour was still relatively undeveloped and where solidarity was based on people’s similarities and on strong pressure to conform. Man does not yet appear as an autonomous individual but the individual conscience “is a simple dependent upon the collective type and follows all its movements, as the possessed object follows those of its owner’’ (Durkheim 1933, 130). By contrast, in the society of “organic solidarity” where there is a highly deve!oped division of labour, people are separate personalities detached from their community. Conformity is not forced upon them but cooperation and solidarity are built upon norms that regulate inter-individual relations and interaction. Sociometry, exchange theory, and other similar instruments of social psychology have been developed by observing phenomena that occur in the Gesellschaft: separate individuals, exchange between individuals, etc. This is why they are suitable for the description and explanation of variations

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observable in modem communities. However, if we limit ourselves to this one task and to these instruments, we will be doing precisely the same thing as the researcher who tried to explain why different objects fall to the ground at a different speed although he had no knowledge of gravity; or the variations in socio-economic status without any idea why the phenomenon called SES exists in society; or the variations in book reading without even considering the question of what the whole system of producing and reading books really means. Nor are these instruments very helpful in a comparison between community and society since it would be unfair to evaluate the former with the methodological and theoretical tools that have developed in and from the latter type of society. It should also be obvious that we cannot produce a very accurate picture of society by an analysis of community only. We therefore need tools that can help us grasp both community and society at one and the same time on their own terms, and also to understand the historical change from the former to the latter; in other words we need an historical sociology and social psychology. Another important question - which is also of political consequence that can only be answered through a careful historical analysis is whether a return to community is even possible. If not, then all the craving is hardly worthwhile. Perhaps we should look ahead to try to help those people who find life in modem society intolerable; to try to find new solutions not by bringing back the Gemeinschaft, but by overcoming today’s Gesellschaft?

C. The Development of Modern Society: Some Classical Thematizations The change from the community life of olden days to the way of life in modem society is a subject that is discussed extensively in all the classics of the social sciences; not only by sociologists such as Tonnies, Durkheim, Weber and Simmel, but also by political economists such as M m and psychologists such as Freud. They all thematize the problem in their own particular way and therefore uncover slightly different aspects of the change. We shall spend the remaining part of this chapter studying these thematizations. We will start with Marx, then move on to the sociologists, and finally discuss Freud. Our main concern is not however with the classical writers themselves but with the classical problems they raise. The

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perspective from which we approach these problems is that of historical social psychology: that is, following our excursions, we always return to the question of the forms and historical change of cooperative interaction.

1. From Feudalism to Capitalism In Marx’s theory the factor that corresponds to gravity is capital. Capital is the ‘social gravity’ whose laws make capitalist society a totality, more than the mechanical sum of the forces pushing and pulling it in different directions. If we discard Marx’s methodological principles and describe medieval European society by enumerating some of its main characteristics, we will be left with a list that looks something like this: (1) Land ownership was the basis for all other social relations. (2) Therefore the class structure was hierarchic. The King and the Catholic church headed the hierarchy - and the King was usually regarded as the supreme owner of all land. Then came the nobility, and finally the peasants. There was a corresponding hierarchy in land ownership: the lord of the manor owned the land in his own province, his vassals held their own land and, within these limits, the peasants were entitled to their holdings. The entire population of the country lived off the toil of the peasants. The peasants handed their surplus product over to the other classes for consumption, not through economic relations but directly, through the coercion of the ruling classes. (3) With the exception of mass migrations caused by war, famine or religious movements, there was very little geographical or social mobility. (4) Most market commodities were the produce of so-called simple commodity production. The craftsman who made goods by hand owned his means of production. The product of his labour was his to sell. (5) People were more directly bound to each other than they are today. The village people could see how the cobbler, tailor and blacksmith worked, so they knew more or less how much work went into making a pair of shoes, a coat, or a scythe and they used this knowledge as a measure when they exchanged goods. The peasant saw in concrete form how much of the product of his labour he could keep and how much he had to give to the landowner. Power relations were very clear and the exercise of power was more visible than the often anonymous use of power in modern society.

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In his theory as to how feudal society transformed into modem capitalist society, Marx concentrated on point (4) of our list of characteristic features: commodity production. The change was inevitable, firstly, because of the development of the forces of production. New machines were invented, as were new sources of energy to run them. Simple commodity production was replaced by industrial mass production, and better means of land and sea transportation gave impetus to the growth and expansion of trade. Secondly, there was at the same time a revolutionary change in production relations when capital and labour were separated from each other. While the means of production had been owned by the person who made the product, in capitalist society there was, on the one hand, the owner of capital (machines, buildings, etc.) and, on the other hand, the worker, or owner of labour power. In the production of commodities these two elements must meet. This takes place on the labour market: the owner of capital hires the worker’s labour power for a certain period of time. In the labour process, within the factory, this labour power is put into productive use according to the instructions and orders of the owner of capital. The product of labour remains at the disposal of the capitalist. It is a profitable enterprise for him because he is left with the surplus value produced in the labour process: that is, the difference between (1) the value which the living labour creates in the production process and (2) the value which the capitalist pays to the worker in the form of wages and what is needed for the reproduction of his labour power. So in capitalism, surplus value is appropriated through economic relations rather than by coercive means. There is also another point of view from which we can define surplus value. With the expansion and development of capitalism the use-value of commodities, their utility for need-satisfaction, becomes of secondary importance in production. Their exchange-value becomes dominant. A new inner logic develops within the system of money and production. In the days of barter the peasant sold his products to the merchant for the things he needed; commodities were exchanged for money only for the purpose of getting some other commodity (C-M-C’). The use-value of the commodities was all that mattered. The logic of capitalist production is that money or capital is exchanged for goods in order to get more money, i.e. in order to increase the value of capital (M-C-M’). The added value is not created in exchange: the product is not merely bought at a lower price to be sold for a higher price. The surplus comes from the labour that is in-

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vested in the production of the commodity. The return on the amount of money invested in production (the difference beween M’ and M) is thus surplus value as defined from a different point of view. The idea of production is to transform labour into surplus value over and over again. Marx (1977, 254) says that the aim of the individual capitalist is not profit on any single transaction, nor to collect riches by saving money from circulation, but “the unceasing movement of profit-making”, which he achieves by “throwing his money again and again into circulation”. This is the process that ultimately transforms money into capital.

The logic of capitalism In his analysis of the forces that dissolved feudal society and created capitalist society Marx made a distinction between the ‘logical’ and the ‘historical’. There were factors during the prehistory of capitalism that were instrumental in the emergence of the new system but that were not part of its logic. Once capitalism had advanced to the stage where its own inner laws began to determine the course of its development, these factors disappeared (Zelenv 1980, 37). The role of these factors was particularly important at the stage of “primitive accumulation” where, for various reasons, capital began to accumulate in the hands of certain merchants and landowners, and where a large number of peasants lost their land and became the free labour force that capitalism needed. M a n (1977, 876) himself says that there is no single formula for this process: “The history of this expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders, and at different historical epochs.” Thus the historical development of machinery and large-scale industry is a question that Marx (1977, 492-639) investigates strictly in the context of the capitalist logic. He starts his analysis by a quotation from John Stuart Mill: “It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being”. Then, without further ado, he sets us on the theoretical tracks along which his analysis of capitalism moves: “That is, however, by no means the aim of the application of machinery under capitalism. Like every other instrument for increasing the productivity of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for

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himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing. The machine is a means for producing surplus-value.” This is the ‘logical’perspective from which he discusses the historical development of industry. Another important methodological distinction in Marx is between appearance and essence. Psychologists and sociologists who lean on the positivist tradition do not make this distinction, but paint a picture of their object on the basis of what is immediately apparent to the eye; they paint a picture of the surface of the object. Marx (1972, 817) however says that “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided’’ . There is more to capitalist society than meets the eye; the way it is portrayed by bourgeois ideology is not the whole truth. Let us take a closer look at three of the many facets that Lukes (1973) distinguishes in the ideology of individualism: (1)dignity, (2) autonomy, and (3) privacy. The first of these concepts implies that every individual human being has intrinsic value and should be treated accordingly. This idea is contained not only in official statements such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which begins by declaring its “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. It is also the basic principle of the kind of political democracy where people enjoy universal suffrage. And further, on the labour markets of capitalist society people appear as equal owners of their labour power or of capital: “The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man” (Mam 1977,280). These ironic words are meant to prepare the reader for the conclusion that recognition of the inherent dignity of every individual is no more than the surface of capitalism. The surface conceals existing inequalities, such as the fact that the worker is not only free to sell his labour power but also forced to do so; and that when this labour power is used, workers must struggle collectively to have laws passed in protection of their dignity (ibid., 415-416). Autonomy, the second basic idea of individualism, finds expression in the notion that every individual is free to make his own decisions. Although he is subjected to various external pressures, according to the liberalist and individualist concept of man he is capable of reaching practical decisions as

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the result of independent and rational reflection (Lukes 1973, 52-58). This is how we tend to explain the impact of electoral campaigns in political democracy: every citizen is conceived not only as an individual with inherent dignity (and therefore with a vote) but also as an autonomous voter who cannot escape political propaganda but who nevertheless makes his final decision autonomously. The idea of autonomy has a rational background in the historical development that released man from the bonds of feudal society and turned him into a free worker. At the same time however, this surface hides the new kind of ties that developed. As Marx (1977, 719) writes, “The Roman slave was held by chains; the wagelabourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads. The appearance of independence is maintained by a constant change in the person of the individual employer, and by the legal fiction of a contract.” The third basic idea of individualism, that of privacy, is that every individual has the right to withdraw into his own private area within which he should be left alone by others. The concept of privacy as we know it today came in with capitalism and the liberalist and individualist ideology. In ancient civilizations people who withdrew into privacy were regarded as not being quite human; they were like slaves who were not permitted to enter the public realm, or like barbarians who knew nothing of such life (Lukes 1973, 59-66). In the Middle Ages many of the things we today do in strict privacy were carried out in public. For instance, medieval etiquette and manners books told people how they should behave if they came across someone who was urinating or defecating in the street, or if they had to share a bed with another person (Elias 1978, 130-33; 162). But again the surface of the phenomenon covers up rather than reveals the whole truth. In reality our privacy is continuously being intruded upon by public authorities and their extensive data registers, although we might not always be aware of this. This trend does not arise from forces alien and opposite to individualism, but from individualism itself. As Abercrombie, Hill and Turner (1986, 151) summarize, “the very process that we have called the Discovery of the Individual not only gives importance to individuals, it also makes it meaningful to tell individuals apart, to identify them, to register them and ultimately to control them; the uniqueness of the individual is his subordination”. On the other hand the walls we build in protection of our cherished privacy prevent us from going out to help people or from cooperating with other people, even when this would be to

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the benefit of us all. What on the surface seems like a right to private life may beneath the surface mean a sentence to isolation.

Social psychological changes We noted earlier (pp. 168-171) that a change in the mode of production does not directly and mechanically affect the individuals concerned. They do however face a completely new situation. They must take into account new kinds of laws, confront and solve new kinds of problems. Through these processes of day-to-day practical activity, people also begin to change, even though it may take generations for the changes to become evident. Let us take a few examples. The replacement of the feudal by the capitalist mode of production represented a very profound social psychological change because it took place in one of the most important spheres of cooperative interaction, i.e. in production. It would be wrong however to identify new machines, for instance, as the ‘cause’ that under all conditions produced the same ‘effect’. New machines created new realities that people had to take into account in one way or another; but the reception they received was not the same everywhere. In England Luddites destroyed new machinery in the fear of unemployment, others accepted the change without any resistance. However, it is clear that in the long term people’s habits and ways of life were deeply affected by their new machine-paced jobs. In precapitalist society work was not understood as abstract ‘labour in general’, but as concrete work such as growing crops on a piece of land. It was carried out in accordance with the rhythm of the day and the year rather than according to abstract working hours. The skill requirements were knowing how to do this or that task. Children learned the job by watching other people doing it and by joining in. The immediate meaning of work was clear because all of its products were concrete and vital goods that were consumed by the family or people in the neighbourhood. All this began to change with the arrival of capitalism and industrial work. Although the worker is still doing concrete work on a machine, in the fields or an office, he realizes that he is also ‘working’ in a general, abstract sense, that his labour power is being used as part of society’s total labour force. This means that the individual who is made redundant is faced not only with a declining standard of living and problems as to what to do with

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his time, but also with being excluded from society in many different ways. Work is no longer carried out according to the rhythm of nature, but according to a set schedule and set rules. On the job the worker has to internalize a discipline that makes no allowance for his own temporary needs and moods; on shift-work he even has to upset the biological rhythm of his body. The most important job qualifications - such as reading, writing and doing arithmetic - have become so general that they are required in practically all kind of work. These skills are taught at school rather than learnt at home by watching other people working. The evolution of the modem industrial worker serves as a general example of how social psychological changes take place in history: rather than abrupt and dramatic transitions, there is a very slow transformation of the activities through which people respond and adapt to new circumstances. The new generation is in a different position to the one before it, and thus changes in a different way as well. Marx vividly describes the measures that were taken in the early days of capitalism to raise the labour power that the new system needed: “Thus were the agricultural folk first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wagelabour”. The socialization of later generations was much easier: “The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of the mode of production as self-evident natural laws” ( M a n 1977, 899). Although some of the changes described above took place with the advent of the capitalist system, they were not restricted to this system but were essentially connected with industrial work. If we are to believe Deutscher (1967,44), the process of industrialization also imposed new requirements on habits and work discipline in post-revolution Soviet Union: “The habits of settled industrial life, regulated by the factory siren, which had in other countries been inculcated into the workers, from generation to generation, by economic necessity and legislation, were lacking in Russia. The peasants had been accustomed to work in their fields according to the rhythm of Russia’s severe nature, to toil from sunrise to sunset in the summer and to drowse on the tops of their stoves most of the winter. They had now to be forced and conditioned into an entirely new routine of work. They resisted, worked sluggishly, broke or damaged

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tools, and shifted restlessly from factory to factory and from mine to mine. The government imposed discipline by means of harsh labour codes, threats of deportation, and actual deportation to forced labour camps.” This quotation invites another, where we see how the qualifications necessitated by industrial wage-labour - qualifications that “by education, tradition and habit” have already become “self-evident natural laws’’ to workers of advanced capitalist and socialist countries - are still lacking in the traditional village communities of the developing world: “In many parts of the world we find that one works as necessity calls; this may be the need for the day’s food, or for preparation for a ceremonial, or it may be the need of the land or the growing plant which must be attended to on that particular day. But the machine has no such insistent need; so if the worker has enough food or money for his needs, he does not see why he has to go to his job. In fact, if he also has a garden, or if the fish are running in the stream, he has a valid reason for not going.” (Mead 1954, 261) This brings us back to the difficulties with which capitalism had to struggle in its early days in Europe. As long as people had land it was hard to persuade them to move into the cities and sell their labour power. Thus there were two ways in which man had to free himself. First, he had to be ‘free’ from the means of production, i.e. he was not to own land or money capital. The dark side of ‘the logic of freedom’ is the loss of security that stems from this ‘liberation’. The bright side is that the individual is expected to own his labour power in order to be able to sell it. He must be personally free, that is he must not be slave to anyone (Marx 1977, 874). This means he is freed from feudal ties and constraints. He has more room to grow as an individual and as a personality. On the other hand new kinds of bonds bind him to the economic system that is no longer based on direct interaction with nature, but which might be called ‘another nature’ that man has created and that has its own inner laws. Erich Fromm was the first writer to analyse these two aspects of freedom from a social psychological perspective. In his book, originally published in 1941, he says that some historians have painted all too dark a picture of the Middle Ages by refusing to see anything but the numerous bonds of medieval man. Others have tended to romanticize the Middle Ages, the fact that man knew his place and rarely felt insecure. The feeling of security was strengthened by the Church, which had an explanation for

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everything. A truthful account must, however, include both aspects; and both changed when feudalism was overthrown by the new economic system: “Man was deprived of the security he had enjoyed, of the unquestionable feeling of belonging, and he was torn loose from the world which had satisfied his quest for security both economically and spiritually. He felt alone and anxious. But he was also free to act and to think independently, to become his own master and do with his life as he could - not as he was told to do.” (Fromm 1960, 85) The structural changes that took place in the production system eliminated some problems, although they created new ones too. They touched off a development that began to shape the personality of modern man, a personality less closely tied to his social environment and less bound by his immediate perceptions than that of medieval man. At the same time, however, these changes are at the root of such problems of modern man as loneliness, lack of power, alienation and anomie. But it is impossible to say if the development has been purely positive or purely negative; the evaluations of Tonnies and Durkheim are both true in their own way. The important question that remains is whether it is possible to develop such forms of social production and modes of life that the individual, who through his practical activity participates in them and moulds them, can retain his freedom, or release himself from the new bonds which develop beneath the surface of freedom.

An excursion: how to study book reading If capital is the ‘social gravity’ whose laws make capitalist society a totality, then obviously these laws should apply not only in production but in other spheres as well. How, for example, do these laws explain the research object that caused us so much trouble in our reading study: books, the production, distribution and reading of books? The crude answer we propose below is at the same time an attempt to summarize the numerous parallel processes we have referred to above. Our answer-summary is presented in Figure 4.5. Read it from the top downwards, from feudal to capitalist mode of production. There are two lines of change, as was discussed above. The line on the left represents the changes that take place on the capital side: capital accumulates, better

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Figure 4.5. Some factors behind the development of modern literature as an institution

FEUDAL MODE OF PRODUCTION 2. Detachment of individual from natural bonds

Manifest level: sale and purchase of labour power

I

---- - - - -- ----- ------

Cr --- ------------------------Latent level: use of labour power

I

FREE LABOUR POWER

CAPITALIST MODE O F PRODUCTION

1. Uifwcation of both pruducl and

labour p u r r into exchange-value and use-value

5 . Dominance of exchange-values: essential relations covered by surface

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machines are developed, factories are built. One result of this process is the development of the art of printing and the graphic industry. However ths does not yet explain the birth of the book. The right hand side of the figure shows what happens simultaneously to people: the reader is born. The bond that ties the individual to his immediate environment is severed, his intellectual world expands. Individualism that comes with capitalism is one of the main psychological conditions that made the novel possible, as Watt (1957, 60) has shown: “The novel’s serious concern with the daily lives of ordinary people seems to depend upon two important general conditions: the society must value every individual highly enough to consider him the proper subject of its serious literature; and there must be enough variety of belief and action among ordinary people for a detailed account of them to be of interest to other ordinary people, the readers of novels. It is probable that neither of these conditions for the existence of the novel obtained very widely until fairly recently, because they both depend on the rise of a society characterized by that vast complex of interdependent factors denoted by the term ‘individualism’.” Watt’s example of the connections between individualism and the novel is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Cmsoe, which Marx saw in the same light. “The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with which Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine”, he wrote. “It is, rather, the anticipation of ‘civil society’, in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth. In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate” ( M a n 1973, 84). Marx’s (1975, 221) keen eye also spotted the problems created by the retreat of the individual from public life into his own privacy, his separation from other people, his ‘natural surroundings’. ‘‘It is no longer the spirit of the state where man behaves”, he wrote. “It has become the spirit of civil society, the sphere of egoism and of the bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community but the essence of difference. It has become the expression of the sefiaration of man from his community, from

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himself and from other men, which it was originally. It is now the abstract confession of an individual oddity, of a flrivute whim, a caprice.” The reader however needs his privacy. The opportunity for this arose when people started dividing houses up into rooms. Now, when you wanted to be in peace - to read a book, for example - you could retire to your own room (see Watt 1957, 187-188). People had learned how to read because it was one of the new qualifications required of the labour force, as part of the total development of the capitalist system. But how did the modern novel come into existence? How does the book relate to devetopment in society? Georg Lukhcs and his follower Lucien Goldmann provide an answer to this question. The similarity of fictional literature and social reality, they say, should not be sought in their content but in the form of the novel and the structure of society. In capitalist society exchange-value and use-value are completely separate. The former dominates the surface of society and hides the latter from view. The modern novel has the same structure. It is a genre where the hero is separated from the world by an insurmountable rupture. The world in which the hero lives is dominated by unauthentic exchange-values. In a sense the novel is a search for authentic values in an inauthentic world. (Goldmann 1975) The word “authentic” deserves a brief personal comment, which might help clanfy its meaning. Some time ago, in a bookshop in Amsterdam, I came across a copy of a Dutch translation of my social psychology textbook. Naturally I was pleased to see “my book” on the shelf; but at the same time this particular copy also aroused a feeling of foreignness in me. Although it was my work, the form in which I now found it was the result of many other people’s work as well: translator, editor, designer, typographer. Without knowing these people, I had been in cooperative interaction with them and was now holding the product of this interaction in my hand. This was “my book”, but I had to buy it to get it for myself. My diary, in which I wrote about my feelings later on, arouses very different feelings in me. Since I bought it, no one but I has written on its empty pages; I alone have made it what it is. It belongs to me and me alone. This diary represents something of the authenticity that we have lost since the dawn of industrial production, which has separated us from the products of our work. The results of empirical reading studies very often consist of a

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miscellaneous collection of correlations between reading and various background variables. The Marxist totality principle means that between the most essential empirical relations there must be a logical connection that arises from capital and its laws. Figure 4.5. is intended to give a rough idea of what this principle could mean. It would be taking our excursion too far if we went into detailed examples of how the principle could be put into practical use in reading studies. Sat sapienti, by now it should be clear why we keep empirical generalizations separate from ‘societal laws of gravity’; it should also be obvious what relevance Marx’s method of analysis has for historical social psychology.

2. From Traditional to Rational Action

The Communist Manifesto of 1848 contains a vivid description by Marx and Engels of the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary role in history. The bourgeoisie, they write, has overturned the whole traditional world, including traditional attitudes to certain occupations: “(it) has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers” . From the traditional family, the bourgeoisie “has tom away its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation”. All spheres of life are increasingly pervaded by a new kind of rationality, ‘‘the icy water of egoistical calculation” (Marx and Engels 1967, 82). In the American school of ‘sociological social psychology’, the idea of tradition abandonment appeared in the late 1940s in David Riesman’s study of the changing American character. Riesman starts out from the days when the prevailing character was ‘ ‘tradition-directed” . The term refers to “ a common element, not only among the people of precapitalist Europe but also among such enormously different types of people as Hindus and Hopi Indians, Zulus and Chinese, North African Arabs and Balinese”. Behaviour was strictly controlled by culture. There were separate sets of rules for every situation, and there was no real effort to find new solutions or to change things, nor indeed was this permitted (Riesman 1953,26-28). However from the end of the Middle Ages there begins in the West “the slow decay of feudalism and the subsequent rise of a type of society in

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which inner-direction is the dominant mode of insuring conformity”. Behaviour is no longer controlled by culture, nor do there exist separate norms for every situation. Instead, there develops inside the individual a “psychological gyroscope’’ that keeps him on course: “it is implanted early in life by the elders and directed toward generalized but nonetheless inescapably destined goals” (Riesman 1953, 28-31). Riesman’s inner-directed man is however not necessarily any more rational than tradition-directed man. He chooses his goals and pursues them in a “rational, nonauthoritarian and noncompulsive” way only insofar as he is autonomous. But inner-directed man may also adapt to the demands imposed by society; in this case he accepts the goals and movement as “merely given” (Riesman 1953, 287). Here, as Kecskemeti (1961) points out, the classics of European sociology were on completely different lines. Tonnies, Durkheim and Weber attempted to describe how the nature of social activity was transformed by superindividual societal processes. Weber defined the change as a transition from traditional action to rational action: the transformation from tradition-directed to inner-directed took place as a result of increasing rationalization in all spheres of life in society, including socialization. For example, there were ethical norms that told people to work hard and that forbade all kinds of extravagance, thus serving as a “psychological gyroscope”. According to Weber, this kind of Protestant ethic began to spread with the emergence of capitalism (Weber 1930). So the kind of rationality that is represented by capitalism and the kind of character that Riesman apparently had in mind when he was talking of inner-direction, emerged in the same historical process.

Types of social action Collins (1986, 62-63) asks whether rationalization constitutes “the master trend of history” for Weber. It is not easy to answer this question because Weber gives a number of meanings to his key concept. The most fundamental meaning is incorporated in his typology of social action. First, action may be traditional, i.e. the actor observes habits and customs automatically, without much self-reflection. Second, action may be purely affectual. Rational action is different from both of these types: it is characterized by conscious deliberation rather than automatic or spontaneous response. In means-end rational (zweckrational) action, all aspects

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of action are taken into account and weighed: “the ends, the means, and the secondary results”. In ualue-rational (wedratzonal) action, the actor sets himself an absolute value goal with no alternatives; only the means applied in the pursuit of this goal will be chosen on the basis of rational deliberation. (Weber 1947, 117) Weber’s definitions are extremely terse but at the same time very careful. He is aware that purposeful action in everyday life, once it has been repeated often enough, may become almost automatic, and that “attachment to habitual forms can be upheld with varying degrees of selfconsciousness and in a variety of senses”. The borderline between traditional and value-rational action is not watertight; the former may shade into the latter. Also, purely affectual behaviour “stands on the borderline of what can be considered ‘meaningfully’ oriented, and often it, too, goes over the line”. For instance, the actor may consciously give vent to emotional tension. Value-rational action is however distinguished from the affectual type “by its clearly self-conscious formulation of the ultimate values governing the action and the consistently planned orientation of its detailed course to these values” (Weber 1947, 116). It is also difficult to draw the dividing lime between means-end rational action and value-rational action. For example: How do we describe a scientist who is ‘value-rational’ in making choices with regard to his research activities? Weber (1947, 116) says that examples of pure rational orientation to absolute values would be the action of persons who, “regardless of possible cost to themselves, act to put into practice their convictions of what seems to them to be required by duty, honour, the pursuit of beauty, a religious call, personal loyalty, or the importance of some ‘cause’ no matter in what it consists”. It is indeed possible to picture many kinds of researchers who meet these criteria. A ‘value-rational’ researcher is one for whom truth is an absolute value and who tackles only those problems and applies only those methods that, upon a rational weighing of the alternatives available, would seem to lead to the discovery of truth. But the ‘value-rational’ label can also be applied to the scientist who in his research work wants to give his faithful service to his country - or to the scientist whose aims are revolutionary. The common denominator between these types - which in many respects are complete opposites - is that, in Weber’s words, their activity “always involves ‘commands’ or ‘demands’ to the fulfilment of which the actor feels obligated”. The researcher whose

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activity is based on means-end rationality pursues his goals in a different way. His choices are influenced not only by scientific considerations, but also by current theoretical and methodological trends, prospects of obtaining funding for his research project, the career implications of different choices, etc. None of these criteria are alone decisive, but everything is subject to rational weighing, “the end, the means, and the secondary results’ ’ . However, if we start out from Beckermann’s (1985) interpretation that Weber’s typology of social action is primarily a description of how the legitimacy of an order may be guaranteed, then we need to repaint these portraits. In the context of science, the traditional type would be represented by the researcher who automatically follows the conventional rules of scientific work and never questions their content. The affectual type could be the young scientist to whom the rules of science are still new and stimulating. The value-rational scientist would be convinced of the absolute value of certain basic rules of science, such as Merton’s (1957, 552-561) famous institutional imperatives: universalism, communism, disinterestedness and organized scepticism. The means-end rational scientist would probably hold that the attitudes of all three are somewhat ‘irrational’. For him, the norms of science are legitimate, but he will follow them only insofar as he is convinced that they are the best way to reach his own scientific goals.

War, peace, and types of rational action It would seem that means-end rationality is the most ‘modem’ of the four types of social action. At the same time it involves some very interesting problems. We have already touched on some of these problems in our discussion of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, but let us now look at how the game works when set in the context of the arms race. The two actors in this particular version are the United States and the Soviet Union. It is assumed that they both reason along the following lines: The security of our people can best be guaranteed if our adversary refrains from armament while at the same time we continue arming ourselves. If our adversary does continue to arm, then our only alternative is to follow suit. In other words: whatever the adversary does, we must strengthen our military capability. Yet the outcome of this arms race is not increased security, but a deadly

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trap for the whole world. The best result would be achieved if both parties could decide on a mutual reduction of arms; this is why the US and the Soviet Union have spent so much time sitting at the negotiating table. But as in the case of the two prisoners, the tendency to go back on one’s word and the fear that one’s counterpart will do so, effectively undermine attempts at a solid agreement. If both superpowers pursue individual rationality and consider only their own security, then the result cannot be collective rationality for the world as a whole. But what type of action, in Weberian terms, does this kind of individual rationality represent? Imagine what would happen if we told the story of the two prisoners, or of the two superpowers, to the boy who in Andersen’s fairy tale cried, “But the emperor wears no clothes!” Having heard our story, he might say: “But you have to confess if you’ve committed a crime!”, or “If nuclear bombs can kill us then they must not be made!” Or: “If you’ve made an agreement, then of c o u m you must not break it!” It is clear that this child believes in some absolute value, such as truth, peace, or keeping one’s word. When he makes a rational choice regarding his course of action in accordance with this goal, he is value rational. The action of the prisoners and the superpowers is of a different type. They are not committed to any single option; they will settle for any alternative - confessing or not confessing the crime, increasing or decreasing military capability, keeping or breaking their agreement - so long as it serves their own individual interests. They rationally weigh the ends and the means. It is this particular form of rationality that lies behind the problems here, not rationality per se. The question is: Are we, in our cooperative interaction (or the superpowers in theirs), in some way predestined to this kind of means-end rationality? And what would happen if the superpowers went over to value rationality? Wouldn’t this mean even greater dangers for the world? A firm belief in the absolute value of a certain religious or ideological goal can indeed lead to the most frightful consequences, and can even mean war; it has done so in the past and it continues to do so today. One example of this kind of value rationality is the theory “better dead than red”; the ideological goal is more important than the ‘costs’, including human lives, that may be incurred in the pursuit of that goal. However, we cannot analyse the problems of war and peace only in formal terms, without considering the contents of the values upon which value rational action is bas-

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ed. It is perfectly clear that an absolute value can be found that, in questions of war and peace, could solve the problems involved in means-end rational action. The value that we are looking for is, very simply, the preservation of human life in the world. It is interesting that this value would not seem to be at variance with what may be called ‘the logic of capitalism’. “The unceasing movement of profit-making’ ’ , which according to Marx is characteristic of this logic, is of course possible only if human life is allowed to continue in the world. ‘Better dead than red’ is not at all consistent with the logic of capitalism; ‘the show must go on’ is much more like it. Our conclusion is in keeping with the observations made in the iterated PD games. When the game is played time and time again, cooperation between the players usually develops (Barry and Hardin 1982,378). The condition for cooperation, in a game between egoistic individuals, is apparently that both actors can be sure they will meet again so that they have something at stake in their future interaction as well (Axelrod 1984). Perhaps there is still hope that the superpowers, to guarantee the continuation of the game, will eventually accept a kind of value rationality and an agreement in which the absolute value is the preservation of life in the world. An important difference between man and the animal world is that humans are aware of their own existence. The human individual is also aware that he will die. As a result of the growth of knowledge and rationality, people have learned how they can postpone the inevitable fact of death and lengthen their lives. In traditional societies people believed that the world would also, eventually, come to an end. Their fear was not that the world would be destroyed by man, for everything was believed to depend on the will of God. This has now changed dramatically; we are more than well aware that man is indeed capable of exterminating all life on earth, whether by using nuclear weapons or by poisoning the environment. Collective self-consciousness no longer consists merely in an awareness that the whole species may become extinct, but also in an understanding of the decisive role of man’s own actions in the future of humankind - or in collective death. This provides a completely new motivational and cognitive basis for collective rationality. We no longer have to dream about solving the problems of modern Gesellschaft and rational activity by going back to the Gemeinschaft and traditional modes of action. In a historical perspec-

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tive the rationality of modern man is of relatively recent origin and is also rather underdeveloped; there is clearly room for improvement. One particularly promising line of development seems to run from individual meansend rationality towards collective value rationality. This is a development whose nature and conditions can be illuminated by an historical social psychology using the formulae of modern theory of action and Weber’s concepts.

Rationality and the ‘underdeveloped’ world In a comparison of the advanced industrial nations of the West and the countries of Asia, Africa o r Latin America where the level of industrial development is comparatively low, there are two ways we can analyse the differences: in the light of Marx’s concept of capital, or in the light of Weber’s traditionality-rationality dimension. In American sociology and social psychology the latter has been the more common approach. For example, in Lerner’s study from the 1950s, the key concepts in his description of change in Turkey and the Arab countries of the Middle-East are “the passing of traditional society” and “modernizing styles of life”. The word “capitalism” cannot be found in the index, nor is there any reference in the footnotes to Marx’s theory (Lerner 1958). For certain anthropologists the underdeveloped areas are simply ‘‘those which have not adopted the body of customs constituting industrialism”; thus “contemporary industrialization is viewed as a case of the more general phenomenon of acculturation” (Slotkin 1960, 9; 21). The advice that we give to the developing countries is this: Give up your old customs and traditions, imitate the egoistic and individualistic means-end rationality of the Western countries! If you run into difficulties, don’t hesitate to ask us for help - our social psychologists have the answer to all your problems! The well-known American psychologist David McClelland, for instance, holds that development arises out of something he calls “ n Achievement”, which apparently refers to what we are left with when Weber’s Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism are emptied of all sociological content, psychologized and operationalized. McClelland believes that the best way to help the developing countries is to put their petty entrepreneurs through training courses where they are taught how “to think, talk, and act like a person with high n Achievement” (McClelland 1978).

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It is hardly surprising that the Western social psychologist is occasionally ashamed of his ‘science’. A large part of it is not only simplistic and naive, but also forms an extension of the anthropological tradition that started in the imperialist era: the tradition that took for granted its imperialist framework but tried within this framework to be as liberal and humane as possible. A suitable motto for this attitude has been provided by the Finnish anthropologist and sociologist Edward Westermarck, who said in his inauguration speech at the University of London in 1907: “I am convinced that in our relations to non-European peoples, a certain amount of sociological knowledge, if appropriately used, would be a much more satisfactory weapon than guns and gunpowder. It would be more humane - and cheaper as well” (Westermarck 1927, 294). Discussing the differences between traditional and rational action, Lerner (1958, 49) says that “whereas traditional man tended to reject innovation by saying ‘It has never been thus’, the contemporary Westerner is more likely to ask ‘Does it work?’ and try the new way without further ado”. But what if we analyse why ‘it has never been thus’ and find a rational reason that is still valid? If the man living in the developing world adopts the Western conception of what is necessary or of what does and doesn’t work, he will notice that everything that works comes from the West, not from his own culture. This leads to a serious identity crisis that can hardly be resolved any other way than by indiscriminate acceptance and adoption of all that comes from the West, or by a fundamentalistic adherence to one’s own tradition. However, if in the move from traditional to rational action the values of one’s own mode of life are accepted as the cornerstone of value rational activity, then it will be seen that many of the elements of one’s own culture work perfectly well. Consider for example the traditional African family, which according to Mbiti (quoted in Uzoka 1979) “includes children, parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters who may have their own children, and other immediate relatives”. And that is not all: “The family also includes the departed relatives, whom we have designated as the living dead. These are, as their name implies, ‘alive’ in the memories of surviving families, and are thought to be still interested in the affairs of the family to which they once belonged in their physical life”. How stunted our Western ‘nuclear family’ looks in comparison with this! Uzoka (1979) has attempted to show that the theory of the ‘nuclear’ nature of the modern family is a harmful

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myth: “Clearly, the freedom to call on members of one’s family network in times of emotional need (for plain emotional support) without fear of social sanctions, remains the one essential freedom denied to modem western peoples”. As far apart as sacred and profane are also the methods of traditional African shamans and the ‘rational’ medical practitioners of the West: they cannot be applied simultaneously for the same purpose because they would both be rendered ineffective. However we cannot be sure that the former system ‘does not work’ and that the latter has a solution to every problem. Western medicine can only diagnose an illness and prescribe a cure. Unlike the traditional healer, it has no answer to the patient’s concern as to why this happened to him; all it can tell is what has happened. Rappaport and Rappaport (1981) therefore suggest a two-phase procedure where Western medicine concentrates on mending organic disorders and leaves the ‘secondary anxiety’ - the question of “why” - to the traditional healer. This is often how the urban African tries to find a cure: “Thus, an individual who breaks his or her leg frequently goes to a Western clinic to get it repaired. The individual then consults a medicine man to determine the cause for the calamity and for a prescription (figuratively) to alleviate the problem (scorcery and spirit).” Things get more complicated when we take into account the sociological fact that the developing countries are part of the social entity that may be called the capitalist world-economy. The context within which the move from ‘traditionality’ to ‘rationality’ is now taking place in the developing countries is completely different from the context of a nascent capitalism in which European man went through the corresponding process. We cannot transfer the theories of the classics of European sociology and social psychology directly to contemporary African society; nor can we introduce practical systems that disregard the role of the capitalist world-economy. It is not very likely that the idea of leaving ‘secondary anxiety’ to the traditional healer will survive because the developing countries are being flooded with drugs pumped in by the Western pharmaceutical industry. For Weber, too, rationality has the connotation of “something active, a force that masters the world rather than passively adapting to it or going along with routine’’ (Collins 1986, 62-63). This kind of ‘rationality’ has also infiltrated into Western social psychology, which prefers to master foreign cultures by imposing its own recipes rather than seriously considering the

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native cultures’ own values and goals and then trying to decide what is in their best interest. In this regard it is acting in exactly the same way as the multinational corporations. Perhaps we need to have our science rewritten from a Third World perspective and by Third World writers before we can even dream of a truly scientific and universal synthesis that would pull social psychology together.

3. The Elongation of Mediating Chains

In traditional society man is directly bound to nature and to the natural objects of his needs. His relations to the people he cooperates with are also immediate. In modern society these relations assume a more indirect, mediated character. Capitalism leads among other things to increasing exchange between people and thus to an expansion of indirect economic relations. Along with increasing rationality, people’s day-to-day interaction becomes increasingly regulated by written rules and agreements. Some of Weber’s theories strongly implied that “rationality is based on written rules, and hence on paperwork” (Collins 1986,63). This is one aspect from which the historical change we have been discussing can be studied: it can be thematized as the elongation of mediating chains. Social psychological ideas for a discussion of the importance of this point can be found in the works of Georg Simmel and some of his followers.

Food and eating as a case in point Before moving on to these theoretical ideas, let us take one example from daily life of what we mean by the elongation of mediating chains: food and eating. Unlike primitive man, who ate raw meat and fish, in modern society we now eat prepared food. Cooking, the use of utensils, heat etc. represent one mediation that has distanced man from the object of his need: food. Without these, modern man would have great difficulty in satisfying his hunger, even if he had plenty of fish and meat. “Hunger is hunger”, M a n (1973, 92) wrote, “but the hunger gratified by cooked meat with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth”. People living in advanced industrial countries are also eating an increas-

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ing amount of convenience foods. A new link has appeared in the chain of mediations: the fast food industry and the related advertising industry. Apart from reducing the nutritional value of what we eat, this new link also has wider implications. Now that cooking takes up less of the average housewife’s time, changes are taking place in our family life and in the position of women. The new mediations are having an impact on our way of life. When we go to the supermarket to buy food we can rarely smell or taste whatever it is we are buying. Most of the foodstuffs are wrapped up in plastic. To find out what the package actually contains, we must be able to read and understand the technical description written on the small stick-on label. So instead of concretely sensing, we have to be satisfied with the linguistic-theoretical mediation represented by the list of ingredients. Contrary to medieval man, we are not allowed to bolt down our food. We must use a knife and fork, remember our table manners, watch out for anything that is fattening or “not good” for us. It is not until quite recently that all these tools and rules and all this health knowledge has come between man and what he eats. They have deprived many of us of the joys and pleasures of eating, and have turned meals into tedious sessions where we measure the potential health hazards of every spoonful. New mediations have also appeared at the other end of the chain, in food production. The producer’s relation to nature and to the consumer was more or less immediate in the days when peasants still grew crops using simple tools and sold whatever they did not need directly to the consumers on market day. Now these tools have been replaced by highly sophisticated, expensive machines. Big poultry farms and pig units are more like industrial production plants than anything else. The farmer uses fertilizers and insecticides and all kinds of chemicals to improve the yield of his land. He sells the whole crop even before it has been sown by signing production contracts with big firms. One important mediating element between food production and consumption is state agricultural policy; so too are the planning, advice and training provided by various organizations. Agriculture and industry, which used to be fairly independent of each other, have now merged into one single ‘agro-industrial complex’. Its top priority is not the production of food for the people who need it, but the production of surplus value on capital investments. This is particularly clear at the global level. Vast numbers of people are dying through starvation even though the food produced in the world would easily suffice to feed us all.

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Even in countries where people are suffering from serious malnutrition there are factories producing consumer goods for the people of the industrialized world, rather than trying to meet the local needs. Production, for the average citizen, is taking place via so many mediations that it is virtually impossible for him to influence it in any way. However, in most cases the new mediations do not have a mechanical, law-like impact on our way of life. As is suggested by the formula we proposed earlier in this chapter, their impact is mediated by the process whereby people in one way or another take account of the new mediations. Some weigh the costs and benefits in a means-end rational way, others accept them only if they do not have to relinquish some absolute value. While the growth of new mediating links can be seen as a result of the laws of capital described by Marx, a study of how these links become incorporated through human action into our way of lie can be carried out with the conceptual tools provided by Weber.

From immediate to mediated relations Georg Simmel studied the differences between immediate and mediated relations in many of his writings. The simplest case of an immediate social relation is the dyad. A comparison of the dyad with the triad reveals some interesting differences. Simmel writes that the simplest sociological formation, methodologically speaking, remains that which operates between two elements: “It contains the scheme, germ, and material of innumerable more complex forms”. However these more complex forms are not straightforward multiplications of the dyad. The triad is not only a dyad plus a third member; the third person brings a lot more with him. The dyad has a different relation to each of its two elements than do larger groups to their members, Simmel argues. Although the dyad seems to the outsider like an autonomous and super-individual unit, this is not how the members of the dyad see it: “Rather, each of the two feels himself confronted only by the other, not by a collectivity above him. The social structure here rests immediately on the one and on the other of the two, and the secession of either would destroy the whole. The dyad, therefore, does not attain that super-personal life which the individual feels to be independent of himself. As soon, however, as there is a sociation of three, a group continues to exist even in the case one of the members drops out.” (Simmel 1964, 122-123)

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Simmel regards the phenomena related to the number of actors as typically sociological, for two reasons. First, these forms continue t o exist irrespective of the personality or motives of the actors involved. The withdrawal of one member from the dyad invariably destroys the group: “for its life, it needs both, but for its death, only one”. In the triad, the loss of one member cannot destroy the group because it will continue to exist as a dyad: “It makes the dyad into a group that feels itself both endangered and irreplaceable, and thus into the real locus not only of authentic sociological tragedy, but also sentimentalism and elegiac problems”, Simmel (1964, 124) philosophizes. These simple laws that are inherent in the logic of the dyad and the triad have far-reaching consequences. The second reason why Simmel considers these laws typically sociological is that they also apply to relations between groups, such as families, organizations or states. Freud (1963, 328-338) however gave a distinctly psychological content to these relations and laws in his theory of the chiid’s early emotional development. Following the stage of auto-erotism, in which the child’s libido is focused on his own body, the mother becomes his primary loveobject. The third element is the father, who in a tragic way turns the dyad into a triad. Boys develop hostile impulses against their fathers whom they see as rivals. When the boy realizes that his mother is also his father’s wife, his immediate relation to his mother becomes a mediated one: his feelings for his mother are mediated by the expectations of his father. For the first time, the child is aware that a social formation is not dependent on one individual. If the child withdraws from the child-mother dyad, it will cease to exist; it is depedent on him. But the coalition of mother and father will coiitinue to exist even without him, as if behind his back, working against him. The father has different rights to mother than does the child. However, an important factor is the promise that if the child keeps his immediate impulses under control and behaves himself, he will one day get the rights that are now denied him: he learns that socialization to the rules and customs is worthwhile. After this experience it is unlikely that the child can ever have an immediate relation to his mother, or to any other person. There are even extreme cases where people who fear a conspiracy involving a third person close their ears to all talk about love. When the value of immediacy is denied, the fabric of customs, rules and social games is no longer perceived as an obstacle and a difficulty, but rather as a network

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developed by civilization and providing access to greater riches than immediacy. Having collected these ideas from Simmel and Freud, we can now return to the elongation of mediating chains. These chains form a world apart, one that seems to have its own development. The greater the complexity of this world, the harder it is for ordinary people to understand it without explanations provided by various experts - which then become a new mediating factor. The individual cannot comprehend the way in which the world of mediations develops according to its own inner laws, and he is therefore overwhelmed by a feeling of powerlessness. Using Elias’s (1978, 71-103) game models, we may say that for the individual an increase in mediations means the same thing as an increase in the number of players and in the size of the field for the individual soccer player. When two players are passing the ball or trying to beat a defender and score a goal, the result of the game depends on no one but themselves. When the number of players is increased, the individuals’ contribution becomes less important. The larger the group of players and the bigger the field, the lesser the individual player’s control over the game and the more it becomes a social reality with its own development. However, if the players are divided into two teams, our individual - who has only very limited control over the game - is dependent on the game in the sense that if his team loses, he too will lose. This is very often the case in everyday life as well. ‘Games’ are played in which the individual has no say at all, but is still affected by the results. He can taste, see and smell the result of one very complicated game every time he sits down for a meal. With every meal he swallows a large amount of foreign substances that have been put into his food as a result of one mediated effect of the agro-industrial complex; but there is absolutely nothing he can do about it. If he buys a loaf or a can of beans, he must eat the additives they contain. There is of course another way to take into account this fact: he can move out into the countryside and grow the food he needs in his own garden. This will not alter the fact that he is affected by the compulsion, but the effect is now different. In the attempt to avoid the health hazards involved in eating convenience foods, he has changed his way of life. The increasing complexity of the mediating chains also leads to increasing power differences. Let us assume that a group of people are asked to

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judge by sight the distance to a mountain peak on the horizon. Some of the estimates will be fairly accurate, others less so, but the differences between the individual judgements will hardly be very signu5cant. If there is a device nearby that some of the people recognize as a distance meter and know how t o use it while others do not, then the differences in the estimates will be much greater. Those who use the device will give much more accurate estimates than those who do not know how to use it. The group is now divided into experts and laymen; the former gain in power relative to the latter. This analysis generally applies to both technical and social devices. When commodity exchange grew more complicated with the introduction of money, credit etc. between the opening and concluding episodes of exchange, the benefits were reaped by those who quickly understood the meaning of the new mediations and learned how to exploit them. The effect of computers has been similar. For those who know nothing about new technology they arouse a feeling of helplessness and confusion, for the hacker they open a whole new world. Third, in addition to feelings of powerlessness and increasing power differences, the elongation of mediating chains also gives rise to growing suspzczon. When a group of disorganized people work together they may quarrel and be suspicious of each other, but when they are organized there appears an added dimension of suspicion: the tension between the representatives of the organization and its rank-and-file members. Fourth, the increase in mediations also changes the motivation of activity, often as in the case of organization - for the worse. The purpose of setting up an organization is to find a more efficient method of furthering the interests of the membership. However the net advantage is not very great if at the same time the new mediation undermines the members’ determination to pursue a common goal and also increases egoistic and irresponsible freerider behaviour. Along with people’s growing awareness of these problems, various social movements have mushroomed that propose to simplify the mediating chains. Their aim is to dismantle organizations or at least to split them into smaller units in order to “increase citizen participation in decisionmaking”. They also want to do away with the dangerous chemical, technological and economic mediations that exist between man and nature. In some cases the people who are attracted to the ‘green’ movement also feel suspicious about the mediations that maintain distance between peo-

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ple: customs, rituals and social games. They would want to “open up”, to “touch”, to “express their feelings openly”. However, this road leads to a difficult dilemma. If the movement wished to pursue its goals effectively, it would have to organize itself and set up a political party - but the question of whether or not a party should be formed seems to be the most divisive issue within the green movement. The bad links that can and must be removed from the complex mediating chains in society will only be found in an analysis that is based on the skilful use of sophisticated theoretical and practical tools. And in human interaction, it should be clear that our social customs and games allow for much greater accuracy and richness in communication than is achieved when feelings are expressed “spontaneously”. The tools that human civilization has developed in the course of history mean that the human individual’s interaction with nature and with other people is mediated many times over. This creates serious problems, no doubt about it; but is it possible to solve these problems without the help of the very same tools?

4. The Problems of ‘Egoism’ and ‘Anomie’ As we now turn to a study of Durkheim’s ideas, it is useful to recall that we are searching for different ways of thematizing the modern mode of life and its historical evolution. On the surface we see factories, banks, large multinational corporations, the accumulation of capital; all those things that M a n organized in his theory of capitalism. Also characteristic of the contemporary mode of life is that different alternatives are considered and their consequences are calculated, that rules and agreements are put down in writing, and that the overall aim is to gain control of the current of events, or the rationalization of action, as Weber would have it. We can also see and feel that life is getting more and more complicated with the proliferation of new tools, rules and organizational innovations; an aspect that can be illuminated by an analysis 2 la Simmel. But what kind of phenomena do we see on the surface of the modern mode of life that could be elucidated by Durkheimian ideas? Durkheim was concerned with what in sociology is known as social disorganization. From his study of suicide in 1897, there emerge “some

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suggestions concerning the causes of the general contemporary maladjustment being undergone by European societies and concerning remedies which may relieve it”. Suicide, as Durkheim sees it, is “precisely one of the forms through which the collective affection from which we suffer is transmitted’’ (Durkheim 1952, 37). Durkheim’s study of suicide is so immensely rich in social psychological insight that the following pages are completely devoted to his book. In Suicide Durkheim not only sets out to build a theory of suicide, but he also presents statistical and historical observations of the phenomenon. Therefore some writers define his study as empirical sociology or as an historical study of social disorganization. Let us assume that from Durkheim’s theory a social psychologist derives an hypothesis concerning the relation between social conflicts and the control exercised by the social environment. To put this hypothesis to the test, he collects two different sets of information: first, data about riots, strikes and other conflict episodes; and second, observations of the social environment in which these episodes take place. For reasons that were stated in chapter 3 by Klaus Weckroth (pp. 126-1301, the search for universal laws using this method is as futile as trying to find a general cause of insomnia in the external characteristics of the situations in which insomnia occurs. It is quite possible that you cannot sleep because you are so happy; that you cannot sleep because you are so unhappy; that you cannot sleep because your life is so monotonous, devoid of both pleasure and griet it is also possible you had such a good night’s sleep last night that you cannot fall asleep now; or that you already suffered from sleeplessness last night and therefore you cannot sleep now. Similarly, a given social conflict can in principle be connected to any characteristic of the environment. If, using this ‘epidemiological’ method (which is described e.g. in Tilly 1981, 71), the conclusion is drawn that Durkheim doesn’t work or that he is “useless” (Tilly 1981, 95-108), then one should stop and think again: could it be that something else doesn’t work or is useless? If Durkheim had followed the methodological rules on the basis of which empiricists call him a failure, his work, which is now a classic, would have “taken its place among thousands like it, none of them contributing anything to our understanding” (Willer and Willer 1973, 2). True, Durkheim’s statistical data are unreliable and it is impossible to say whether or not his theory is empirically valid. But, as Asplund points out, the aspect that Durkheim takks up has added to our

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understanding; so far “the discussion of suicide has been a dialogue with Durkheim” (Asplund 1970, 58; 108). - Let us now enter into this dialogue, not only about suicide but also about the whole basis from which Durkheim approaches the problems of his time.

Does community still provide goals for individual action? It is true that Durkheim sets out to discuss what he calls egoistic suicide in the same way as an empiricist would. For example, he concludes from his statistics that suicide is more prevalent among Protestants than Catholics. This, he says, is because the Protestant Church is less strongly integrated than the Catholic. On the basis of this and other similar observations, he proposes the general conclusion that suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of the social groups of which the individual forms a part (Durkheim 1952, 159; 209). The empiricist has now found what he was looking for in Durkheim’s text. The next step is to think of a way to operationalize “the degree of integration of the social groups”. The theorist however reads on, his interest awakened. He is curious to know what kind of necessary relations lie beneath Durkheim’s proposition. First, he finds “society” which, when it is “strongly integrated”, “holds individuals under its control”. Just as individuals have goals, so too does society. Some of the necessary relations between these concepts are crystallized in the theoretical law according to which “society cannot disintegrate without the individual simultaneously detaching himself from social life, without his own goals becoming preponderant over those of the community, in a word without his personality tending to surmount the collective personality”. So the important question here is: Are the actions and decisions of the individual guided by the collective goals of strongly integrated society, or by his own individual goals? The society that is weakly integrated and conscious of its own weakness even recognizes its individuals’ “right to do freely what it can no longer prevent” (Durkheim 1952, 209). Durkheim fears that there has been a shift in emphasis from the former to the latter type of action with historical development. This is an aspect we have not yet dealt with, and one that complements those we found in Marx, Weber and Simmel. At this point Durkheim’s text becomes really exciting, at least for the social psychologist concerned not so much with random empirical

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regularities as with necessary relations. When the individual is not constrained by social control, he is free to set out his own goals and to make his own decisions, even regarding his own life and death. But Durkheim asks whether there is something in this “excessive individualism” that makes the individual choose death instead of life. Why is it that it not only leaves room for suicidogenic causes but is itself such a cause? Durkheim first rejects the explanation that the self-dependent individual would lose his interest in life because he has nothing which transcends and survives him. Immortality is too weak a motive for living because whatever we leave behind us will be very short-lived in any case. “Besides, what of us is it that lives? A word, a sound, an imperceptible trace, most often anonymous, therefore nothing comparable to the violence of our efforts or able to justify them to us” (Durkheim 1952, 211). No, dwindling hopes of immortality do not explain why excessive individualism undermines our zest for life. The explanation that Durkheim accepts comes very close to the ideas with which we started this chapter. Individuals need meaningful goals in order to be able to act. Up to a certain point the motives of these acts derive from the more general activity of which they form constituent parts. However, the motive for the last link in the chain must come from outside the individual, from the community. If excessive individualism breaks this last link, then the whole chain of action will become meaningless. “Ail that remains is an artificial combination of illusory images, a phantasmagoria vanishing at the least reflection; that is, nothing which can be a goal for our action. (. ..) So there is nothing more for our efforts to lay hold of, and we feel them lose themselves in emptiness. In this sense it is true to say that our activity needs an object transcending it. (. ..) No proof is needed that in such a state of confusion the least cause of discouragement may easily give birth to desperate resolutions.” (Durkheim 1952, 213) But even this is not all. When individual activity loses its meaning, the community level will be informed: “Since we are its handiwork, society cannot be conscious of its own decadence without the feeling that henceforth this work is of no value”. This collective consciousness finds expression in ‘currents of depression and disillusionment emanating from no particular individual but expressing society’s state of disintegration”. No one can escape these currents; they drive even the egoistic individual “more vigorously on the way to which he is already inclined”. The in-

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dividual is not cut off from interaction with society because “at the very moment that, with excessive zeal, he frees himself from the social environment, he still submits to its influence”. There is, however, a profound change in the structure of interaction. Integrated society provides the goals for the individual’s activity and does not feed a pessimistic atmosphere. In disintegrated society, the individualized man “effects communion through sadness when he no longer has anything else with which to achieve it” (Durkheim 1952, 214). Durkheim thus has a fairly clear idea of interaction between the individual and society and of how the structure of interaction changes with history. His theory clearly falls under the general heading of historical social psychology. The consequences of the structural changes in interaction are not mechanical and invariable at the level of practical activity, in the case of different individuals: not everyone commits suicide in a disintegrated society. This is why there is no sense in trying to h d - by any statistical method - strong correlations between variables describing the state of society and the activity of the individual. However, every individual must take into account the new situation; and the dynamics that Durkheim describes may indeed underlie some cases of suicide; cases that may be termed egoistic suicides. But what about the other types of suicide described in Durkheim’s theory; are they also based on the same view of interaction between individual and society? When we read about altruistic suicide, we learn that suicide is not only the result of excessive individuation; insufficient individuation has the same effects. In the former case, the individual’s activity has no meaningful goal because society fails to provide him with one; in the latter the goals are there but the individual does not consider them his own:. “Having given the name of egoism to the state of ego living its own life and obeying itself alone, that of altruism adequately expresses the opposite state, where the ego is not its own property, where it is blended with something not itself, where the goal of conduct is exterior to itself, that is, in one of the groups in which it participates.” (Durkheim 1952, 221) In the latter case the community also has the power to impose suicide upon the individual as a duty, to recommend suicide as a respectable act, or to suggest that suicide is the road that leads to the real goal in the hereafter. We are now in a position to compare egoism and altruism within the same framework of basic concepts:

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“While the egoist is unhappy because he sees nothing real in the world but the individual, the intemperate altruist’s sadness, on the contrary, springs from the individual’s seeming wholly unreal to him. One is detached from life because, seeing no goal to which he may attach himself, he feels useless and purposeless; the other because he has a goal but one outside this life, which henceforth seems merely an obstacle to him.” (Durkheim 1952, 225) Durkheim goes on to state that in a social structure that denies all freedom and value of individual goals, there emerge at the level of collective consciousness pantheistic metaphysical and religious systems. In these it is held that the soul which animates the individual is not his own and he has no personal existence. This kind of religion could be constituted only in a society where the individual counts for nothing, and to some extent it has an effect on the conditions that have produced it (Durkheim 1952, 226-227). Durkheim’s social psychology is perfectly plain and straightforward and it works. As a matter of fact the form of his basic social psychological concepts is very much akin to Freud’s basic theory. Where Durkheim has action and the goal of action, Freud talks about libido and love-object. The analogy is clear if the Freudian concept of narcissism is compared with Durkheim’s egoistic man for whom society does not provide a meaningful goal and who solves the problem by making his own physical existence the last object of his life. This, as Durkheim (1952, 215) writes, means that physical man tends to become the whole man. This is possible because “a whole range of functions concern only the individual; these are the ones indispensable for physical life”. The individual’s physical existence, health and well-being give adequate justification for them: ‘‘Since they are made for this purpose only, they are perfected by its attainment. In everything concerning them, therefore, man can act reasonably without thought of transcendental purposes. These functions serve by merely serving him. In so far as he has no other needs, he is therefore self-sufficient and can live happily with no other objective than living.” (Durkheim 1952, 211) In Freud’s theory, a distinction is made between three types of narcissism, which means the attraction of the individual’s love or libido to himself. A small child is narcissistic in the sense that he likes touching himself and sucking hs thumb, for example. As yet he is unable to make the elementary distinction between his own body and the outside world,

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unlike the adult whose love-objects are normally outside himself. However, even the adult indulges in narcissism in sleep, when he blots out the rest of the world and lets his psychic imagination, his dreams, take over (Freud 1963,414-430): The third case is the kind of pathological narcissism where the adult, in a waking state, is totally taken up with himself and his own body. The main characteristics of narcissistic personalities are grandiosity, extreme self-centredness, and a remarkable absence of interest in and empathy for others (Kernberg 1975,228). It is hardly surprising then that the narcissistic personality is also incapable of falling in love (Kernberg 1976, 186-188). Durkheim’s theory seems to imply that in a society where narcissism is prevalent, we can also expect to see corresponding trends in the culture of that society. Lasch (1979) has discovered a wide range of narcissistic tendencies in the culture of American competitive individualism. This culture, he says, “has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war of all against all, the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self”. The aspect that Durkheim brings up in his social psychological analysis is far from outdated.

Does community still regulate the individual ’s passions? In his novel The Slave, Isaac Bashevis Singer tells the story of a Jewish teacher by the name of Jacob, who lives in seventeenth century Poland. When the Cossacks attack the country, he flees and is caught by Polish robbers, who sell him as a slave to primitive and ignorant village peasants. Jacob’s life is so desolate, so hard and so poor that he prays for death and even contemplates self-destruction. Suicide under these circumstances would correspond to Durkheim’s third type of suicide: fatalistic. “It is the suicide deriving from excessive regulation, that of persons with future pitilessly blocked and passions violently checked by oppressive discipline. ” In fact one example that Durkheim (1952,270) mentions of fatalistic suicide is precisely that of the slave. Jacob however does not commit suicide. He resigns himself to living in his mountain hut with only just enough to survive, not only because of his poverty but also so that he can obey the commandments of.his faith concerning food, prayers, and washing. But when he falls in love with Wanda, a young widow, and breaks one of the commandments, all his passions are set loose: “Jacob could no longer control

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his thoughts. Every kind of absurdity and non sequitur crammed his brain. He imagined himself eating cake, roast chicken, marzipan; drinking wine, mead, beer; hunting among the rocks and finding diamonds, gold coins, becoming a rich man, and riding around in coaches.’’ Durkheim uses the term anomie to describe the state where passions are no longer held under any constraints. He makes a distinction between the regulation of goals of action and the regulation of action itself. In the same way as the community provides - or does not provide - the individual with a meaningful goal of action, it also regulates or omits to regulate action. If Jacob had actually broken away from all the rules of the Torah, as he occasionally did in his imagination, the normative context of his action would have become anomic; and if we are to believe Durkheim, he would have been in serious danger. It is as if Durkheim (1952, 248) is giving a lecture to all who want to eat cake, roast chicken, marzipan, to drink wine, mead and beer, to find diamonds and gold coins and to ride around in coaches: “Thus, the more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of filling needs. Shall action as such be considered agreeable? First, only on condition of blindness to its uselessness. Secondly, for this pleasure to be felt and to temper and half veil the accompanying painful unrest, such unending motion must at least always be easy and unhampered. If it is interfered with only restlessness is left, with the lack of ease which it, itself, entails. But it would be a miracle if no insurmountable obstacle were ever encountered. Our thread of life on these conditions is pretty thin, breakable at any instant.” It is easy to understand that anomie will follow from sudden richness or from a sudden economic upswing. But why does it also follow from sudden poverty or a sudden economic crisis? Doesn’t poverty put passions under very strict restraint? The restraint implied by the Durkheimian concept of anomie is not just any kind of regulation, but moral regulation. Durkheim (1952, 271-272) held that the growth of anomie in society, which followed from the increasing number of divorces and thus from the general loss of moral regulation through marriage, had a greater impact on men than on women. The psyche of the woman, he says, is different from that of the man: “Woman’s sexual needs have less of a mental character because, generally speaking, her mental life is less developed. These needs are more closely related to

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the needs of the organism, following rather than leading them, and consequently find in them an efficient restraint. Being a more instinctive creature than man, woman has only to follow her instincts to find calmness and peace”. Man’s passions, then, can only be controlled by social and moral regulation, which is provided by marriage: “For by forcing a man to attach himself forever to the same woman it assigns a strictly definite object to the need for love, and closes the horizon.” This forms “the state of moral equilibrium from which the husband benefits” ; particularly since custom “grants him certain privileges which allow him in some measure to lessen the strictness of the regime”. Durkheim’s study is hardly of great interest to the reader who is looking for a tenable psychological theory of gender; yet neither this nor his dubious statistics knock the bottom out of his social psychological theory (the same, incidentally, applies to Freud). One of the key concepts in this theory is the moral regulation exercised by the community. Society, Durkheim (1952, 241) writes, is not only something that attracts the sentiments and activities of individuals with unequal force: “It is also a power controlling them”. This system of regulation tends to break down in times of both economic hardship and economic prosperity; the same thing happens to the regulation system of the family when there is an increase in the number of divorces. Durkheim is perfectly consistent up to the point where he begins to analyse the differential effect of the new situation on different groups of people, such as men and women. Or does he perhaps already falter in his discussion of how anomie or a weak system of moral regulation affects people in general? The fact is that Durkheim also has his own psychology of the human individual and his hap.piness, and at certain points he makes some very crude simplifications. His psychology is based on the notion that nothing appears in man’s organic or psychological constitution which sets a limit to his thirst for pleasure, wellbeing, to comfort or luxury. His second main tenet is that without constraints, our desires are merely a source of torment: “Inextinguishable thirst is constantly renewed torture”; or: “To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness” (Durkheim 1952, 247-248). In a discussion of Durkheim’s psychologicalideas, it is necessary to make a distinction between two types of concepts that are related to motives. Certain of his concepts, such as “need”, are seen as pursuits that are

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quenched when satisfied to a sufficient degree, as in the case of hunger and thirst. Other concepts, such as “desire”, refer to pursuits that can never be ‘satisfied’ to the extent that they are ‘quenched’. In many old writings eating and drinking are praised as the greatest of pleasures, without any mention of satisfymg ‘needs’. It was natural for people to eat and drink as much as they wanted to. Scarcity would probably limit most people’s pleasures in any case. In the barter economy everything that was produced went for consumption. Little if anything was left over, and new needs developed slowly. When man has seen a sufficient number of days go by, he too can pass away like Abraham, “old and satiated with life”. The ‘need’ for living has been ‘satisfied’ because there is nothing left to be seen. Capitalism and industrialization mark the dawn of a very different kind of era. New needs keep occurring, no day is the same as the next. Civilized man, placed in the midst of the continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge, and problems, may become ‘tired of life’ but not ‘satiated with life’, says Max Weber (1958, 140). Durkheim’s concern about unrestrained desires is understandable against this historical background; his concept of man is dubious only if we take it as a universal truth of philosophical anthropology. And indeed, Durkheim (1952, 254) anchors his theory in history by saying that for a whole century, economic progress has mainly consisted in freeing industrial relations from all regulation, and that therefore, in the sphere of trade and industry, anomie “is actually in a chronic state”.

Uncertainty and ordeal Durkheim’s rich and imaginative study has inspired countless analyses and elaborations. One of the most interesting studies, from the present point of view, is that by Taylor (1982), who dissociates himself categorically from the positivist and empiricist approach. For Taylor (1982, 161), “science involves the explanation of observable phenomena through the discovery of underlying, unobservable structures and causal processes”. In chapter 1 (p. 29) we referred to the ass which starved to death facing two equally desirable hay-bales; to the philosophical construction that was created amid the medieval controversies about free will. We said that for the human being, uncertainty is a challenge that he must solve in one way or another - for instance by tossing a coin to decide which alternative to

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choose. Certainty-uncertainty is an important dimension for Taylor as well, as one explanation of suicide. He also refers to such ‘casting of lots’ as certain kinds of attempted suicide with which the individual reacts to uncertainty. The certainty-uncertainty dimension is closely related to Durkheim’s fatalism-anomie dichotomy, and Taylor cross-tabulates it with another dimension that comes close to Durkheim’s altruism-egoism dichotomy. He first couples certainty to the kind of “altruistic” life situation where the individual is not separated from other people but over-attached to them. Suicide (of the type “I am killed”) may result if the individual is sure that the other people with whom he is inextricably intertwined have abandoned him, deceived him, hope he will die. The person who is totally detached from other people (in the state of “egoism”) may also sometimes be sure that his life no longer has any meaning - if for instance he is incurably ill. Because he is separated from other people, no one can shake his certainty; here too the result may be suicide (of the type “I am dead”). The two other types of suicide are arrived at by combining uncertainty with social over-attachment and social detachment. In the former case the individual is totally uncertain as to whether the people to whom he is overattached care about him; he doesn’t know whether they want him to live or die. Attempted suicide, if the method leaves a chance of survival, becomes an ordeal with which the decision is made because there is no other way to cope with total uncertainty. It is as if the individual were trying to find an answer to the question concerning those other people: “Who are you?” But the same means is attractive even when the individual is isolated from other people and totally uncertain as to whether his life has any meaning (“Who am I?”). Taylor (1982, 173) defends the concept of uncertainty by noting that if a human being really commits suicide, he is not seeking the ‘unattainable’, so he is quite ‘nomic’. “It is hard to see, therefore, at least in terms of Durkheim’s conception of suicide, how an individual could commit ‘anomic suicide’. The position taken here is that individuals are more likely to contemplate suicide in situations of great psychological uncertainty. ” Durkheim’s social psychological theory of egoism and anomie touches upon real and important historical trends. In modern society the individual is less attached to his community than he used to be, which means that the goals of the individual’s activity are not immediately clear to him. The goal

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of action is crucially important because it is in this goal that the individual finds a meaning for his life. In the story of his life Viktor Frankl describes how the Nazis, when they took him to the Auschwitz concentration camp, dispossessed him of a manuscript that was ready for publication. Frankl decided he would rewrite that manuscript. This was the goal of action that gave a meaning to his struggle for survival: “For instance, when I fell ill with typhus fever I jotted down on little scraps of paper many notes intended to enable me to rewrite the manuscript, should I live to the day of liberation. I am sure that this reconstruction of my lost manuscript in the dark barracks of a Bavarian concentration camp assisted me in overcoming the danger of collapse.” (Frankl 1959, 165) It is important to realize that not just any kind of ‘activity’ would have helped. For instance, the sentries could have made him scribble nonsensical words on pieces of paper and then tear them up. This is in fact one of the many methods of breaking a prisoner mentally. In other words, the point is not that the person’s hands move, or that he behaves in some given way; nor even that the movements add up to some act with a given purpose. The separate acts must be part of a meanzng‘iul, objective activity; and the meaning derives from the community, in this case Frankl’s colleagues and the prospective readers that he had in mind when writing the book. Just as capitalism has solved its internal problems in a way that Marx was unable to foresee, so modern man has coped with the challenges of his ‘egoistic’ and ‘anomic’ mode of life with greater success than Durkheim could perhaps have anticipated. Indirect and mediated relations with people whom one can only picture in the mind but never see in person, can compensate for the absence of immediate relations. For example, there are still researchers in peripheral countries who do not meet their colleagues very often but who find a meaning for their life and their activity in writing, perhaps in a foreign language, to the ‘scientific community’ they picture in their mind. It is precisely by using his imagination that man has invented new ways of coping with the kind of situations created by increased ‘egoism’ or ‘anomie’. In some cases writing a book may also be an ordeal by which the writer wants to find an answer to the question, “Who am I?” If the critics treat him harshly (or if there is no response at all), he can still imagine that the time is not ripe and that his real audience must be somewhere in the future. Taylor’s concepts add important new perspectives to Durkheim’s analysis.

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It is likely that the relation between passion and happiness is also more complicated than in Durkheim’s presentation. Popularized versions of Maslow’s (1954, 80-92) theory of basic needs often have us understand that people should first satisfy their physiological needs, then their security needs, next their need for loving and belonging, their need for appreciation, and fmally their need for self-realization. The desire that refuses to comply with this scheme is labelled as ‘irrationality’, and there is also something very threatening and abnormal about the individual who aims to maintain his self-respect as a subject even at the expense of his health, security and personal relations; his activity is at sharp variance with our notions of the ‘natural’ hierarchy of needs. But should we really condemn Karl Marx as irrational and abnormal when he writes to his emigree friend in America (quoted in Ivanov 1982, 134): ‘‘NOW,why didn’t I answer you? Because I was constantly hovering on the edge of the grave. Therefore I had to utilize every possible moment to finish my book, to which I have sacrificed my health, the happiness of my life, my family.” In Marx’s opinion there is not much difference between the means-end rationality of ‘practical men’ and the behaviour of animals: “I laugh at the so-called practical men and their wisdom. If one wants to be an ox, one can naturally turn one’s back on mankind’s torments and look out for one’s own skin. But I would have regarded myself as truly impractical had I taken off without completing my book, if only in a manuscript form.’’ The motive power of Marx’s value rationality, its goal and meaning, derives from a community that he can only picture in his mind and that cannot exert direct control or regulation; he is addressing humankind as a whole. Yet he sees his audience as consisting of real, concrete, suffering human beings. The goal that has been derived from the pursuits of this community, as Marx sees them, is so clear and the motive power that it imparts to action so strong that there is no need for external regulation. In today’s world, when humankind is living under a constant threat of extermination, it is impossible for the individual to withdraw and pretend that nothing is happening; every day the mass media remind us that our fates are intertwined. To find out what the new situation means from the point of view of human activity, we shall now move on to Freud and see how he thematizes historical development.

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5. The Changing Face of Anxiety

In the summer of 1929 Sigmund Freud, well into his eighties and suffering from a painful illness, no longer had the strength to take long walks or concentrate on his reading. He had also realized that it was impossible for anyone to spend their holiday smoking or playing cards all day long, so he began to pass his time away by writing a long essay. It was published the following year under the title Civilization and its Discontents, which suggests that Freud now had something to say about society and culture. The book is also a description of the historical development of cooperation between humans, and in this sense ranks among the classical works of historical social psychology.

Sense of unhappiness and guilt Freud (1961, 76-77) asks what men themselves show by their behaviour to be the purpose and intention of their lives; he answers that they strive after happiness; “they want to become happy and remain so”. On the one hand this pursuit aims at an absence of pain and displeasure, on the other hand it strives towards the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure. However the pursuit of pleasure and happiness meets with three kinds of obstacles: those “from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men”. The reaction that these obstacles give rise to is not the same in all men. Different strategies are applied in the attempt to cope with them: we may withdraw from the world, suppress our needs, look for alternative sources of satisfaction in religion, or try to remove the obstacles to happiness. The latter is what culture is about. In culture Freud includes “all activities and resources which are useful to men for making the earth serviceable to them, for protecting them against the violence of the forces of nature, and so on.” Culture - or civilization, which is the more usual English translation of Freud’s term Kultur - is inherently historical, something that distinguishes eras: “the word ‘civilization’ describes the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our

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lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two purposes namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations” (Freud 1961, 89-90]. Freud yields a footnote’s worth to his temptation to speculate on the ‘psychohistory’ of culture. One of man’s most significant early cultural achievements was learning how to control and utilize fire. Freud (1961,90) points out that tongues of fire, as they shoot upwards, produce a phallic image. “Putting out fire by micturating (...) was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him arid subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct.” Woman became the guardian of the fire in the kitchen range ‘‘because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire”. Although Freud’s speculation merely reflects the kind of prejudice that was prevalent against women in those days and is of no value as an historical or scientific explanation, his theory about the relation of culture and the controlling of instincts hits the nail on the head. Culture not only prevents man from satisfying his immediate impulses. The riches of human culture are also a reward that the individual is entitled to if he submits to certain restrictions. There is however still one element in the picture: anxiety, which is the price that has to be paid for all of this. Culture places restrictions most particularly on sexuality. Along with civilization the once open, visible forms of sexuality have gradually become more and more mediated and transformed into representations of sexuality. Sexuality in all its variations seems to have flourished in the streets and in the not so private rooms of the mountain village of Montaillou much more openly than we have become accustomed to. “In the remote countryside a certain innocence still survived”, Le Roy Ladurie (1978, 151) says: “Many people were of the opinion that pleasure in itself was without sin, and if it was agreeable to the couples concerned it was not disagreeable to God either”. Children could watch their parents have intercourse, and even statesmen had nothing to hide: “in 1434 the Emperor Sigismund publicly thanks the city magistrate of Bern for putting the brothel freely at the dispose of himself and his attendants for three days” (Elias 1978, 177). Children do of course still learn about genitals and copulation and all the

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rest of it, but they now learn about it from their schoolbooks, pornographic videos and other representations, not through first-hand information. Freud has an explanation for why civilization is so eager to put sex under restraint: it needs it for its own purposes. Civilization aims at binding the members of the community together in a libidinal way and employs every means to that end, Freud (1961, 108-109) says. “In order for these aims to be fulfilled, a restriction upon sexual life is unavoidable”. However, the restrictions are also necessary for the purposes of the new economic system in that the kind of work discipline and rationality it requires cannot develop unless something is done to control people’s impulsive sexual life. Foucault (1979, 135-145) goes even further in stressing the connections between the use of power and restrictions on sexuality. He says that while the ruler used to have the right to take or spare human lives, power now means the regulation of the individual’s body and its use; power concentrates “on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls”. According to Freud (1961, 115) civilization imposes great sacrifices not only on man’s sexuality but also on his aggressiveness. There is ample historical evidence in support of this argument as well. Foucault (1977) starts his book with a detailed and horrifying description of how a criminal who had attempted to assassinate the King was publicly tortured in Paris as late as 1757; even children were allowed to watch this kind of episode. Such obscenities are nowadays accessible to children only in a form mediated by modern technology and commercial interests, as in the video of the Texas chain-saw massacre. Freud’s main argument is that the restrictions of civilization bring displeasure and anxiety to people. “In fact, primitive man was better off in knowing no restrictions of instinct” (Freud 1961, 115).The ultimate outcome in the process that is started by restrictions is a sense of guilt, which is produced by our conscience; which in turn is the result of restrictions: ‘‘instinctual renunciation (imposed on us from without) creates conscience, which then demands further instinctual renunciation” (&id., 129). However, civilization is “a process in service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind” (M.,

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122). This is why we might have to accept that “the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening sense of guilt” (ibid., 134). Besides, the sense of guilt is rarely perceived as such; it “remains to a large extent unconscious, or appears as a sort of malaise, a dissatisfaction, for which people seek other motivations” (ibid., 135-136).

Has civilization gone back on its word? But can the “tormenting uneasiness” (Freud 1961, 135) felt by modern man still be attributed to the restrictions he must submit to if he wishes to reach the goals that civilization promises him? In the very last lines of his book Freud (ibid., 145) voices his own suspicions that something has changed: “Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.” More than half a century later, the truth in these words is more obvious than ever. Civilization is no longer merely something that promises us a better and richer life; it also threatens to destroy all life on earth through pollution, radioactive leaks from nuclear power plants, or nuclear war. People have often been afraid that the world will come to an end, but so far these fears have not had a rational basis. Now this has changed. Not only do we know that there is the potential in the world to destroy all life, but we have reached the stage where the weapons systems (which by now could kill us many times over) are in fact deployed, actually pointing at us at this very moment. It is not the first time that humankind has been on the brink of extinction, but so far man has always been able to rebuild his conditions and mode of life. After a global nuclear war, this would be impossible. War is known to have started by accident in earlier times, but it has spread so slowly that there has always been time for reconsideration, for negotiation, for taking shelter. Now, the ‘accident’ that could trigger war is much more trivial than before; all it takes is a flock of birds or a systems failure. War will spread in a matter of minutes, cause irreversible havoc in a matter of hours. The change should be clear at least to those who experienced the 1960s in Western Europe and now compare those times with what things are like

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today. A useful concept in describing the difference is Ernst Bloch’s (1980) “not-yet”, which refers to something that “as yet is unsure and unsolved, but that for this reason is not out of the world”. Not so long ago not-yet was something that, for most people in Europe, aroused hope: not-yet rational and just society; but it was still worthwhile pursuing the goal and accepting the restrictions, because even though it was not-yet, as a utopian vision it already existed and had a definite impact on the world. Now, notyet is something that causes fear: not-yet nuclear war, not-yet dead forests. These things also have an impact on us; they are not ‘out of the world’. The impact they exert is not direct and mechanical but mediated by the processes in which people take account of these new realities. However, every decision must now be made in the new context, in an atmosphere where anxiety plays an increasingly important role. The young generation probably lives most clearly under this atmosphere, but nevertheless even those people must adapt who have drawn their historical wisdom from the experiences of World War I1 and the optimism of the age of reconstruction that followed: this wisdom is of little help in the new situation. The important question now is this: Is there any point in submitting to the sacrifices that civilization expects the individual to make if civilization itself has not kept its word? We have now, using different kinds of thematizations, run through the historical development of our society and come to the problems that are characteristic of modern society. It is time to close our classical books and see whether we can get to grips with these new problems using the methods of empirical social psychology.

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References Aaltonen, E. (1944) Linsi-Suomen yhteismyllyt. Forssa: Kansatieteellinen arkisto. Abercrombie, N., Hill, S. and Turner, B. (1986) Sovereign individuals of capitalism. London: Allen & Unwin. Alestalo, M., Eskola, A,, Eskola, K. and KYoskowska, A. (1978) Cultural participation and social structure. In: Allardt, E. and Weslowski, W. (eds.) Social structure and change: Finland and Poland, comparative perspective. Warszawa: Polish Scientific Publishers. Alestalo, M., Eskola, A. and Eskola, K. (1981) Lesen und andere kulturelle Aktivitaten in Finnland. In: Dorsch, P.E. und Teckentrup, K.H. (Hrsg.) Buch und Lesen international. Gutersloh: Verlag fir Buchmarkt und Medien-Forschung Asplund. J. (1970) Om undran infor samhillet. Uppsala: Argos. Asplund, J. (1987) Det sociala livets elementara former. Goteborg: Korpen. Axelrod, R. (1984) The evolution of cooperation. New York: Basic Books. Back, K.W. (1972) Beyond words. The story of sensitivity training and the encounter movement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Barry, B. and Hardin, R. (eds.) (1982) Rational man and irrational society? An introduction and sourcebook. Beverly Hills: Sage Beckermann, A. (1985) Value-rationality and the distinction between goaloriented and value-oriented behaviour in Weber. In: Seebass, G. and Tuomela, R. (eds.) Social action. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company. Blau, P.M. (1964) Exchange and power in social life. New York: Wiley. Bloch, E. (1980) Abschied von der Utopie? Vortrage. Hrsg. Hanna Gekle. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Brown, R. (1965) Social psychology. New York: Free Press. Castren, M.A. (1870) Nordiska resor och forskningar. Forsta Bandet. Helsingfors: Finska Litteratur-Sallskapet. Chadwick-Jones, J.K. (1976) Social exchange theory: Its structure and influence in social psychology. London: Academic Press. Collins, R. (1986) Max Weber: a skeleton key. Beverly Hills: SAGE. Deutscher, I. (1967) The unfinished revolution. London: Oxford University Press. Dormer, K. (1979) Siperian samojedien keskuudessa. Helsinki: Otava (originally 1919).

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Durkheim, E. (1933) The division of labour in society. New York: The Macmillan Company. Durkheim, E. (1952) Suicide. A study in sociology. London: Routledge. Durkheim, E. (1975) Contribution to discussion ‘Religious sentiment at the present time’. In: Pickering, W.S.F. (ed.) Durkheim on Religion. London: Routledge. Durkheim, E. (1976) The elementary forms of the religious life. London: Allen & Unwin. Elias, N. (1978) The civilizing process. The history of manners. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Eskola, A. (1982) Reading perspectives in Finland: theoretical and methodological perspectives. In: Social role of mass communication. Report of the Second Finnish-Soviet Seminar. Publications of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Tampere, Series B, 19829, 135-145. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and punish. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (1979) The history of sexuality. Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Frankl, V. (1959) Man’s search for meaning: an introduction to logotherapy. New York: Washington Square Press. Freud, S. (1961) Civilization and its discontents. The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vol XXI. London: The Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1963) Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vol XVI. London: The Hogarth Press. Fromm, E. (1960) The fear of freedom. London: Routledge. Gergen, K.J. (1973) Social psychology as history. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 26, 309-320. Gergen, K.J. and Gergen, M.M. (1984) Historical social psychology. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum. Goldmann, L. (1975) Towards a sociology of the novel. London: Tavistock Publications. Harre, R. and Secord, P.F. (1972) The explanation of social behaviour. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Homans, G.C. (1950) The human group. London: Routledge. Homans, G.C. (1961) Social behavior: its elementary forms. New York: Harcourt. Brace & World.

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Mead, M. (1954) Cultural patterns and technical change. Paris: Unesco. Merton, R. (1957) Social theory and social structure. Revised and enlarged edition. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press. Rappaport, H. and Rappaport, M. (1981) The integration of scientific and traditional healing: a proposed model. American Psychologist, 36, 774-781. Renvall, P. (1949) Suomalainen 1500-luvun ihminen oikeuskatsomustensa valossa. Turku: Turun yliopisto. Riesman, D. et al. (1953) The lonely crowd. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Slotkin, J. (1960) From field to factory. New industrial employees. Glencoe: Free Press. Taylor, S. (1982) Durkheim and the study of suicide. London: MacMillan. T i y , C. (1981) As sociology meets history. New York: Academic Press. Tonnies, F. (1963) Community and society. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Ullman-Margalit, E. (1977) The emergence of norms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Uzoka, A.F. (1979) The myth of the nuclear family. Historical background and clinical implications. American Psychologist, 34, 1095-1106. Voionmaa, V. (1969) Karjalaisen heimon historia. Porvoo: WSOY. Wallerstein, I. (1986) Crisis as transition. In: Amin, S., Arrighi, G., Frank, A.G. and Wallerstein, I. (eds.) Dynamics of global crisis. London: Macmillan. Watt, I. (1957) The rise of the novel. London: Chatto & Windus. Weber, M. (1947) The theory of social and economic organization. New York: Oxford University Press. Weber, M. (1930) The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Allen & Unwin. Weber, M. (1958) Science as vocation. In: Gerth, H.H. and Mills, C.W. (eds.) From Max Weber: essays in sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Westermarck, E. (1927) Minnen ur mitt liv. Helsingfors: Schildts. Willer, D. and Willer, J. (1973) Systematic empiricism: Critique of a pseudoscience. Englewood Cliffs, N .J. : Prentice-Hall. Wittgenstein, L. (1965) A Lecture on Ethics. Philosophical Review, 74, 3-16.

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Wolff, K.H. (ed.) (1964) The sociology of Georg Simmel. Glencoe: Free Press. von Wright, G.H. (1982) Wittgenstein. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Zeleng, J. (1980) The logic of Marx. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Zetterberg, H. (1963) On theory and verification in sociology. Totowa, N.J.: The Bedminster Press.

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Chapter 5 Non-Active Role-Playing: Some Experiences Antti Eskola

In chapter 2 03-Helena Ylijoki discussed some of the main problems of the laboratory experiment in social psychology. These problems can only be properly understood if a distinction is made between (a) the researcher’s theory of the essential nature of his subject as a human being and of the nature of his activity and (b) the practical arrangements required for testing the research hypotheses. The laboratory, both as an instrument and as a situation, imposes its own restrictions on these arrangements. For this reason the experiment rarely goes precisely according to the researcher’s theoretical premises. The object of study is affected by the research instrument and by the practice of measurement. In physics and other natural sciences this is a familiar problem. In social psychology it may appear in the following context: The researcher may picture his subject as an active and thinking creature who is capable of finding out what is going on in a certain situation. This is the theoretical concept of man the researcher has in mind; this is the kind of man he wants to investigate and learn to understand. But can the subject retain these key qualities in the laboratory if the experiment is so designed that he is supposed to believe he failed in some task even though he didn’t, or that his drink contained alcohol even though it didn’t? This does not seem very likely, because the active and thinking subject would soon find out how well he did in the task, or what his drink really contained. He would behave exactly the way he is expected to in the researcher’s theory, although technically the experiment would have ‘failed’. If, in order to make the experiment ‘succeed’, the subject is misled or prevented from getting correct information, then actually it will have failed in a much more serious

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way: it is no longer in agreement with the underlying theoretical assumptions regarding the nature of man. It was with these thoughts in mind that in spring 1982 I started to study some of the alternative methods that had been proposed for the laboratory experiment in social psychology. I was looking for something that adhered to the basic logic of experimentation - the variation of certain factors to see what happens in the other parts of the system - without depriving the subjects of those characteristics that made them human beings. The discussions that were reported in a book edited by Ginsburg (1979), called Emerging Strategies in Social Psychological Research, seemed to proride some promising clues. According to the introduction, these discussions had been concerned with “strategies in which it was presumed that people are active agents, capable of making plans and pursuing objectives, of acting as well as reacting, of doing things for reasons as well as having been forced to do them by causes”. The strategies that struck me as most interesting were those that wer2 described as role-playing techniques. Their Sirens’ song charmed with both promises and perils, which no doubt would also be involved in an adventure with these methods. Being less cautious than Odysseus, who stopped the ears of his crew with wax and had himself tied to the mast as he approached the Sirens’ island, some of my students and myself decided to take a closer look at the temptations of role-playing. We did this by arranging a course on alternatives to experimental research in social psychology. We decided to limit our experimentation with this new instrument to techniques which Ginsburg (1979, 123) describes as “role-playing of the non-active sort”. In these techniques, “subjects are given a description of some social setting (...), aqd are asked to predict how the participants will behave (...); it simply engenders writing behaviours, as requested by the investigator”. Our version of role-playing consists simply of writing short essays. The subjects are asked to picture themselves in a certain situation that is described to them and then to imagine and write how the situation proceeds, what must have preceded it, etc. Role-playing is not perhaps the most fitting term for a4 the versions we have used, but nevertheless we wanted to use it throughout this chapter because the role-playing method has been our main impiration in all our experiments. Our method bears some resemblance to certain traditional projective techniques (e.g. the sentence completion method), but it is based not so much on the Freudian theory of projection

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than on the theory of action where action has a meaning and an underlying structure and where it goes forward in the form of interactional sequences with their own inner logic.

A. Objectives and Limitations of the Method Our students’ projects revealed many interesting facts about role-playing as a social psychological method; below are some examples. The subjects, or perhaps it should be ‘fellow researchers’ in this case, were recruited from amongst undergraduate students, as so often in social psychological experiments. In one exercise the material was collected by asking the class that had agreed to cooperate to write a short play. Half the class was given a description of a middle-aged housewife, who had been admitted to mental hospital to be treated for depression, and the hospital’s arts therapist meeting for the first time in therapy class. The other half wrote a play on the basis of a description of a middle-aged housewife suffering from depression meeting the teacher of the arts study group at a workers’ institute. The material thus obtained - fragments of plays written by students, often no more than a few lines - described the respondents’ expectations of people’s behaviour in two different situations. This version of the method exactly corresponds with Ginsburg’s non-active role-playing. This method of material collection uses the logic ofexperimevltal thought, which in all branches of science has proved to be one of the finest inventions of inquiring man. Here, it was applied by varying one element of the situation described to the subjects (hospita! and therapy vs. workers’ institute and arts study). The rest of the situation remains constant - for example, in both situations there is a middle-aged housewife suffering from depression. However, when reading through the materials one could not help asking whether the features of the situation that were supposed to be controlled really were so. Although the housewife was formally described as the ‘same’ person in both situations, the one who was depressed and therefore joined the arts group at the workers’ institute may psychologically have been a ‘different’ person from the one who was depressed and who went to arts therapy at the mental hospital. A change in the meaning of the

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episode necessarily changed the meaning of this one element of the episode. The ‘control’ of this element, in the sense that experimental psychologists talk about control, is quite simply impossible; not in a technical sense but more fundamentally, for conceptual and logical reasons. It is not only that the ‘same’ people - the middle-aged housewife and the artist - are playing different roles in two different situations. They are psychologically different people because both of the situations have their own ‘logic’, and it is this logic that gives a meaning to the people in the episode and to their acts. The popularized textbook version of social psychological role theory, according to which the individual in different situations plays different roles assimilated from the surrounding culture, did not seem relevant in our fragments of plays. What emerged from our experiment was an interesting new theoretical construct, the situation logic, a concept to which we shall return at several points in this chapter. It soon also became obvious that the method does not provide the researcher with easy and automatic solutions. Instead, it forces him into active theoretical work. If mechanical methods of classification and calculation are applied in the analysis of this kind of material, the results will hardly be very interesting. The method, at least in this case, was primarily a heuristic instrument which encouraged the researcher towards theorybuilding rather than the testing of given hypotheses. This by no means renders the method worthless; on the contrary, it is the former task, the invention of new ideas, which is the engine of science. In the words of C. Wright Mills (1961, 71): “Social research of any kind is advanced by ideas: it is only disciplined by fact”. Verification can easily be accomplished by the mediocre researcher, who needs only to observe given methodological rules. In the not too distant future the task will probably be delegated to the research team’s computer-linked robot. In our case, however, a computer programme for testing the role theory would hardly have come up with the concept of ‘situation logic’. Admittedly, in the further elaboration of this concept there would no doubt be use for the conventional experiment as well. One thing that these fairly simple projects made clear was that rolep!aying is not merely a harmless ‘method’. It is an activity that interferes ir, the subjects’ emotional and cognitive world. Therefore one inevitably encounters the question of professional responsibility and ethical problems. Take the following case. One of the course participants played volleyball

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for a top team in the national league. She asked her teammates to imagine they lose their next game and to write a short essay on the subject, “Why did we lose? What happened to us?” As their next visitor was to be a team that was not doing very well, it was not easy for the players to imagine themselves in that situation; they had to play a role that was hardly plausible. But they wrote their essays just the same. The following weekend, to the great surprise of everyone, the team lost. Did role-playing psychologically affect the players, bring negative images and tensions to the surface, and interfere in their game? Our carelessness gave social psychological experimentation a dubious reputation among the players at any rate. And we ourselves learned a valuable lesson about the dangers involved in the use of the role-playing method.

1. The Use of Role-Playing in Assessment and Therapy

Role-playing can also be used for other than scientific purposes, in contexts where it does not compete with the laboratory experiment. A closer study of these uses should also teach us something about the method as an instrument of scientific research. In his review of role-playing and role performance in social psychological research, Ginsburg (1978) sets out by mentioning that role-playing has been used as an assessment technique for decades; it was, for instance, used to select espionage and sabotage agents in the United States during World War 11. It would be even more natural to use the method as an assessment technique in entrance exams to drama school, but there are of course many other tasks which require the ability to step into someone else’s role, or to play different kinds of roles. The method can also be used to assess not only how well a person performed a certain role, but also the style in which he performed it. That role-playing can validly be used for such purposes implies that there are inter-individual diflerences in how well or in what style people perform roles. Does this in some way debase the applicability of role-playing for purposes of scientific research? Two points need to be considered here. First, there is exactly the same problem in experiments and in studies using questionnaires or interviews. The tasks that are given to the subject in the laboratory are often so complicated that his behaviour is sure to be

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affected by his ability to understand the instructions. In fact role-playing can more flexibly be adapted according to the population than most methods. Characteristic of all the different versions of role-playing is that the subject mentally pictures a certain situation and, in his imagination, puts himself in that situation. In the active version he does so not only at the level of thoughts and emotions, but also at the level of actions. Unlike the subject in the normal experiment who is put into a situation, in role-playing the subject takes himself into it. But when it comes to presenting the situation, there are several alternatives. These can be chosen according to the features and qualities of each particular population. For example, when small children are studied, rather than asking them to write a story it is often easier to ask them to present a play, or simply to say how they envisage the situation. For adults any one of the three different versions may prove easiest, depending on factors such as age, education, culture, etc. There may of course also be inter-individual differences in people’s faculty for imagination or abstract thought. In the previous chapter we mentioned the Samoyed who had no answer for the philologist who wanted to know how to say “my river” in Samoyedic. The river belonged to the Samoyeds, not to the philologist. But we also saw Luria ingeniously using a kind of role-playing technique and presenting the counterargument of “another man”; he now had a game the Samoyed knew how to play (p. 184). Second, inter-individual differences are of equal consequence in roleplaying and in the experiment or in interview studies in the sense that the distorting effect depends on the objectives and the practical execution of the study. Their impact on the results should be considered especially in descriptive studies. In the comparison of groups which are similar in terms of age structure and educational level, for instance, it is unlikely that any average differences between the groups will be confounded by individual differences in narrative power. Inter-individual differences are least problematic when the aim is not to produce descriptions, but to identlfy universally applicable theoretical relations. We shall return to these questions in a more concrete context when introducing our own empirical studies. Ginsburg goes on to mention, second, the use of role-playing as a therapeutical procedure, in the form of, for instance, psychodrama or scciodrama. This particular use implies that role-playing affects the person himself- which could be the case even when the method is used not for therapeutical but for scientific purposes. It is for this reason that the social

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psychologist who wants to use role-playing in his study can never totally evade ethical problems. He is responsible for the effect of role-playing on his subjects, just as we apparently were responsible for the unexpected defeat of the volleyball team. However, in this respect it would seem that rcle-playing is far less problematic than the kind of experiment in which the researcher makes a conscious effort to influence the subject, to change his attitudes, or to throughly upset him.

2. Role-Playing as an Alternative to the Laboratory Experiment

We made brief acquaintance with the role-playing method earlier in this book when we discussed Mixon’s new interpretation of the studies on obedience by Milgram (p. 35). Mixon (1972) starts out from the problems related to deception, which have been widely debated in American social psychology since the late 1960s. He has a very clear picture of the bzckground to the problems: “Though not always aware of the implications of the move psychologists often act as if a subject were a creature capable of actively controlling his behaviour in relation to an interpretation or definition of a situation. (...) It is imagined that if a subject knows what is going on he will behave in an artificial manner unrepresentative of behaviour outside the laboratory. The deception manipulation appears to be part of an effort to create a human analogue to the animal experiments; that is, deception is thought to place the human subject in the position of a naively responding automatic mechanism. ” In other words, the researcher knows fairly well what his object is like and how he can be expected to behave. But when he is looking for guidelines for his practical experiment there is no use consulting the experiment carried out in the natural science laboratory, because here the objects do not interpret the situation or attempt to find out what the experimenter is trying to do. The natural scientist has never required methods that account for consciousness and therefore has never needed tc develop such methods. If the social psychologist too is reluctant to do so, then he will take what appears to be the easiest way out, and try to alter his subject and deprive him of the tools that make him human. This, hcwever, means that the results of the experiment will not be about real man and real human action.

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Role-playing as a substitute for deception In social psychology, deception is a scientific as well as an ethical problem. There are scientists who believe it is wrong to deceive other people, even in a scientific experiment (or at least in a scientific experiment). There are also scientists who believe it is wrong to try to influence people in a social psychological study of, say, attitudes: “Unless completely trivial attitudes are involved it would be unethical to attempt to change an individual’s attitude in the psychological laboratory” (Smith 1975). Role-playing is generally regarded as a preferable alternative to the experiment when it comes to ethical problems. The intertwining of the search for truth or the general aims of scientific research with ethical acceptability is a fascinating question. Is there no other way for us to find out the truth than by doing wrong to the human subject or the animal that is being investigated? As we have seen, there are definite risks in role-playing, too. Is it possible that, at least in some cases, the method that is most satisfactory from the ethical point of view is also the best from the scientific point of view? In fact when social psychologists are talking about deception as an ethical problem, they tend to have somewhat more practical concerns. It is a generally accepted norm that upon completion of the experiment the subjects are informed of its true purpose; they will learn that they have been deceived, and the word will spread. The next time they are invited to take part the subjects are more suspicious and it is more difficult to mislead them. Until scientific experiments began on a larger scale this was not a serious problem, and experimenters were not too concerned about the ethics of deception. But when experiments are carried out at the rate that they are today, the atmosphere in the social psychological laboratory and people’s image of the whole discipline are bound to be affected. Consider the study by LatanC and Darley (19701, who seated their subjects, one at a time, in a room to ill in a questionnaire. Suddenly smoke began to pour into the room through the air-conditioning duct. The situation required the subject to interpret what was happening and to take steps to do something about it. The subject had complete freedom of action; nothing wrong here. Indeed, the purpose of the experiment was to see whether the subject would leave the room to find out what was going on, or whether he would continue to fill in the questionnaire. But how are the morals and the atnosphere of a social psychology department affected if every now and then you hear people falling and hurting themselves in adjacent rooms, or sub-

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jects howling in agony from electric shocks, or smoke is billowing into the room through air-conditioning ducts - and you don’t know what is for real? One day people will realize that all their efforts at a deeper understanding of man has merely generated suspicion and paranoia. When LatanC and Darley (ibid., 57) asked their subjects to explain their reactions, some said that they ignored the smoke because they thought it was “smog, purposely introduced to simulate an urban environment”, or “truth gas” filtered into the room to induce them to answer the questionnaire accurately, or that “it must be some sort of experiment”. Role-playing could represent a healthy alternative to a problem which is not only ethical but also scientific: it should enable the researcher and his subject to work together in an atmosphere of mutual trust without compromising human dignity. In short then, role-playing can be recommended as an alternative to deception on at least three counts. First, from an ethical or value-rational point of view, it is a better choice when complete integrity in all human relations is set as an absolute value overriding all other aims. Second, roleplaying is not the kind of gravedigger that deception is: deception tends to give the whole discipline of social psychology a bad name and to spoil the relationship between the researcher and his subjects. Here the two alternatives are weighed on a more or less means-end rational basis. Third, role-playing should be seriously considered if there is any hope of it giving a less distorted picture of the nature of man and his action than methods based on deception, In this case the value one adheres to in the weighing of different methods is not integrity but the quality of scientific knowledge.

Role-playing as an instrument of theoretical work One of the commonest criticisms against social psychological experiments is their preoccupation with thoroughly trivial questions: it often seems that the results could easily be predicted by mere common sense. Each experiment requires considerable investments both in time and money and is hardly worthwhile if there is reason to suspect that the results will prove nothing we do not already know (which is the kind of study that tends to endow all social psychological experimentation with a feeling of naivety). It is cheaper, easier, faster and more exciting to let the subjects immense themselves in the experiment in their imagination, and to ask how they see the result of the experiment. If one subject says that it will give this result

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and the other says something different, then no one can argue that the results of the experiment, were it to be put into practice, are fully predictable. Now it makes sense to conduct the experiment, unless the conflicting views can be given a theoretical explanation and this explanation be verified by another series of role-playing. In this example role-playing is used as an alternative to ‘unnecessary’ experiments. The aim is to minimize the resources invested in tedious laboratory work. The researcher has nothing against the traditional experiment, he is merely opposed to unnecessary experiments. Role-playing is not an alternative to completely replace traditional laboratory experiments. It is an auxiliary instrument which can be recommended to every scientist who is reluctant to waste precious resources and who has finished with the childish amusement of fiddling around with all kinds of exciting little experiments. Mixon’s (1979) role-playing analysis of Milgram’s study on obedience falls into this category. Mixon suspects that the percentage of subjects who, in the kind of setting that Milgram applied, would obey the experimenter’s order to administer an electric shock to another subject, depends on how certain details of the experiment are arranged. These minor details may give the subject a decisive clue as to how the situation should be interpreted (e.g. is it “painful” of “harmful”). On the basis of his interpretation, the subject chooses the norm according to which he acts (e.g. “in a scientific experiment it is permissible to cause pain if it involves no serious risk”). So all that needs to be done is to find those crucial details which guide the subject in his interpretation of the situation. For this purpose role-playing provides a much more flexible method than experimentation. Mixon also designs experiments, but only in written descriptions. He reads each description to ten male students, one at a time. In Mixon’s (1979, 167) words: “Each participant was told that he would hear an account of an experiment that had been performed many times at other universities, that the reading would end before the experiment was completed, and that he would be asked to describe the rest of the experiment.” First, Mixon produces the “basic script”, a description of Milgram’s experiment which allows for more than one interpretation of the situation; and in the process seems to learn more about the experiment than he would have only by reading Milgram’s reports. Mixon then writes another script, one which would result in none of the ten students saying

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that the experimenter’s order was obeyed (“defiance baseline”). And third, he writes a script which should make all ten students say that the experiment continues in accordance with the experimenter’s orders (“obedience baseline”). The descriptions, superficially, are very similar to each other. Mixon says that a brief description of the three scripts might be descriptions of the same scene: “They differ little in detail, but the small variations make all the difference in the way people interpret the scenes”. The next logical step would be to see whether the predictions of Mixon’s theoretical model are supported by people’s behaviour in a real experiment. For example, would it verify the hypothesis behind the defiance baseline that “if the experimenter behaves as if he believes the shocks are or can be harmful, his commands will appear as illegitimate and people will defy him” (Mixon 1979, 173)? Mixon does not doubt the importance of verification. On the contrary, he seems very pleased to find confirmation of his theory, not in Milgram’s original reports but in a book which was published later. Mixon (1Y79, 174) formulates his conclusions in the traditional jargon of the experimental psychologist: “Thus, the defiance model which I had constructed earlier can be seen as receiving support for its accuracy from some of Milgram’s later experimental variations”. Support? Even though the subjects were deceived in exactly the same way they had been in Milgram’s earlier experiments? By his acceptance of Milgram’s crucial experiment Mixon rather knocks the bottom out of the interpretation that he is using role-playing as an absolute alternative to the experiment. He has used the method for the development of a new theoretical interpretation of Milgram’s observations (see p. 361, but he does not object to the use of traditional methods for testing the theory. For purposes of theory-building, however, it would have been a waste of resources to use these methods, because the same result was produced more flexibly and at less cost through role-playing.

Role-playing as a ‘light’ alternative to the experiment Hypotheses constructed on the basis of role-playing should be put to the test for verification especially in those cases where the aim is to find out how people are likely to behave in situations that are emotionally highly charged, such as in Milgram’s study. This is scientifically justified, for the individual’s behaviour in this kind of a situation may well be different from

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what he imagines he and other people would do. But the problem is that this is exactly the kind of situation in which experimenting with human subjects may be ethically dubious. Therefore we must often be content with making observations of a ‘natural experiment’ that is arranged by real life. In this kind of ‘natural experiment’, we normally first see something confusing happening and the11 resort to role-playing in the hope of finding a theoretical explanation. On the other hand, there are many cases in which role-playing and the corresponding experiment would be so alike that the results obtained with the former method would not need to be tested by the heavier arsenal of the latter. Role-playing can well be used as a lighter alternative to the experiment. It is perfectly legitimate to inquire in an opinion poll: “Let us assume that a reporter of a major daily stopped you in the street today and asked who would be your choice for the country’s next Prime Minister. What do you think you would say?” Unless there are some very special reasons, no one is going to insist on backing up this ‘role-playing’ with an experiment where the experimenter’s assistant goes out and, acting as a reporter, stops someone in the street and asks this question. Or to take another example, let us consider the small study I conducted to check a mere detail in a larger project (Eskola 1987, 14): how do the meanings differ of such representations as “temperament”, “character” and “personality”. A group of teachers were presented with a questionnaire, of which there were three versions. Only one word distinguished them from each other. One third of the teachers received a form in which they were asked to imagine they would iiave to describe in writing the temperament of a certain person A whom they had never met. They would be allowed to ask ten questions about A . What would you like to know about A? The respondent wrote these questions down on the form. Another third was given exactly the same task with the exception that the word “temperament” was replaced by the word “personality”. The last third of the teachers were asked to imagine they would have to describe the character of A . What would they want to know about A? When the subjects’ questions were classified, it was found that the variation of one word in the ‘script’ had produced some relatively clear differences in how the questions of the different groups were distributed. In the group who were asked to imagine that they would have to describe the temperament of A , a great many of the questions concerned the psychological traits of A (e.g.

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“Is A shy?”). When the task was to write a description of A’s personality, the subjects were much more often interested in A’s social background (e.g. whether A lives in town or in the country). Finally, in the case of “character”, there were more questions than in either of the two other groups concerning A’s values and attitudes. The method I used here may be called role-playing because the people involved were asked to imagine a certain situation and to describe how they would act in that situation. The results would hardly have been different if, instead of using role-playing, a more realistic ‘experiment’ had been arranged in which the subjects were shown the mysterious A whom they were to describe, if some of their questions concerning A had been answered, and then they had actually written their description. Although the study that is carried out as an ‘experiment’ has a higher status than the study that is ‘played’ - at least according to the criteria applied by many social psychological journals - a referee of judgement would hardly be very excited about this kind of an experiment but probably classify it under the category of the useless and naive experiments which we have been criticizing here. It is important that the methodological arsenal one uses is not heavier than the problem deserves to be dealt with, and in many cases role-playing provides a useful ‘lighter’ alternative. 3. In Search of the ‘Situation Logic’

So far we have found three different uses for role-playing. First, roleplaying may prevent institutes of social psychology from becoming madhouses where it is impossible to tell who is faking and who is not, and at the same time it may help raise the moral standards of scientific research. Second, it may serve as an heuristic instrument in original theoretical work. And third, it represents, within the methodological arsenal of social psychology, a light-weight weapon which may be used for approaching smaller game, such as specific issues branching off from the main problem. But are there fields of study in which role-playing could be used more independently, or problems that cannot be adequately tackled by the traditional experiment? We shall first see whether the concept of ‘situation logic’ refers to such an area in human action and cooperation.

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Episode and its meaning We now revert to the problem which was discussed in chapter 1 when we reviewed methods of concrete research on interaction (pp. 40-42). Here we said that the basic unit to operate with in the study of interaction is episode; now we need to be more specific and add that it should be the meaning of the episode. Let us briefly examine what the word “meaning” itself may mean. For example: how is it possible that the same thing may take on several different meanings? One answer to our question is provided by Figure 5.1., borrowed from an article by Rommetveit (1981), in which the same object (S)appears in three different contexts. Figure 5.1. The same object (S) in three different referential domains

In the first, its meaning is clearly “white”, in the second “big” and in the third “triangle”. In other words, the meanings arise from the relation of the object to the other elements visible in the same referential domain. These meanings are not arbitrary, nor is the number of possible meanings unlimited. Each situation contains a certain number of possible objective meanings, a meaning potential. This is a strictly theoretical concept

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because usually it is impossible, in practice, to enumerate and describe all the potential meanings. What we can do, in most cases, is give examples of interpretations that definitely are not possible. For instance, object S in Figure 5.1. cannot take on the meaning of “square”. For object S to carry the meaning “triangle”, there must be such a concept in our culture, as well as other geometrical representations: concepts and rules which state how they should be used. S cannot be a “square” because it would be in violation of the rules that tell us how to use the concept “square”. Such representations have not existed at all times and in all cultures. We must therefore conclude that meanings are determined through representations which change, historically, with cultural development. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, in the context of social episodes of action or cooperation. Their meanings are also determined by their relations to the surrounding social field. In the same way as geometry tells us how a “square” is related to other kinds of figures, the ‘logic’ of the prevailing way of life is something that tells us how a social episode is related to other elements of this way or mode of life. The meaning of“having a sauna” derives from its relations to certain other things that are part of the ‘logic’ of the Finnish way of life. In a culture where these relations are lacking, “having a sauna” has no meaning at all (and in some cultures it would probably be associated with shady massage parlours). Likewise, the object which is thematized from different points of view will have different meanings: when a tumbler is thematized as a missile, its relations to gravity are most meaningful; when it is thematized as an art object, its relations to different art schools are meaningful. The above is not intended as a thorough philosophical analysis but merely as a background to the following discussion of certain uses of role-playing. If the researcher is concerned to find out how the relations of a given object to the surrounding world affect the meaning that this object takes on, he may manipulate these relations (the ‘independent variable’) and then try to determine the effect that the manipulation has on the meaning (the ‘dependent variable’). For example, he could ask the subject to state what meaning S carries on the first row in Figure 5.1., what meaning it has on the second row, and what meaning on the third. This is an experimental study of ‘rules’ or the ‘situation logic’. We shall later (pp. 266-269) give concrete examples of our own attempts to do something similar with imagined episodes.

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But the researcher may also be concerned to discover the potential meanings of a certain episode, or at least part of them; it is only in very rare instances that an exhaustive account can be given. Rommetveit (1981) is no doubt right in saying that “vagueness, ambiguity, and incompleteness - and hence also versatility, flexibility, and negotiability - are inherent and essential characteristics of meanings of situations as engendered by human beings as well as of linguistically mediated meaning”. The terms ‘situation logic’ or the ‘logic of way of life’ can be accurate only when they are used as theoretical concepts, but never in real life (which is why we prefer to write ‘logic’ rather than logic). But when we know how a certain verbal utterance, for example, is related to external reality, the entity they form may be surprisingly clear. Volosinov’s (1976, 99) example is illuminating: Two people are sitting in a room. They are both silent. Then one of them says, ‘Well!’ The other does not respond. One meaning of the episode and of the utterance it contains will be clear when we learn certain things about the surrounding reality: for example, that it is May and summer is around the corner. They both happen to look out of the window and see that it is snowing. One of them says, “Well!”, in a certain tone of voice. NOWwe understand the utterance, on the basis of the reality which was not included in it, but with which the words are inseparably linked. We need not even hear the words to imagine the tone in which they most likely were uttered. Situations do have a logic of their own. Say we added a few elements to Volosinov’s rather short ‘script’ and produced the following description: “It is May and summer is around the corner. Two people are sitting in a room and they are both silent. They both happen to look out of the window, and one of them says, ‘Well, trust it to do that!’.’’ Then, we would set out the following task: we want to get a rough idea at least of the meaning potential of what the person in our script said, of all the different things that his short utterance could mean. It is hard to see how a laboratory experiment could be of any help in this task, which to some extent resembles the kind of task that occupies anthropologists and linguists. It is certainly more logical to present the subjects with the ‘script’ and to let them solve the problem; they would be asked to imagine what happened in this situation, what the two people saw outside, what they were thinking about, and to write a short essay about all this. From these essays, we could then determine the different meanings of this situation. A certain proportion of the essays would probably be

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very similar; some would probably be very different and imaginative, but no doubt these too would have their own logic. Many of all the possible stories that could be thought up would not occur, even if we had innumerable subjects writing essays for us. The outlines of the meaning potential would begin to emerge on the basis of a fairly small sample of essays, although it would not be possible to draw the exact limits (except at the theoretical level). If we modified the script and said it was December rather than May, the essays would most probably soon show that they are based on a different description. Let us take another example which is more interesting from the social psychological point of view. We have presented a group of Finnish students with the following task: “Lasse is a young man who has finished school. Last summer he travelled widely in Western and Eastern Europe, and he took a special liking to the Soviet Union. Try to imagine why. What did Lasse see there, what happened to him? Write a short essay on this.” Three elements were systematically varied in this script. First, we said that the Soviet Union was a bad experience (“He was not however very keen on the Soviet Union. He prefers not to talk about it, except that he won’t be going back there.”) Second, we changed the main character and had a young woman instead of a young man (‘ ‘Laura is a young woman who has finished school. Last summer she etc.”) Third, we varied the country that the character liked or disliked: the other alternative was West Germany. This way the various combinations added up to eight different scripts. There are several different ways in which a tourist may get a particularly good or bad impression of a foreign country. The essays written by the students on the basis of our scripts provided us with an outline of these possibilities. Many of our critics, however, suspect that these essays are “mere stereotypes”, and that they differ from the information we would get from interviews with people returning from a trip abroad. We shall return to this problem later. At this point we shall simply conclude that for certain purposes the variant of role-playing described above is a faster and more flexible alternative than the survey method. It is true that the validity of the results, in the empirical sense, represents a problem in roleplaying, but that is not a very serious problem if the aim of the study is not to collect descriptive facts but to discover new ideas and develop new theories.

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Internal logic of episodes In the foregoing we were concerned with how a given episode derives its meaning from the relations of that episode to other elements in the same field, which to a greater or lesser degree is regulated by a certain ‘logic’. Now we shall go inside the episode to examine how its elements are organized to form the structure of the episode, or its ‘internal logic’. It is perhaps necessary to repeat that an exact and unambiguous demarcation of episode and element or external field and internal logic is possible only at the theoretical level; in empirical reality the borderlines tend to shift depending on the point of view. The internal structure of episodes can be examined by the survey method, as Simpura (1983) did in his study of Finnish drinking occasions. The interviewees were asked to call to mind a few recent occasions on which they had drunk alcohol, and to describe each of them separately. Almost two and a half thousand persons were interviewed, and descriptions of a total of nearly ten thousand drinking occasions were obtained. The meaning of drinking depends essentially on how it is related to surrounding events (e.g. on whether alcohol is consumed at a party or after sauna); and this, in turn, directly affects the way in which the elements of the drinking episode are organized, or its ‘internal logic’ (e.g. beer is most typically consumed after sauna and with meals, and spirits dominate on public holidays, outdoors and as medicine). However, this method has some serious shortcomings. First, “the analysis here was laborious and time-consuming, and it can hardly be recommended to be applied directly, without a thorough consideration of alternatives” (Simpura 1983,126). Second, since every episode is by definition a “drinking occasion”, the focus is on drinking even in those cases where it has been a secondary and insignificant element of a completely different kind of episode. These were the problems which we set out to solve in our own role-playing experiments, which are described further on. 4. An Instrument for Sounding the Future Role-playing has its own place alongside the experiment and the survey method, especially in studies concerned with the logic of situations, but we have still not come to the area where it is really in its element. The feature that in the first instance distinguishes role-playing from other methods is

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that the subject takes himself, in his imagination, to a world which is not here and now. One such world is the future. The future is an area on which scientists are also expected to have something to say, but the traditional methods of scientific inquiry are highly uncertain for these purposes. Would this be the slot for the new type of method represented by role-playing?

Predicting the future When the sociologist has predictions to make about the future, he will usually solve his methodological uncertainty by putting the future in the world for which social science’s methods were originally developed, that is, in the world of past events. This way the researcher may approach whatever it is he is predicting as though it were already solved: all he needs to establish is how. He collects the necessary data from historical and statistical sources, and other kinds of material which he is accustomed to using. This solution brings to mind Aristotle’s seafight problem: it is true today that tomorrow there either will be a seafight or there will not (see Hintikka 1964)? Similarly, if you are going to take an exam tomorrow, you might think: it is true today that tomorrow I shall either pass or fail. I don’t know yet which in fact will happen, but in any case it has to be either the former or the latter. This I know for sure. If the former is true and I do pass the exam tomorrow, then there’s no point in me studying any further this evening. I could just as well go out for a beer or to the movies. If, on the other hand, the latter alternative happens to be true and I fail, then it is also useless to study any further. I could still just as well go out for a beer. But surely the prediction of future events is something that the social scientist can and should take seriously. However, in order to set oneself apart from the motley crowd of quack clairvoyants, it is important to approach the task with the utmost care. The best way to go about the problem is to imagine that the student’s exam has been marked and that either “Pass” or “Fail” has already been written somewhere, but in letters so small that it can only be seen with the aid of a certain kind of magnifying instrument. This instrument can be put together using such pieces of information as (a) the student’s marks in the matriculation examination, (b) his record in earlier studies, and (c) the importance of tomorrow’s exam to the student. The rationale in this kind of an attempt to predict a mark which

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will be given tomorrow lies in the notion that the exam represents merely one section of a string of study processes which have continued for a long time. They will continue to proceed along their law-like path and decide or actually they already have decided - what will happen to the student tomorrow. The items of which the prediction is constructed represent data about those processes. But would the researcher accept this rationale if it were his own son or daughter who was taking the exam tomorrow? The sociologist would hardly want to believe that the mark has already been given. Surely mother or father can do more than just “read” the result with some sort of a predictive instrument. If we felt about all people the same as we do about our own children, if we really cared about them, what would become of our predictions? Wouldn’t we have to admit that people can influence their own fate, and that we, as researchers, also want to influence them rather than just predict what is going to happen? This would render useless the traditional methods for making predictions, in which past trends are extrapolated into the future. The people whose decisions build the future are different from the individuals whose decisions are reflected in our statistics, and they are free to act in whichever way they choose. Later in this chapter we shall describe one of our role-playing experiments in which we were interested in the future of the family: will people still get married and have children in the year 2000 to the same extent they do today? It would be strange to think that this question is already solved because the young people who will eventually be making these decisions are still children at the moment. Although we can use statistics to trace changes over time in marriage rates and in the number of children that people have had, it is impossible to infer from these that the same trends will continue in future generations, which are made up of completely different individuals. There is however one thing that applies to all generations, both past and future. When they make decisions about getting married and having children, young people always take into account various kinds of laws: biological, psychological, demographic, juridical. The same laws are also taken into account by government officials and municipal boards when decisions are being made on policies and measures affecting the choices of young people (e.g. housing loans for young couples, child allowances, municipal day care). If we could learn something about those

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laws, this knowledge would shed light on the future without us having to assume that it is already decided. It was with these laws we were concerned in our role-playing experiments described on pages 298-302.

Future as a dimension of life space One clear difference between the adult’s and the infant’s life space is that while the infant is ruled by the situation immediately at hand, the adult also attaches importance to the past and the future: “The morale and happiness of an individual seem to depend more on what he expects of the future than on the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the present situation” (Lewin 1951, 75). It may be difficult to predict the future on the basis of the present, but the present is easy to understand on the basis of coming events. For example, we understand why the student stays up all night studying when we learn that he has an exam tomorrow which he is determined to pass. If the future is understood as only a very short period of time ahead of us, as a zone which is constantly becoming the present, then experimental studies can and have been made of the future. Many of the goals which motivate our actions and give meaning to them are goals which, temporally, lie in the immediate future. Over the day, we get a number of things done which were mere possibilities in the morning; and out of these new goals for tomorrow have already grown. In the laboratory this process can be fitted into an even shorter period of time. This can be seen in the excellent experiments made by Lewin and his co-workers who, starting from a theoretical idea they had, examined how the individual sets a goal for himself, acts towards this goal and, guided by the result of his action, sets a new goal (Lewin et al. 1944). When the human subject grows into an adult and learns to look further ahead into the future and thus to set goals that are in the more distant future, he also begins to act on the basis of longer action wholes. The book in hand affected the lives of all us involved in writing it and demanded our cooperation for a couple of years until it was ready. We were also prepared for all kinds of eventualities: what will happen when it is published? what will happen if we never finish it? This was real role-playing, with real consequences. If someone had wanted to study the dynamics of this process, no other method could have been more suitable than role-playing.

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The dynamics we are referring to covers more than just the action of people towards a goal somewhere in the distant future (“If the crop is to be harvested next autumn, it must be sown now”). Sometimes undivided attention must be paid to completing a certain action whole; the motivating factor will then be something that has just happened (“The crop has ripened and it must now be harvested”). Nor do we always do A because we want B to happen in the future. Sometimes we do A to make sure that if B does not happen in the future, it will at least not be because we failed to do A . Humans act not only in the pursuit of concrete goals, but also to shun or to shoulder responsibilities, to take the blame but also to be forgiven, to rouse hope without certainty, etc. If we are interested in finding out how all these complex social psychological relationships are produced, there can hardly be a more useful method than role-playing.

5. Levels of Reality and Irreality The narrow-minded empiricist who is captive of his statistical theories is usually concerned only with what is certain or at least highly probable (a judgement which will be based on statistical significance, for example). Yet in real life, even in the empiricist’s life, things which are possible, although highly unlikely, may also prove to be important. Lewin was a social psychologist who understood this. One of the basic ideas in his theory of how goals are determined is that the value of the goal (W which determines the course of action is equal to the value of attaining the goal (E) multiplied by the probability of attaining the goal (P), or V=PxE. If something has a very high positive value, then it is worthwhile setting it as a goal, even though the probability of attaining it were very low. As it is put in a Finnish proverb, “Trout is so valuable a catch that it is worth the effort even if you never hook one”. The same formula is also applicable to things which, if realized, have a highly negative valence. Nuclear power plants should not be built because even if the probability of one blowing up is extremely small, the explosion, if it happens, may have horrifying consequences. These laws are part of the ‘logic’ which guides people’s hopes and fears of the future. However, hopes and fears occur not only on that dimension of life space which is constituted by time, from the past through the present to the

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future. Lewin (1935, 174-175; 1951, 75-76 and 244-248) outlines another dimension which he places perpendicular to the time dimension: the realityirreality dimension. He says that expectations occur at the level of future reality, and hopes at the level of future irreality. At the latter level, such as in dreams, wishes, and fantasies, people are allowed greater freedom of movement than at the level of reality, where the power and will of other people and also objective obstacles which are more or less independent of other people, form a medium which prevents free movement. In our dayto-day life we would often like to try out this or that new alternative just to see what would happen, but because of these obstacles this is possible only by using our imagination. Thus, this kind of ‘role-playing’ represents an important part of our normal everyday life. It is precisely mental experimentation that helps our actions become real, and experimentation in turn presupposes the level of irreality. If you only move around in past, present and future reality, without ever rising to the level of hopes and fantasies, you might be left with an unrealistic picture of what the world around us could look like, of what can be accomplished in the world through action. It is a false notion that a realistic world view grows from keeping a tight rein on imagination. On the contrary, imagination is an invaluable human resource which must be encouraged and enriched. It keeps our eyes open to all the real possibilities we have in this world but which can only be foreseen by the power of imagination and be carried into effect through action. This also applies to scientific research. In the atmosphere of strict empiricism which now prevails, the researcher only learns how to make and organize observations, to explain the percentages and distributions in his tables, and to develop ‘theoretical’ ideas on the basis of his empirical findings. Unless there is a change in this atmosphere, we will have entire generations of psychologists and sociologists who are incapable of doing original theoretical work, of using their psychological and sociological imagination. To use a comparison: in the world where people travelled on foot, in sailships or horse-drawn carriages, this sort of scientist might have designed better skis, sledges and sailships, but he would never have been able to invent the steam engine or the automobile. I would suspect that he is also sceptical about other people’s visions and about the scientific method which uses these visions for analytical purposes. But it is perfectly clear that a truthful scientific description of a given object is possible only

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if the level of irreality is also made use of. And this is where role-playing has an important methodological task to fulfil.

B. In Search of the Social Meanings of Drinking, or “How Does the Situation Proceed?” Our first serious experiment with role-playing was inspired by Mixon’s (1979) study. Mixon had made slight modifications to his basic script describing Milgram’s experiment, and succeeded in developing a script where none of the writers had the subject obey the experimenter’s order, and on the other hand a script where all the writers said that the subject obeyed the experimenter’s order. What we were interested in was the place of alcohol in the Finnish way of life. Although total consumption of alcohol is not particularly high in Finland, people tend to get very drunk on the occasions that they do drink, with various consequences. Finnish drinking habits, compared with the Danish, for example, could perhaps best be described as ‘neurotic’. Drinking is something that is noticed, strongly disapproved of, and also closely controlled; and at the same time Finns have an international reputation for being heavy drinkers. To take just one example of disapproval, in Finland we would not refer to alcohol in a respectful obituary, unlike Bailyn (1979) who wrote of Paul F. Lazarsfeld: “Then he would sip drinks to keep going. He did not care much what he drank - fine French wines were the same to him as that fearful Grufifiu that ate through the varnish of our table tops - they all had alcohol, and that served to hold fatigue.” In Finland this would most probably be understood as an insinuation that the deceased was an alcoholic! Our aim was to find a situation in the Finnish way of life that would either lead or not lead to drinking. The script that describes the situation contains a number of different elements, which may be varied without essentially changing the basic scene. Using Mixon’s all-or-none method, we wanted to find a script version where none of the writers mention alcohol in their essays: and on the other hand, a script version where all the writers mention alcohol.

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1. Why We Abandoned the All-or-None Method’

The ‘results’ presented below include very few figures and tables or other numerical data. The most important results of our study are the effects that the whole research process has had on our minds. This process included the introduction of the study to our subjects, collecting the essays, discussions with the writers after they had written their essays and, naturally, reading the essays and giving them some sort of preliminary interpretations. This entire process is therefore reflected in our ideas and arguments.

The basic script Our first script read as follows: “Mr and Mrs A2 live in a typical Finnish suburb with a rather wide range of facilities: a supermarket, school, post office, bank, pub, laundry, a small sports ground, a park. They enjoy an average urban Finnish standard of living: a car, summer cottage, a drinks cupboard, a chock-full freezer, colour TV, the usual household appliances. On a normal winter weekday, Mr and Mrs A go out for an evening walk and bump into their old friends Mr and Mrs B. They had been neighbours on the other side of the country some time ago, but now they haven’t seen each other for a few years. It turns out that Mr and Mrs B are moving to town and are looking for a suitable flat in the suburb where Mr and Mrs A live. Try to imagine yourself in the scene and write a short essay about how the situation proceeds.” Let us see what happened when we presented this script to 32 students who were taking a foundation course in social psychology. They did not know we were specially interested in whether they would mention alcohol in their essays. If they did mention it, they had taken it up spontaneously, as a natural part of the story. And indeed in about half of the essays (17) alcohol was mentioned, in the other half (15) not. Otherwise the essays were surprisingly similar to each other. When you had read ten essays, you already knew more or less what the rest of them would be like. We had come across “the saturation process”, as Bertaux and Bertaux1 This section is based on Anna Kihlstrom’s master’s thesis in social psychology at the University of Tampere. References to the ‘researcher’ in the following apply to her. 2 We actually had typical Finnish surnames here, but for convenience we have abbreviated them to A and B.

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Wiame (1981) describe the phenomenon (see also Lalive d’Epinay 1985). Bertaux and Bertaux-Wiame were collecting life stories of bakers and bakery workers for their study of artisanal bakery in France. They said they were at first concerned about the representativeness of their ‘sample’, but soon noticed that they “had moved in another realm than the one of traditional sample representativity” . The life of every interviewee had been shaped by the same sociostructural features, and the researchers heard the same story time and time again. This is exactly what happened in our study. The subjects were predisposed to include certain elements in their stories because we had worked constraints and possibilities into the script. In the first place, the script describes a situation which is not part of day-to-day routine but a more exceptional event: the two couples meet for the first time in years. That probably calls for celebration, in spite of the fact that it is a weekday evening and no one had planned on going out for a drink. Second, it is winter and that means it is cold; therefore in many essays the couples move inside. Third, since Mr and Mrs B “are moving to town and are looking for a flat in the suburb where Mr and Mrs A live”, most of the subjects will have Mr and Mrs A showing Mr and Mrs B around, and also taking them up to their flat. Fourth, the statement that the two couples had previously been neighbours “on the other side of the country” suggests a change in the families’ way of life; more specifically, it points to a more urban way of life because the scene is set in a suburb, which in the Finnish context will probably be understood as referring to the southern part of the country. The fact that the couples used to be neighbours means they have something to talk about, i.e. their old mutual acquaintances. Bertaux and Bertaux-Wiame (1981) write that “it took us about 15 life stories of bakery workers to begin perceiving the saturation process”. We had much the same experience. As long as we are working with people who lead a normal life and who are capable of acting adequately in their normal surroundings, people who take an interest in what is happening in the world, who meet other people and who read the papers - as long as we are working with these people, it makes little difference who we pick out to describe the development of the situation from the point where the script breaks off. They are all to a lesser or greater extent experts in the logic of a certain way of life, the logic which we are trying to establish and which each individual describes in his own particular way. We are indeed

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“in another realm than the one of traditional sample representativity”; that is why a relatively small number of stories suffices for our purposes. In the psychological laboratory, subjects often feel that the tasks they are given are nonsensical, uninteresting and boring. In our study the respondents seemed to enjoy the opportunity to write freely, and it took them no more than a quarter of an hour to write lheir essays. Apparently we were studying something that was meaningful and important to the people who were helping us carry out the study. A recurring feature in the essays which did not necessarily follow from the constraints and possibilities worked into the script, was a tendency to describe the thoughts of the characters which were not evident from, or which were contrary to, their actions. Mr A does this or that but thinks differently; Mrs B says something to her husband which contradicts what she said earlier when they were at Mr and Mrs A’s. Yet one does not get the impression that the characters in the essays are exceptionally dishonest, or that they are lying intentionally. Apparently our subjects have wanted to describe, in Berne’s (1964) words, “games people play”. Perhaps it was a certain element in our basic script which made our subjects write this kind of essay? Or perhaps it was the task itself, the requirement of producing a fictitious story? Our subjects are familiar with the technique often used in literature to build up tensions between what people do or say and what they really feel or think. Perhaps they were playing at being novelists? Our main concern was however to find out why half the subjects included alcohol in their stories and the other half did not. The equal distribution suggested that the connections we were looking for were just as random as in the case of tossing a coin. From a methodological point of view, this provided an excellent starting-point for developing a script version where none of the writers mention alcohol in their essays; and a script version where all writers mention alcohol.

Some modifications Drinking has always been something of a weekend sport in Finland (see Simpura 1983, 18-28): people like to save up for Saturdays, and nowadays for Fridays too. It is a very masculine phenomenon. As a rule women only come into the picture when the bragging starts, or when someone tries to

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interfere and control the drinking (waitress; nagging wife). There are also certain occupational groups where drinking is generally considered improper. Primary school teachers, for instance, have traditionally been in the vanguard of the Finnish temperance movement. Taking advantage of the latter norm, we put a teacher in one of our scripts. If we were right in assuming that a teacher and alcohol do not belong in the same story, we should get essays in which none of the subjects mention alcohol. This version begins with exactly the same description of Mr and Mrs A’s life in a suburb and their living standards as the basic script, but now they do not run across their old friends Mr and Mrs B: “On a normal winter weekday, Mr and Mrs A go out for an evening walk and bump into their son’s teacher. Try to imagine yourself in the scene and write a short essay about how the situation proceeds.” The essays were written by sixteen students who were on a foundation course in social psychology. Contrary to all our expectations, alcohol was mentioned in ten essays; only six writers did not include alcohol in their stories. Our idea did not work, at least at the formal level. However, in eight of these ten essays drinking came in only as a secondary element, such as “Mr A had a beer at home”, or “Mr A went afterwards to the pub for a beer’’, or “after the teacher had gone, mother and father had a drink, but no more”. But there were also two essays in which alcohol was clearly the dominant element. In one, the teacher was an old friend of Mr and Mrs A’s and they had often been out drinking together, in the other the parents control the whole situation, persuade the teacher to join them for a beer, and in the end the whole party gets legless. What, then, was the actual result of this study; what was its effect on us researchers? One thing is clear: people do not behave as mechanically as we had expected. Our subjects did not automatically fall into the methodological trap we had set. We had assumed that the word “teacher” would serve as a sign warning our writers that this is a situation where alcohol is definitely out of place. That our theory was too mechanical and at variance with people’s real behaviour became clear to us only when we had read the essays. We noticed that the all-or-none method which we were so excited about was in effect based on the same kind of mechanical and unrealistic ideas. Therefore, we decided to abandon the method in its strictest form. The decision can justifiably, and quite literally, be regarded

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as one of the main results of the study. In a later discussion of emotional schemes, we shall offer an explanation for why the parents consumed alcohol so often in those stories where they met their son’s teacher. The part of our assumption in which we expected that the subjects would not have the teacher drinking alcohol was essentially true. It is perhaps only logical that in the couple of essays in which the teacher did drink, he got thoroughly drunk; if you deviate from the norm, you must go all the way. As a whole, the picture we got from the sixteen essays reminded us that in social situations there are always ‘extrasocial’ elements which may become dominant; elements which also allow for opposition, surprise, development and reform: “We know of the bureaucrat that he is not only a bureaucrat, of the businessman that he is not only a businessman, of the officer that he is not only an officer. This extrasocial nature - a man’s temperament, fate, interests, worth as a personality - gives a certain nuance to the picture formed by all who meet him. It intermixes his social picture with non-social imponderables - however little they may change his dominant activities as a bureaucrat or businessman or officer.” (Simmel 1959) If the word “bureaucrat” were replaced by “teacher”, this would be an exact description of what we discovered in our stories. As well as by the teacher script, we tried to get all-or-none answers through versions where the time was varied. In one version, it is early morning in the middle of the week when Mr and Mrs A go for a walk; here we expected that no one would mention alcohol. In another version it is Saturday evening, and in this case we thought that all the essays would describe drinking episodes. However, neither of these assumptions was completely correct. Admittedly there was more drinking in stories based on the latter version than on the former, but even in the morning version, two out of fourteen essays included drinking - and in both the characters were drinking heavily. What happened in these stories was something similar to the process we described in Figure 5.1. (p. 252), in which there was a change in the meaning of S from “white” to “big” when it was placed in a different referential domain. In the case where alcohol does appear in the context of a normal morning in the middle of the week, the meaning of the episode will be “boozing” rather than “meeting friends”. And so the elements of the story (e.g. the amount of alcohol consumed) will take shape on the basis of this interpretation.

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The result of the whole project - if we take this to mean its impact on the researcher’s consciousness - is summarized by the researcher as follows: “The effect of the instructions’ key signals - morning and Saturday on the writers’ decision to omit alcohol from their essays or to include it was less pronounced than we had expected. It was quite simply impossible to get a hold of alcohol (...I because it was not an independent element separate from the total structure but was, on the contrary, through its connections with the internal logic of the story, an integral part of that structure. Within this total structure, the alternatives would seem to be so numerous that it is difficult to produce a static classification of drinking situations. The researcher is more and more confused.” Of all the versions in which we varied the time of the meeting, the one which produced least references to alcohol read like this: “At around midnight on a normal winter weekday, Mr and Mrs A wake up to someone ringing their doorbell. Mr A goes to the door and finds old family friends, Mr and Mrs B. They had been neighbours on the other side of the country some time ago, but had not seen each other for several years. It turns out that Mr and Mrs B are moving to town and have been looking for a suitable flat in the neighbourhood. Mr and Mrs B were going to drive back home the same evening, but their car had broken down. They had to ask their old friends for help. Try to imagine yourself in the scene and write a short essay about how the situation proceeds.” Could the nocturnal setting have had a significant effect on the use of alcohol? We got the idea from an article by Melbin (1978), who draws a parallel between night and frontier “as regions of danger and outlawry”. Apparently our couples also sensed the dangers of the night because in these stories they were particularly correct and polite in their behaviour. Alcohol is mentioned in passing only in one essay, where Mr and Mrs A offer a nightcap to Mr and Mrs B. No one gets drunk. The stories produced on the basis of this version lead the researcher to the following hypothesis: “The strange, unfamiliar situation creates a feeling of uneasiness in response to which the people involved resort to familiar social rules. This way they can hope to keep the situation from falling apart. In this respect the unusual time at which the couples meet does not give them the freedom to break rules. Quite the contrary, it seems to make them depend on them more than usual. What exactly would happen if Mr and Mrs A and B

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deviated from their normal path? Where would they find themselves?” The answer is of course that they would frnd themselves in the ‘frontier’ where the meaning of the episode may even change from “meeting friends” to “nightly orgies”. There was also very little drinking in the stories where Mr and Mrs A meet Mrs A’s sister and her child. The script begins in the same way as the others, but the end reads as follows: “On a normal winter weekday, Mr and Mrs A go out for an evening walk and bump into Mrs B, Mrs A’s sister, and her son, who are on their way home, which is in the suburb where Mr and Mrs A live. Try to imagine yourself in the scene and write a short essay about how the situation proceeds.” Alcohol is a dominant element only in one out of fourteen stories - where Mr B, who divorced his wife a year ago, has drinking problems - and it is mentioned in passing only in two essays (“had a couple of beers”). So by working elements such as “a woman who is a close relative” and “child” into the script, we had very nearly achieved our original goal of producing a script where none of the respondents would mention alcohol. But after all that we had learned in the course of our experiments, we were not very excited about our success. Although alcohol was not mentioned in these stories, there was no reason why it should not have been. The stories placed in the rigid category of ‘no mention of alcohol’ were not nearly such straightforward cases as this label presupposed. And as the same was apparently true in the category ‘alcohol mentioned’, there did not seem to be much point in continuing the search for situations where all the stories would contain reference to alcohol. We had already seen that in most of the stories which were classified in this category, the kind of statement that “the host offered his guest a drink” or “they went down to the pub for a couple of beers” could just as well have been omitted: there was nothing in the story that made it necessary.

What did we learn? Our series of experiments was rather short, it took only a short time, and it was inexpensive. Yet to the researchers involved it taught some important lessons, or produced the following results: The ‘appearance’ or ‘non-appearance’ of alcohol in a story - the dichotomy upon which the ‘all-or-none’ approach is based - is a fruitless

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abstraction. The way to go about the problem is to make a distinction between (a) episodes where drinking is the dominant activity, and (b) episodes where it is a secondary element, subordinate to the main line of activity. These two categories emerged rather clearly from our stories when we concentrated on the meaning of the episode. It would be worthwhile to apply the same distinction in interview studies as well, where the difference is often hidden beneath an all too complex classification of drinking situations. For instance, Simpura’s (1983, 42-55) classification of drinking occasions into context categories such as “Public holidays” or “Entertainment contexts” means he will inevitably have, within the same category, episodes where drinking is the dominant activity and episodes where it is a secondary element. When reading our stories where alcohol is an insignificant element subordinate to the main line of activity, it is hard to see why the use of alcohol is so strictly controlled by official norms in Finland. If you are shopping at the grocer’s and pick up a bottle of middle beer (which is the only alcoholic beverage that the grocer is allowed to sell), you are not allowed to drink it until you have left the shopkeeper’s premises. If you open the bottle, the grocer might lose his licence to sell beer. If you are having a picnic in the park and the police spots you drinking wine, he may take away your bottle and fine you. If you are travelling by train and take a swig from your pocket flask, the guard may have you put off the train at the next station. If - and this actually happened to a visiting American professor in Finland at the time I was writing these very lines - if you want to celebrate the end of a study course by offering a glass of wine to your students in the lecture room, this will not be permitted; which means that in this culture teaching and studying at the university are also governed by the prohibition act. So although the prohibition act was officially repealed in Finland in 1932, it still seems to apply to many individual activities. Although these prohibitive norms may seem unnecessary and irritating, it is easy to comply with them because drinking is a more or less unimportant part of these activities. Apparently it is this kind of unimportant drinking whose occurrence we can manipulate in the role-playing stories by varying the time of the situation, by including children in it, etc. It is much more difficult to do away with those stories where drinking is the dominant theme. Whatever the other elements in the situation, there will probably be at least one story in 15-20 which revolves around alcohol. In this case

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the other elements are by definition secondary: the time, place, the makeup of the party, etc. We often saw in our stories how one activity unfolded into another. The most interesting cases from the viewpoint of our present concern are those where drinking becomes a dominant activity, or where it ceases to be dominant and changes into something else (such as going to sleep). Rather than searching for connections between certain ‘stimuli’ and this or that action (S-A), it is much more interesting to try to find out how one action emerges from another (A-A’). A social situation is always in a state of flux; something is always flowing out of something else, and it is impossible to divide the flow of events into any other ‘state’ than into its state of becoming without distorting the object of research.

2. On the Cognitive-Emotional Meaning of Some Simple Episodes

As a rule our writers described events which in behavioural terms were rather simple and straightforward: Mr and Mrs A show their friends around; invite them to the local bar or up to their flat; talk about old times and mutual friends, etc. However, in many cases it seems that it is not the acts of the characters which are most important but the cognitive and emotional field which develops beneath the surface. The researcher who read the stories felt that the message of the stories was crystallized in their atmosphere, in the same way as after an evening out with friends we say, “That was nice!”, or “What a dreary evening!” Maybe ‘atmosphere’ was something that the writers decided on even before they started writing. That is, in many essays it is clear from the very outset whether the meeting is going to be a pleasant and tension-free occasion, or a dull and awkward formality. In real life it is often easier to communicate one’s feelings by doing something (like breaking a plate) than by giving them a specific name. The actions which appear in our stories can also be read and interpreted as schematic representations of cognitions and accompanying emotional feelings. This understanding of action gives the concept a deeper social psychological content compared with the usage where it refers only to visible behaviour. We shall now, from this perspective, compare those stories where Mr and Mrs A meet (a) Mr and Mrs B, their old friends (b) Mrs A ’ s

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sister, and (c) their son’s teacher. Our aim is to discover some of the cognitive and emotional currents that according to our writers inhabit the psyche of the Finnish urban dweller. First, we shall try to interpret the numerous stories in which Mr and Mrs A invite their friends up to their flat and show them all their various belongings. This was perhaps encouraged by the broad hint we gave at the beginning of our script when we connected Mr and Mrs A’s high standard of living with certain of their possessions. It was natural to go on by saying that Mr and Mrs A showed their guests all they had bought (and perhaps hoped to detect some sign of admiration or envy). On the other hand, these stories - or perhaps even the scripts? - can also be interpreted as a schematic way of indicating that Finnish people who have moved into new suburbs are not at all sure how they should live and how well they have done. It should by now be obvious that our script was not as innocent and pure as we proposed it to be (“Our aim was to find a situation in the Finnish way of life that would either lead or not lead to drinking”). Underlying both the basic script and the stories, we find the ‘great migration’ which took place in Finnish society during the post-war years: while in 1950 a clear majority (67.7 per cent) of the population was living in rural areas, by 1980 city dwellers already accounted for 59.8 per cent of the population. “So a nation of small farmers entered urban life practically in one generation and started to learn the way of life of urban dwellers”, says Simpura (1983, 20-21), who links the ‘great migration’ to the discussion of ‘Finnish boozing’. In this situation the traditional criteria of a ‘good life’ are no longer applicable. One alternative is to resort to what Festinger (1954) calls the “social comparison process”: if objective means are not available, “people evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparison respectively with the opinions and abilities of others”. In our case, “opinions” would, in the light of the stories written, seem to mean conceptions of how to life, and “abilities” whether one has succeeded in life. Comparison is not overt, but takes place through assessments of homes and belongings. We now have one potential explanation as to why the stones generated by the basic script so often described ‘games’ where people say something different to what they really mean. This characteristic of interaction is especially noticeable in the closing sentences of the stories. Invitations of

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the kind “you must come again” and phrases such as “do keep in touch” are empty rituals; and both couples are well aware of this. Sometimes this can be seen in the general logic of the story; sometimes in what husband and wife speak about once they have left the other couple; and sometimes the writer simply says that “invitations to come again are nothing more than empty phrases”. Our interpretation of this is that invitations and sayings of the above kind are a schematic way of representing those feelings and problems of life in the new suburbs that Tonnies (1963, 65) linked to his type of Gesellschaft and described by saying that “here everybody is himself and isolated, and there exists a condition of tension against all others”. In the stories where Mr and Mrs A meet Mrs A’s sister the whole atmosphere is quite different. Very often the characters talk about their problems, the real hardships and sufferings of day-to-day life. The researcher who worked on this study writes: “When the sisters start to pour out their troubles to each other, the men are not there. But because the women are close to each other, there develops a feeling of mutual confidence and sympathy which allows them to open up and to unburden themselves.” The relationship between the sisters is of the Gemeinschaft type where people, as Tonnies writes, “remain essentially united in spite of all separating factors”. The reason why our writers did not consider alcohol necessary in this scene probably lies in the closeness of the relationship rather than in the mechanistic idea that alcohol is not a ‘suitable’ element in a story involving a woman and her child. But how does one interpret the surprising finding that alcohol was mentioned in more than half of the stories where the couple met their son’s teacher? Why didn’t the teacher serve as a warning sign indicating the impropriety of mentioning alcohol in this context? Perhaps in this case the rules of the story differ from day-to-day reality? In real life I may come across my son’s teacher quite accidentally, without this event having any special meaning. The story has its own inner logic; its elements are not meaningless. We found that in many of the stories written by our subjects the meeting with the teacher was taken to mean that Mr and Mrs A’s son had problems at school! Problems tend to generate tensions, and our writers seemed to believe that alcohol is in some way related to tension and anxiety. Or perhaps the descriptions of parents having a drink as soon as the teacher had gone are simply the conventional way of describing ten-

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sion and the need for relaxation. But if the laws obtaining in the stories are a different thing from everyday reality, then do we have to conclude that our material consists only of stereotypes?

3. Does Role-Playing Merely Produce Stereotypes?

The first queston that people always ask us about role-playing is, Doesn’t it produce mere stereotypes? What, exactly, do they mean? In social psychology the verb “stereotyping” has been used to refer to the “action of assigning attributes to a person on the basis of the class or category to which he belongs”. It has three characteristics: (1) the categorization of persons, (2) a consensus of attributed traits, and (3) a discrepancy between attributed traits and actual traits (Secord and Backman 1964, 67). So when people say that the stories we get with the role-playing method are “mere stereotypes”, this means, accordingly, three different things. It means, first, that what the stories are like depends essentially on the category to which the script characters are assigned: young or old, middleclass or working class, etc. Second, it means that there are standardized, widely adopted conceptions - stereotypes - about what, say, suburban young couples are like, or about how they act in different situations. If we include a young suburban couple in our scripts, we will find in the stories stereotypes held of such people. Third, these stereotypes do not correspond with what these people are really like. There is “a discrepancy between attributed traits and actual traits”. We shall below first discuss the question of categorization and the attribution of traits in scientific research and in day-to-day life, and then, as a separate question, deal with the possible discrepancy between attributed traits and actual traits.

Categorization and beliefs about groups If stereotyping were understood as consisting in nothing other than the categorization of individuals on the basis of certain distinctive features (e.g. gender, nationality) and a certain trait were believed to be characteristic of the whole group, it would be easy to find innumerable examples of stereotypes: “Finns are heavy drinkers”. “On the average, men engage

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in sexual activity earlier than women and more often than women; are more responsive to psychological and symbolic materials associated with sex; and are more likely to engage in self-stimulation”. “Men are more active politically than women”. “Middle-age groups are more active politically than young adults or the old”. These assertions are not from stories written in role-playing studies. With the exception of the first they are excerpts from a book that according to its subtitle is “An Inventory of Scientific Findings”. This book, we are told on the jacket, contains more than one thousand “conclusions about human conduct”, all stated in more or less the same format as those cited (Berelson and Steiner 1964,302-303; 424). The attribution of traits on the basis of the category to which people belong is in other words particularly typical of people who like to call themselves social scientists. This seems paradoxical because ever since the 1920s, when Walter Lippman introduced the term, researchers have insisted that stereotypes are wrong, and attempted to root them out: “And so semanticists, and sociologists, and social psychologists patiently explained to their student audiences that it was stupid to believe that Jews were thus-and-so and Negroes this-and-that, and those students grew up to be editors of Time magazine, which enabled them to explain their point to all respectable urban Americans.” (Brown 1986, 587) However, these well-meant teachings were clearly based on a misunderstanding. Human consciousness utilizes both knowledge of groups and knowledge of individuals. What we normally mean by saying that we can identify an animal or a plant is that we know which species it belongs to. It is enough I know that the animal I saw in the woods yesterday was a fox and not a wolf. It is not important to know which particular fox it was out of the country’s entire fox population. The same applied to people in olden days when they were primarily members of their family or estate: all they had to know was which family or estate they belonged to. In eighteenth-century Finland, for example, the typology of Hippocrates and Galen was used to characterize whole estates or classes rather than individuals. Noblemen were arrogant and rather violent because they were by nature cholerics; a melancholic temperament was said to be characteristic of learned men and the bourgeoisie; country folk and the peasantry were described as humble and good-for-nothing phlegmatics. Only the sanguine type was unknown to the people of the north: this type

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was mainly represented by courtiers of the south (Wirilander 1974,42-43). This kind of knowledge - e.g. to know what fat and skinny people are ‘like’ - is still useful as a means of understanding and communication. It helps us to understand what Shakespeare meant when he had Caesar say that he is suspicious of Cassius because of his lean and hungry look and that he would prefer to be surrounded by men who are fat and amiable. But this is not the kind of knowledge you would use when selecting civil servants. With the individualization of society and the growing interest in technical knowledge, there is also a growing need for information about individuals (cf. chapter 1, p. 18). In the field of personality psychology typologies are replaced by trait theories because it is believed that these can produce a more accurate description of individuals: “A combination of perfectly general, descriptive variables is sufficient to allow any individual to be differentiated from any other, by specifying his position on each of these variables in a quantitative form” (Eysenck 1952, 19). Against this historical background we can understand why enlightened people are so concerned and suspicious that they come up and ask us: Aren’t the stories produced by your method mere stereotypes? We have tried to convince these people that, in Brown’s (1986,587-588)words, “stereotypes are natural categories, an intrinsic essential and primitive aspect of cognition, and anyone who attempts to ‘jawbone’ natural categories out of existence has chosen not just an ineffective means but also an end whose realization would be disastrous”. What is wrong with the idea we have inferred from our role-playing stories that “the Finnish people who have moved down to the new suburbs of the south are uneasy because they do not know exactly how they should live and are also unsure as to how well they have done in life”? This,unmistakably, is a stereotype: a certain trait (uncertainty) is attributed to a certain category of people (newcomers in suburbs). For the time being we shall put aside the question of whether this statement is true or not and concern ourselves instead with whether the whole approach to formulating such assertions is wrong. The answer is: it cannot be wrong because without them we could never gain control over masses of information. It is needless to say that not all Finnish people who have moved to suburbs are uncertain about themselves. No one is going to take the statement to mean that anyway. It will be understood as a statement of probability which allows for exceptions to the general rule. The great advantage of the role-

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playing method is that we will see these exceptions in a very small number of stories, just as we shall see the general rule. In a much more concrete way than the empirical generalizations of sociological research, it reminds us constantly that our hypotheses (such as those about the behaviour of teachers) are in fact more stereotyped than reality. In this sense it seems unreasonable to criticize the method of producing stereotypes. On the contrary, it effectively breaks down the researcher’s stereotypes. Furthermore, in each sample of stories the exceptions are linked much more logically to the general rule than is the ‘accidental’ observation which deviates from the statistical trend. When the writer describes an addicted teacher or a booze-up that starts early in the morning, he is well aware that teachers are not supposed to drink, or that it is very unusual to start drinking in the morning - and that is why these descriptions become so extreme that the whole meaning of the episode changes. After the subjects had written their stories, the researcher asked them what they felt about the task and how they had solved it. These discussions revealed something which would seem to be typical of stereotyping. Many of the subjects said they had a fairly clear idea of what the two couples were like, but they also hastened to add that they were not like that themselves - even if the person concerned lived in the same kind of suburb with the same status symbols as were mentioned in the script. It turned out that the source from which our writers had picked up their ideas was publicity: from the numerous research reports, statistics, newspaper articles, films, and novels published on the ‘average citizen’, on the life of the suburban dweller with a rural background. Using this information, they could tell what Mr and Mrs A were like, what kind of ‘traits’ they had, how they would behave in various situations. Their own life, however, was much richer and much more interesting, and so in their stories they distanced themselves quite clearly from their characters. It was only during the discussion with the researcher that many subjects started to think: Could I be like those people? This observation brings to mind the phenomenon which in social psychology is known as actor-observer divergence (Jones and Nisbett 1971). Actors tend to attribute their actions to external situational causes, whereas observers tend to attribute the same actions to causes internal to the actors, such as personality. When our subjects wrote about the meeting of the two couples, they were playing the role of ‘observer’: they

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had their characters do and say certain things on the basis of their own stereotyped notions of the personality traits and other characteristics of these kind of people. When trying to imagine what they would do if they were in the same situation themselves, they felt they were ‘actors’ who orientated to the situation. This is why it was so difficult for our subjects to identify themselves with Mr and Mrs A. What happened in our experiment is not specific to the role-playing method, but it is a more general social psychological phenomenon. There was one experiment in our series of studies to which the above explanation does not really apply. In this experiment our subjects were not students but metal workers from a large engineering works (in their scripts Mr and Mrs A were out for a walk in the morning on a normal weekday or on a Saturday evening). What we wanted to find out was whether our critics were right in saying that the kind of stories presupposed by our method could not be produced by manual workers. They were in fact capable of this, but the stories they wrote were on the average much shorter and also simpler than those written by the students. Most of the stories were actually straightforward answers to the question: “What did Mr and Mrs A do when they met Mr and Mrs B?” rather than true accounts of the situation with its many nuances. In some stories the writer described what he would do, not what Mr and Mrs A did: “Not having seen them for quite a while, I would first ask them how have you been doing, are you still working at the same place and all that. I would talk about things of current interest and I hope we could meet again now that you’re moving into the neighbourhood. And then said, see you later.” Although this is a very short story, it gives the information we are looking for because we can already see whether or not the writer has brought alcohol into the situation. After all, he could just as well have written: “Then we would go down to the local for a couple of beers and we would talk about things of current interest ...” The style in which the story is written is most interesting. The writer has risen to the level of irreality to use Lewin’s distinction - but what he sees there is himself as an actor rather than Mr and Mrs A whom he would be observing. It is impossible to tell whether this is because he is unable to write the story in any other way, or whether he is unable to imagine and see the situation in any other way; this could be tested in an experimental situation. Workers are rarely recruited as subjects in social psychological laboratory experiments. In

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most cases experimenters use social psychology students, who are used to playing various role games. It would be important to find out whether the results of studies that require an ability to distinguish between the roles of actor and observer apply not only to the latter, but also to the former population.

Stereotypes and reality Knowledge concerning entire population categories is a natural and legitimate part of the information we require for orientating ourselves in this world, but this knowledge must of course correspond with reality. However, we know from social psychological experiments that this kind of knowledge has a certain bias: “in certain conditions, judgements will accentuate resemblances between stimuli which belong to the same category and differences between stimuli belonging to different categories” (Doise 1986, 85). This is not to say that stereotypes give a completely erroneous picture of reality, but that they tend to accentuate real differences and resemblances. In a similar way, the stories written by our subjects may accentuate certain factors and de-emphasize others. Therefore they are not perfect mirror images of reality; but then again nor are the materials that are used by psychology and sociology and called facts. They usually need to be interpreted before they become evidence of some real-life phenomenon. When a subject says that he sees a “butterfly” in a Rorschach blot, that is a fact. But as such it is a very uninteresting fact. The important question is: what does this fact stand as evidence for? Or: what does it mean? To be able to answer these questions, the scientist will have to produce an interpretation. The same applies to opinion polls and attitude measurements. Eysenck (1954, 52) tells about a British opinion poll, where soon after the war people were asked: “Do you think that King George of Greece ought to be allowed to return to his country, or should a referendum be held on the question of his return?” It is a fact that 56 per cent favoured his return; but what does this fact mean? Is it evidence that the majority of respondents favoured the Conservative side in the Greek political struggle for power? No, says Eysenck: “The majority vote was merely an expression of ignorance coupled with a natural view, ‘If he is Greek, why shouldn’t he go back to Greece?”’. This is the interpretation made by the

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psychologist, but it is supported by the additional fact that in a subsequent poll, only 20 per cent said they had ever heard of the Greek king. In the case of our role-playing stories, the important question is accordingly not whether these are mere stereotypes, but what kind of evidence we see in them. We interpreted the stories as lending evidence to the theory that people who have recently moved into suburbs in Finland are troubled by the diffuse question of how they should live and how well have they done so far. This uneasiness is evident from certain themes in the stories, such as the ‘games’ that people play with their acquaintances. The question remains in the background only in meetings with close relatives, in which case the subjects would have their characters discuss concrete problems of their day-to-day life and in this way unburden themselves. It is possible that Finnish people are more keenly aware of and more sensitive to the difference between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft than people in those European countries which became urbanized much earlier than Finland. In this situation the use of alcohol - which was our main concern in these experiments - had a rather flexible role. Our stories may be seen as evidence that the search for ‘background variables’ which would directly determine the use of alcohol is a futile exercise. On the other hand, our writers did seem to take into account certain historical regularities or universal laws related to alcohol and the use of alcohol that apply in modem Finnish society, i.e. laws of the kind ‘if a then b’. For example, if alcohol is consumed sometime during the week rather than on a Friday or Saturday, then in a statistical sense this, in the Finland of today, is exceptional, and therefore it is probably exceptional in other respects as well. If a teacher consumes alcohol, then this is in violation of social norms. Therefore the situation easily leads to the interpretation that he (or, in particular, she) must have an extraordinary craving for alcohol. There is no reason to suspect that people take such factors into account only when they are participating in an experiment and writing stories. They do so in real life as well. It is this that in the final analysis moulds the statistics describing distributions of the use of alcohol by age, gender, occupation, weekday, etc. Our experiment has resulted in, among other things, growing methodological convictions of this kind, rather than producing reified ‘results’ of the kind that are seen in the form of a pile of numbers in the same way as the wood-chopper sees the results of his work in a pile of

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wood. We have also learned something about the technique itself in the course of our experiment. We have seen that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the procedure in which, using the logic of experimentation, different elements of the scripts are varied in order to see how this affects the stories. We have, however, become critical of the all-or-none method which is based on a too straightforward concept of the determination of practical activity. It is, of course, extremely unlikely that a subject will mention alcohol if we describe a situation where a child is waking up at home on a beautiful summer’s morning and we ask him to write a story about how the situation will proceed. But there is nothing to prevent someone from creating a story in which the child wakes up, notices a glass of whisky that someone has forgotten on the table, drinks it, and becomes violently ill. The story reflects reality because, sometimes, things like this really happen. Having criticized the methodological line of thinking which mimics the form of the social psychological laboratory experiment, there would hardly be any point in reconstructing this same line of thought on the basis of the role-playing technique. A more useful approach would seem to be provided by Derrida’s idea of ‘deconstruction’ (see Rorty 1982, 90-log), or, in a broader perspective, of research as writing, as “reinterpretation of our predecessors’ reinterpretation of their predecessors’ reinterpretation (...)”. Instead of trying to prove that our stories are direct representations of ‘objective reality’, we would assume that our writers, through the stories they have written, are making comments on the debate about alcohol policy and the use of alcohol in Finland. Our interpretations would in turn be comments on these comments - and hopefully at the same time contributions to the debate which is going on in the name of alcohol research. As for Derrida, “writing always leads to more writing, and more, and still more - just as history does not lead to Absolute Knowledge or the Final Struggle, but to more history, and more, and still more.”

4. Is the Role-Playing Method Useful in Cross-Cultural Studies? In 1985, under the auspices of the Nordic Council for Alcohol and Drug Research (NAD), we began to look into the possibility of making interna-

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tional comparisons with our role-playing experiments. A number of working papers were produced and several meetings were held with researchers from other countries, and eventually we had a set of scripts written in three different languages. Drawing on the experiences gained and on all the material that was produced in the process, we shall below describe some of the difficulties the researcher must be prepared to face when using the role-playing method in a comparative cross-cultural study. Our hrst problem was to find countries with which Finland could be compared. It was essential to be able to use the logic of the experiment - the variation one factor while the others are held constant - so we were looking for countries which in terms of culture would be as similar to Finland as possible, with the exception of that aspect which may be termed ‘alcohol culture’. These requirements took us to Denmark and the Federal Republic of Germany, which, unlike Finland, are ’beer countries’: additionally, from the Finnish point of view, Denmark is traditionally regarded as a very permissive country as far as the use of alcohol is concerned. However, we were still left with the problem of what exactly we should be comparing. “The indiscriminate and interchangeable use of such terms as ‘comparative’, ‘cross-cultural’, ‘cross-societal’, ‘international’, reflects the tendency to talk of societies as if they were distinguishable, discrete entities and consciously ignore the fact that nation-states may contain several distinct cultures, and distinct cultures may extend beyond the boundaries of nation-states” , says Stolte-Heiskanen (1987). Are we comparing the nation, culture, or society, she asks, if our study is concerned with “Western European countries”, “a Chinese and an African village”, “Tokyo and Detroit”, “Israeli and American youth”, “college students of the University of Helsinki and the University of Wisconsin”? Before tackling this problem of interpretation we had to solve more practical problems. It was clear from the outset that the scripts we had used in Finland could not be used in Denmark or in West Germany. The scripts described a typical Finnish suburb and its many details. But what could it be compared with if the Danish or German subjects felt that an ecological environment of the kind described in our script did not exist in their own country? We solved this dilemma by pruning all ‘Finnish’ elements from the scripts so that they would be credible in all three countries. Thus the final script had a suburban couple running across their old friends in the street. We varied only two elements: the age of the characters and the time at

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which they met. All other details were omitted to give the writers’ imagination free rein. Our new basic script read as follows: “Mr and Mrs A are a suburban couple. They are both under 30 years of age. One evening early in the week, they bump into their old friends Mr and Mrs B, whom they haven’t seen for a long time. Try to imagine yourself in this scene and write a short story about how the situation proceeds.” We then produced three modified versions of this basic script. In one, the characters are under 30 as in the basic script, but the episode takes place on “a Friday evening” rather than “early in the week”. In the two other versions, Mr and Mrs A are “over 60”. They run across their old friends either on “a Friday evening” or “one evening early in the week”. The script was tested by presenting it to 30 students from the University of Tampere. The stories do not essentially differ from those that were produced on the basis of the more detailed script, although alcohol is mentioned somewhat more often (in about six stories out of ten) than in our earlier experiments. The reason obviously lies in the setting: in two thirds of the stories the characters are either young, or the episode takes place on a Friday evening. Mention of alcohol remained far below the average and occurred only in one story out of four when the characters were over 60 and the episode took place early in the week. In these stories the traditional norm, that drinking is less acceptable early in the week than during the weekend, did not apply to young people. There were other signs too that the younger generation is changing the Finnish alcohol culture. For example, in many stories young people were drinking imported and more expensive brands, or making critical comment on Finnish alcohol policy and on the high price of drink. Another finding we made which may be typical of Finnish culture was that in many of the stories alcohol actually played a structuring role in the flow of events. For example, as soon as the bottle appears, women withdraw to form one group while men form another; when the host says he has run out of booze, the guests know it is time to leave, etc. When the same script was presented to 170 sociology students of the Free University of Berlin, one clear difference appeared immediately between Finland and the Federal Republic. In our case none of the subjects refused to take part in the experiment, but it was generally experienced as an interesting and amusing task. The researchers in charge of the West

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German project1 say that participation did not really mean ‘fun’, nor did it really make sense to their subjects. Only 65, or 40 per cent of the 170 students agreed to write a story. Comparative research is not always as easy as one might hope! The German students were apparently put off by the way of life of the two couples. Although the elements of the script had been reduced to a minimum, every one of them could be interpreted as a sign of a ‘bourgeois’ way of life: the characters are married, they live in a suburb, they are out for a walk together. It would seem that German students are more keenly aware of and more sensitive to such details than students in Finland. In methodological terms, the different reaction means that although the scripts may be exactly identical from a philological or translation point of view, it is not at all sure that they are so as psychological stimuli. The experimental psychologist’s dream of controlling variables very often remains a mere illusion. But surely that is how it should be insofar as our aim is to study real people who do not respond mechanically to stimuli but who always interpret their observations and thus give a meaning to them? In the stories written by the German students, explicit reference to alcohol was made only in every third case, which is considerably less than in the stories produced by Finnish students. This does not of course necessarily mean that West Germans drink less than Finns. It may also mean that drinking beer or wine is a more ‘natural’ part of social intercourse in Germany than it is in Finland. If this is true, there is simply no need to mention it (in the same way as no one mentions that the characters go to the toilet during the evening). Another difference between the West German and Finnish stories was that, in the former, people more often spent their evening in a restaurant or some other public place, whereas in the latter people tended to go to one or the other couple’s homes. This is an example of a difference which apparently reflects real differences between the two cultures, but not in the same way as beams of light are reflected from a mirror. We must take into account at least one mediating factor if we want to find out how the method really works. If, for example, young Finnish writers have seen their parents meet their friends at home but not in restaurants, it is obviously easier for them to imagine the former 1 Professor Hermann Fahrenkrug and his student Peter Rieker, who discusses the results of the experiment in his diploma thesis in sociology.

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kind of episode and write a story about it. In this case one might assume that the stories in which the evening continues at the home of either of the couples are more realistic, or are based to a lesser extent on stereotypes and pure fantasy than the stories which have the characters go out to a restaurant. Unlike the stories written by Finnish students, the West German stories were not significantly affected by the variation of the time of the episode. On the age dimension, however, it was found that old people were less spontaneous, met their friends and used alcohol more often at home, and chose wine more often than young people. Generally the differences that can be found in the stories correspond with the results of survey studies concerning the drinking behaviour of different age groups (e.g. Fahrenkrug 1987). We said earlier that in Finland the people appearing in the stories are often anxious because they are not at all sure how they should live and how well they have managed in comparison with other people. According to our German colleagues, they found elements of uncertainty, precariousness and embarassment in many of the stories describing meetings with old friends. The whole structure of the story often depended on this one critical social situation, on whether it developed in a positive or negative direction. So whereas in the former stones people’s uncertainty was related primarily to their way of life, in the latter it was more closely related to the immediate social situation, to the unexpected encounter. This difference may be seen as reflecting real existing differences between the psychological and sociological anxieties produced by a more recent (Finland) and a more developed and established (FRG) urban way of life. In Denmark the difficulties began at an even earlier stage than in the Federal Republic. In Germany our script was criticized by the students who refused to participate in the experiment, but in Denmark the same criticism came from the researcher with whom we were supposed to work and cooperate. In his opinion the situation described in the script was so naive and unnatural that he categorically refused to present it to any group of students. He would accept the script only on the condition that it mentioned the characters by their Christian names, omitted to mention whether or not they were married, and that, for instance, Niels and Ulla were shopping in the local supermarket on a Saturday morning when they ran across their old friends. And even then, our colleague did not believe

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that this method could prove anything we did not already know; least of all about the use of alcohol, which he said was so natural a part of everyday life in Denmark that it would hardly be considered worth mentioning. Danish people would be interested only if the situations in some way touched upon drinking problems. Therefore our Danish colleague insisted that the emphasis of the study should be on problem drinking and the scripts should describe situations where, for example, two people are preparing for a party at home, knowing that one of their guests usually becomes very aggressive when he or she gets drunk Eventually however we managed to get 43 stories from Denmark, which came from a school just outside Copenhagen.’ The stories are very lively and the characters move around quite a lot (from home to restaurant, to the theatre, disco, etc.), and they also eat a lot and at the same time drink alcohol. The Finnish reader soon discovers he is finding out about the life of people who really live in a culture which to some extent is different from his own. At this point we shall not make a closer comparison with the Finnish and West German stories because the writers in Denmark were slightly younger than in the two other countries. We merely note that even in Denmark a sufficient number of people were found who agreed to write a story on the basis of our script. Disappointed though we were to be turned down by our first contact in Denmark, the reception of our script made it clear to us that there must be considerable differences between the Danish and Finnish cultures, including the persistent tendency in the latter to regard even moderate use of alcohol as a problem, or at least as a dangerous habit. In many respects social and cultural development in Finland is heading towards the kind of situation prevailing in Denmark and the Federal Republic of Germany; for example, towards making a clearer distinction between problem-drinking and normal consumption of alcohol. We might have encountered less problems in our comparative project had the script been adapted to the circumstances in these more advanced countries, even though in Finland they might have seemed a bit too ‘modern’. Mam (1973, 105) once wrote that “Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape”, meaning that the forms of the less developed can be understood when we understand 1 Gunlevholm Idraets Efterskole. Pirkko Heiskanen and Mogens Berg assisted in the collection of the material.

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the more developed; therefore the latter rather than the former should be taken as a frame of reference in comparisons. However, given that an understanding of life in town can help us predict the development of the village, surely the village-dweller’s perspective on the town can also open up new insights? The use of role-playing as a research instrument instead of traditional interviews and questionnaires tends to accentuate the problems of comparison. The method requires that a concrete scene is described in the scripts (rather than presenting the respondents with abstract arguments and having them say whether or not they agree), and this will reveal profound differences between different countries not only in people’s attitudes towards alcohol, for example. The whole historical situation, the culture and the social environment may also differ. This poses serious technical obstacles to the use of the role-playing technique for comparative purposes, but also shows that our method uncovers many important factors which are ignored by researchers working with abstract attitude scales and scores.

C. The Logic Behind the Development of Certain Realities, or “What has Happened?” In the experiments described above our subjects were presented with a given situation and asked to imagine how that situation would proceed. Using a certain logic, they had to create a vision of the future world. We shall now move on to another series of experiments in which we proceeded in the opposite direction. The script described something that had already happened. The writer’s job was to turn back in time and to trace the logic which had guided the flow of events from a possibility of yesterday’s world into present-day reality. In every experiment we are also interested in how this ‘logic’ changes when certain elements of the reality described in the script are varied. The four cases presented on the following pages should be understood as samples of all the various tasks for which the role-playing method may be used.

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1. Lasse and Laura Travelling the World

Upon returning home from a trip to a foreign country, the visitor may be left with a positive picture of that country; it is also possible that he comes to dislike the country. What conditions cause the former or the latter? Are there differences in how this logic works in men and women, or in socialist and capitalist countries? There is no reason to rush headlong into a timeconsuming interview study of hundreds of male and female tourists, who have travelled to different countries. It is much faster and cheaper to see what kind of answers are produced by the role-playing method. If the answers are interesting and we decide to carry out a survey study on the subject, we can then use these answers to construct our hypotheses. This time we tackled the problem by writing a script which was extremely simple and also purged of all cultural elements. This way we would be able to use it in other countries as well, should our colleagues abroad be interested in cross-cultural comparisons. The script describes a young man by the name of Lasse, who has travelled in a number of countries in Eastern and Western Europe. Of these, he took a special liking to the Soviet Union. Why? What did he see there, what happened to him there? (The exact wording of the script and its different versions are presented on page 255). Three elements of the script were systematically varied. First, the picture that our tourist had of the Soviet Union was changed from positive to negative. Second, the tourist whose impressions were described was changed from boy to girl, from Lasse to Laura. And third, the country which they liked or disliked was changed from the Soviet Union to the Federal Republic of Germany. These combinations gave us eight different versions: Lasse (boy) Laura (girl) impression impression Country positive negative positive negative Soviet Union Federal Republic

1 5

2 6

3 7

4 8

The scripts were presented to 80 students from the University of Tampere. Since the scripts were distributed randomly, the number of stones obtained for each version is not 10, but varies between 8 and 12.

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The subjects were given 15 minutes to write their stories. We decided that we did not want any background information on the writers. This way we could avoid the temptation of indulging in separate analyses of whether the stories were written by men or women, etc., and concentrate instead on the logic of the stories. Most of the stories are rather concrete and give the main character a surname or introduce her as the writer’s younger sister, for example. Many of them are very moving and amusing. It is obvious that our subjects have enjoyed the task but that they have not taken it too seriously. A number of the writers have used a great deal of humour in their stories. If we start with the reasons why Lasse came to like the Soviet Union (version l), there is nothing unusual or unexpected in the explanations. Usually Lasse is charmed with the people he meets, the culture, the scenery. Some writers also mention certain features of the socialist system, such as the absence of commercialism and advertisement, as a positive experience. In the stories featuring Laura instead of Lasse (version 3), the writers tend to put more emphasis on human relations. Four writers out of ten mention some Russian person by Christian name (e.g. an old woman or a young policeman) who becomes a close friend of Laura’s. Not one out of the nine stories written on the basis of script version 1went into such concrete details. This clear difference apparently reflects the view that personal relations are a more important element in the logic underlying the formation of experiences in women than in men. Whether or not this is merely a stereotype is not a question we can solve here. Another sex stereotype is found in the stories which explain why and how our travellers took a dislike to the Soviet Union. In a few stories it is said that Laura was appalled by the “untidiness” of her hotel or by the “dirt” in the streets. It is evidently thought that Finnish men are not as sensitive to such things because none of the writers describing Lasse referred to untidiness. A number of writers make reference to the Russian language, which is spoken by very few people in Finland. In some stories Lasse or Laura enjoy their trip because they speak Russian. In others, they were pleased with their trip because they made contact with the local people and the local culture, even though they did not speak Russian. These stories do not necessarily contradict each other. Both types of explanation are part of a more general logic according to which knowledge of a certain language

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helps to create a positive experience but is not a necessary condition of it - even though the person may fear that it is. The reasons that were given for negative experiences of the Soviet Union (versions 2 and 4) were also very much what we expected. For example, Russian bureaucracy was mentioned several times. However, there were many stories in which certain preconceptions were presented as a background to the negative experience. Lasse held a prejudice against the Soviet Union which he selectively continued to reinforce; or then he had greatly admired the Soviet system but was disappointed in his expectations. There were also a couple of writers who explained the positive experience by reference to expectations - the reinforcement of positive ones or the reversal of negative ones - but this was much rarer than in the stories seeking explanations for bad impressions, where this possibility was mentioned by every other writer. An even clearer difference between the stories written on the basis of script versions 1 and 3 and versions 2 and 4 was found in the descriptions of the characters themselves: in the latter stories, where explanations were sought for negative experiences, the characters were much more often described in a negative light as well. On average, he or she is a different Lasse or Laura from the one who comes back and says the Soviet Union was a pleasant experience. Unlike the latter, the former drinks, brawls, gets locked up, wakes up with a hangover. Recalling what we said earlier about actor-observer divergence (p. 2771, we may develop the hypothesis that when the reference person gets a good picture of the country, it is easy for the writer to identify himself with this person and to see him as an actor whose experience is determined by situational factors (culture, the people he meets, etc.). On the other hand, when the imagined tourist gets a bad impression of the country, the writer tends to take a step backwards, assume the role of observer and explain the experience by factors which are internal to the actor (prejudices, bad manners, etc.) In the stories where Lasse or Laura travelled to West Germany, the positive experience (versions 5 and 7) is often explained by referring to the influence of the different culture, landscape, people, customs, and other external situational factors. Another similarity with the stones describing the Soviet Union was that the young person who took a dislike to West Germany was often portrayed in a disapproving strain; the bad experience was attributed to the respective traits of the reference person. But we also

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made some new discoveries in the stories where our tourists travelled to West Germany rather than the Soviet Union. Our young subjects were particularly excited about the political activity in West Germany, which made political life at home look very dull. In this context reference was usually made to the green movement and its demonstrations. On the negative side, most attention was paid to the position of migrant workers in West Germany. That this question was so prominent might have been due to the incidental fact that only a couple of years earlier a Finnish translation had been published of Gunter Wallraff‘s book about the kind of treatment he received in West Germany in the disguise of a Turkish guest worker. The replacement of Lasse by Laura, which in the stories about the Soviet Union brought some different nuances, did not have this effect in the case of West Germany. By contrast, a negative experience, whether the tourist was a boy or girl (versions 6 and S), is in the West German case often explained by some personal incident. For example, Lasse prefers not to talk about his trip because the first person he met was a streetwalker who happened to be Finnish and his ex-girlfriend; or he gets into a fight with a group of Germans whom he had argued with last summer when they had met in Lapland. Laura gets mugged in a couple of stories, in one she is arrested when the police break up a demonstration march, etc. While the tourists’ negative experiences of the Soviet Union are typically explained by an uneasiness about the rigid economic and political system, in West Germany the emphasis is on the insecurity experienced by the individual in the face of the system. When the story is set in West Germany, chance plays a greater role in the logic behind the formation of experiences than in the Soviet Union. Often this means that the risks and dangers are greater and that for this reason the tourist gets a bad impression. However, sometimes the greater scope which is left to chance produces a positive experience: in West Germany even Lasse may have a romance, which never happened to the boy who travelled to the Soviet Union.

2. The Structure of Threats in Today’s World

In chapter 4 we touched upon some of the global dangers which are threatening the world we live in and which also tend to shake one’s belief in the promises civilization has made of a better future. Today, increasing

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anxiety is being caused by fears that nuclear war, the death of fore& the spread of AIDS or some other catastrophe is inevitable, even though it has not yet happened. In recent years sociologists in many countries have been attempting to identify the main causes of people’s anxiety by asking them questions such as, to what extent are you afraid of the possibility of a Third World War breaking out, how likely do you consider the threat of a nuclear power plant blowing up? It should be fairly clear however that the opinion poll type of question cannot produce very stable results because people’s fears are directly affected by what is happening in the world around them. The Chernobyl nuclear accident in spring 1986 was immediately reflected in growing anti-nuclear sentiments, and the discovery of the virus causing AIDS in 1981 made the world aware of a completely new threat. It would therefore be useful to dig deeper, into the permanent structure or logic underlying threats and fears.

The method We set to work on this problem in 1982, using a “What has happened?” version of the role-playing method. The frrst stories were gathered from sports camps and various sports courses. We wanted to have a script which would be closely related to the respondents’ special interests, so in this case they were given the following task: “Imagine it is the year 1996, the Olympic Games are due to be held. The Games are arranged but after just two days of competition they have to be called off. Why? What has happened?” One section of the respondents received a less dramatic version: “Imagine it is the year 1996, the Olympic Games are due to be held. However, for several reasons, the Games cannot be arranged. Why? Try to imagine what has happened in the world and in the field of sports over these fourteen years.” Some of the respondents were presented with a situation which had developed even further. It is 1996, but “no one has even thought about arranging the Olympics”. What has happened in the world? In all these versions something happens, or has happened, which is extremely unpleasant and conflicts with the interests of the subjects. The fears they have or the threats they consider possible have now come true. From the stories they write, we can identify these threats and fears and,

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above all, their deeper structure or ‘logic’. T o throw light on this structure from a different angle, we presented part of the subjects with a script where all threats have disappeared: “Imagine it is the year 1996, the Olympic Games are due to be held. The Games are arranged and everything goes excellently. World records are broken, there are no disputes whatsoever. What has happened in the world over these fourteen years?” We did not ask the respondents to state their age, sex, or to give any other background information, because we were not interested in interindividual variation. What we wanted to establish was the general logic of threats in the collective consciousness of the population we had, the group of subjects which we took as one complete entity. During the next stage we moved on - not to inter-individual variation, but to a comparison of the contents of the collective consciousness of different interest or occupational groups. The script was presented to, among others, psychologists, adult educators, librarians and social workers. It was always varied according to the special interests of each occupational group. For our psychologist subjects the script read as follows: “It is 1996, the XXV World Congress of Psychology is due to be held. The congress is arranged, but it has to be broken off. Why? What has happened?” In this group too, we had a version where the congress was not arranged: “Upon consideration, however, it is decided that, for several reasons, the meeting might just as well be cancelled. Why? What could have happened in the world and in the field of psychology over these thirteen years?”.l In the third version, the congress is held and everything “goes smoothly and there are no disputes whatsoever”. When we had librarians writing stories, the congress mentioned in the script was an “international congress of the world’s biggest librarians’ organization”; when they were adult educators, it was the “V Unesco Conference on Adult Education”. By these modifications we wanted to make sure that there was, to use Allport’s (1950, 124) term, “ego-involvement” on the part of the respondents who took part in the role-playing.

1 The results of this experiment have been discussed from a psychological point of view in an earlier article (Eskola 1984).

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The structure of threats In all t h e x experimental groups we made the same discovery: although the stories on the surface looked like an extremely varied collection, it took us no more than 15-20 stories to begin to see that there were three basic categories into which every theme found in the stones could rather easily be slotted. In the first category, we had explanations where the Olympic Games or a scientific congress had to be cancelled or discontinued because World War I11 had broken out, because of a major nuclear accident, etc. In these stones the threat comes suddenly and from the outside. It arises almost always from man-made economic, political or technological systems, rather than from something of nature’s making. There are hardly any stories in which the Olympic Games or the international congress have to be called off because of a sudden thunderstorm or a violent attack of wild beasts. Our fears have changed since earlier historical times. We are not so much afraid of nature itself as of the various systems we have built to control and exploit it. The Freudian theory of anxiety has indeed become obsolete in the sense that anxiety is no longer caused solely by the selfcontrol required of us by civilization, but also by uncertainty of the happiness we were promised in return for self-control. In this atmosphere, people are asking themselves whether there is any point in making the sacrifice and controlling our immediate impulses if we are doomed to extermination anyway. Any crime can be commited without guilt because no individual can ever commit anything like the incredible crimes committed by civilization. It is also important to notice that even though these sudden catastrophes have not yet occurred, they are nevertheless possible. They are like a giant we have put behind bars but whose escape we have to fear all the time. Compared with the atmosphere in which we are now making our decisions, the days when there were no evil giants like these seem truly idyllic, even allowing for all the natural dangers that existed in those days. In the second category we placed those stones where dangers originating in man-made systems are slowly creeping into sports, adult education, etc. and threatening it from within. It is no longer worthwhile to arrange the Olympic Games because doping, commercialism, or people’s indolence has inftltrated sports and left it to rot from within. There is no point in arranging the congress on adult education because people now have access to all the information they need through computers and data

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technology; therefore the whole idea of adult education has become redundant. These threats have developed into processes which are now ticking away like a time bomb. There seems to be no way we can stop them. The third category consists of stories where the threat has not originated from outside the activity concerned (sports, adult education, etc.), but from its inner developmental logic. There is no point in arranging the Olympics because athletes have already reached the limits of human performance, and since all the records are unbreakable, people have lost interest. The psychologists’ world congress is cancelled because the various branches of psychology have drifted so far apart that scientists in different fields have great difficulty understanding each other: psychology no longer exists as a uniform discipline. In other words, in the contemporary world there is not only an awareness that continuous growth is necessary and unavoidable, but also an understanding that there are definite limits to and dangers involved in this growth. Whereas people were formerly eager to see a new system completed, expecting it to bring them happiness, it is now feared that the completion of a system will at the same time ruin it. There is also a fourth element which comes into the picture with the script where the respondents were asked to imagine that the Olympic Games or an international congress is held and all goes remarkably well. If the writer pictured the world in the same way as Freud did in his theory of civilization, he could easily imagine a world where in spite of a measure of anxiety, cooperative interaction among people is fluent and safe because the actors all control their immediate sexual and aggressive impulses. However, for most of the subjects who were given this task, this seemed to be extremely difficult. When asked, “What has happened to make things go so smoothly?”, it is not easy to construct a sequence of events which in the present world situation seems credible and realistic. Since the most alarming threats have their roots in various social and technological systems, there is no way they can be removed by individual self-control. Most of our subjects managed to come up with a story only by inventing something very exceptional: for instance, World War I11 had been waged and people were once again living in peace and harmony; or a “pill” or some other miraculous invention had put an end to all threats and conflicts in the world. In short: it seems that threats and dangers are a more natural part of the world we are living in than the idea that they could be dispelled.

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Librarians and social workers: a comparison To find out how the deeper structure of the stories is intertwined with their more superficial contents, we shall now compare the answers of two different occupational groups. These are a group of social workers and a group of librarians, which are of roughly equal size. When explaining why a world congress on social policy had to be discontinued, one of the social workers said there was an explosion in a nuclear power plant and another that air pollution levels were dangerously high in the city where the congress was being held, but all the others refer to various kinds of social conflicts. It is not so much the political conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union that they have in mind, but the connict between the developed and the developing countries, or between the forces striving towards “scientific, humanistic development and cooperation” and the forces “aligned with economic power and the military industry”. The writers feel it is possible that when these conflicts come to a head, a sudden, massive explosion might follow. The stones written by librarians tended to have a different emphasis. The focus here is on technology, which is perceived as a serious problem and as a threat to the future. This, too, is a time bomb which may suddenly explode. The librarians’ world congress has to be discontinued because the mainframe computer has broken down. It has either been “out of order for a long time and no one can 6nd out what is wrong”, or “some individual or organization has sabotaged the Nes”. Another popular fantasy is one where “information society” has slowly worked its way into libraries and ousted both librarians and books. “There is a self-service system where customers can borrow books and look things up on the computer terminal on their own”. People are demanding that “books be recorded on tape or disk, and that librarians be retrained as operators”. Therefore, in one story “the librarians, who show proper pnde in their profession, marched out of the meeting” and set up an underground organization to fight for the book. In the stones where there were “several reasons why the congress might just as well be cancelled”, the basic difference between the two groups is still the same, but certain new details also appear. Here too the social workers are concerned with the economic and social development of the world, with the course and limits of growth. If the circumstances are such that there is no point in arranging a world congress, then social policy

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must have lost much of its significance and the underprivileged must be having a really hard time in this world. Or could it be that exactly the opposite has happened? A number of writers explain the decision to cancel the congress by many positive developments: “Things have improved to such an extent in all sectors that social policy is left with nothing to do”. Librarians are again preoccupied with technical development. The same theme recurs in some form in almost every story: “A dull mechanistic age has dawned. No one can be bothered to read any more because all that is needed in terms of information and entertainment is readily available on TV and video”. All communication takes place “through electronic media”. People have “forgotten about books and libraries”. Instead of a library congress, various “computer and electronics congresses” are arranged. When the social workers and librarians were presented with a script where the international congress in the late 1990s is a successful meeting void of any disagreements, both groups had great difficulty finding a reasonable explanation. They saw no other way to solve the task than by making up something very unusual. Many of the social workers, for example, assumed that a dictator must have seized power and authority over the world; or that the harmony must have come about as a result of some major catastrophe, such as nuclear war; or then some revolutionary substance or method had been invented with which all the participants were “made to conform”. The explanations given by the librarians once again revolved around information technology. In some of the stories all goes well at the congress because computers have conquered the world and “there is no sign of books anywhere”. However most of the respondents try to find a solution whereby computers and books each have their own place, although many of the writers nevertheless seem to feel that even this is not possible unless there is some catastrophe in the world of computer systems to start witn. From the samples we have described above, we can see that the roleplaying technique has here served, just as projective tests do, to uncover the kind of fears and hopes that two groups of respondents had in mind when they were asked to picture certain future situations. Both groups perceived threats in the world which could suddenly and without warning explode, as well as dangers which were slowly working their way into the field of activity concerned or arising from the own development logic of that activity; and it is easier for both groups to find a plausible explanation for

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frightening future visions than it is to explain situations where the threats and dangers have been dispelled. Within this general frame, however, the groups differed rather clearly from each other in terms of the content they gave to their visions. Social workers were primarily worried about the consequences of social and economic development, whereas the librarians were concerned to the verge of obsession about information technology.

3. The Future of Family and Marriage Our third little experiment with a “What has happened?” version of roleplaying takes us back to the ideas put forward earlier in chapter 4 about the different place of ‘laws’ in nature and social activity. We said that whereas nature obeys its laws, humans take various kinds of laws into account in their practical activity (pp. 168-169). We are rarely able to predict how they will do this. However, it is useful to know what kind of ‘laws’ they consider worth weighmg up in their decision-making. Below we shall attempt to find out what this could mean at the level of empirical research. Let us take two young people who are thinking of getting married or having children. When making their decision, they will take into account various laws of the kind “if x , then y”: biological, psychological, sociological, etc. In order to find out what kind of laws these could be, we presented a number of different versions of the same script to Finnish students, a small group from the University of Lapland (N = 31) and a larger group from the University of Tampere (N = 103). Our basic script read as follows: “Imagine it is the year 2000. At a major international congress on family policy, it is reported that in more or less all advanced industrial countries, traditional marriage has risen in esteem. People get married and have children; the number of divorces has also decreased. Try to imagine why. What has happened in the world over these 15 years?” At the University of Lapland, we presented this script to half the students, while the other half were presented with a version in which the second and third sentences read: “It is reported that in more or less all advanced industrial countries, traditional marriage has lowered in esteem. Marriages are short-lived and are usually on a common-law basis; people have few children.” In Tampere, we had two further versions of the script

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in which marriage and having children were separated. In one, the respective sentences read: “It is reported that in more or less all advanced industrial countries, traditional marriage has risen in esteem, but people have very few children. People get married and divorces are rare; but very often married couples have no children”. In the other script, we reversed the situation: “It is reported that in more or less all advanced industrial countries, people like to have many children, but marriages are rarely lifelong. People get married, divorce, and re-marry; but they have many children.”

Marriage as an obstacle and as a necessity At first glance it seems that the stories written by our students offer no end of explanations. However, the picture becomes much clearer when one ignores the tautological ‘explanations’ of the kind that people get married because “family life and traditional values have risen in esteem”, or that they do not get mamed because “family and marriage have lowered in esteem”. When these are omitted, we can identlfy four broad categories. In the frst category, we have those explanations which refer to purely individualistic or egoistic aims. The imagined future in which people no longer get married or have children, is explained by saying that people have become “egoistic”, that they want to enjoy themselves, to embark upon a career, to raise their standard of living. This implies that the family is seen simply as a form of cooperation between two individuals of the opposite sex, a form which can support their individual ambitions but rarely does. In the latter case, the individuals feel it is better to pursue their goals alone, without the burden of a family. Our respondents seem to believe that the ‘law’: ifyou get married, then you will have to give up your own ambitions, applies most particularly to women. Indeed, the explanations which refer to changes in the position of women represent a category of its own, As a rule these explanations imply that a woman gets married only if she has to; for example, in order to have children or to find someone to support her. Thus the typical explanation offered for the situation where marriage rates have decreased by the year 2000 was something like this. “Women have become more equal with men, they have created their t ~ w ncareer, they haven’t found the time to have children. Marriage is no longer ‘necessary’ for them”. Or: “Women

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no longer need men in the traditional sense” (because of technical advances which mean that children can be produced in test tubes or using cloning techniques). On the other hand, when the subjects are told that family and marriage are in favour in the year 2000, the usual explanation is that “women have had to submit to doing housework, to give up their jobs to reduce unemployment”. The third type of explanation is based on the same simple model as the two former ones, but it brings in a third actor in addition to man and woman: the state. This actor takes account of the ‘law’ that if people do not have children, then the country will see a loss in net population, which has various disadvantages. Therefore the vision of the future where people have many children, whether within marriage or otherwise, is usually explained by saying that state support of f a d e s with children has increased to such an extent that children are no longer an economic burden to their parents.

The family in the world of threats and dangers Many of the subjects also referred to the same dangers and threats we discussed in the previous section. Young people seem to be very sensitive to them today (for instance, around 15 per cent of the respondents mentioned AIDS, although at the time hardly more than ten cases had been reported in the whole of Finland). It is normally assumed in sociological models that if a is the cause of b, then it cannot at the same time be the cause of non-b. Fears and feelings of insecurity, as explanations in our stories, clearly do not follow this logic, but could lead to completely opposite results. On the one hand, they are referred to when explaining why traditional marriage is held in high esteem in the year 2000, that is, why people get married, have children, and do not get divorced: “It is felt that the family is the only place of refuge in tho entire world”. But fears and insecurity are also mentioned in the opposite case, to explain why the esteem of traditional marriage has declined, that is to say, why marriages are short-lived and mostly on a common-law basis, and why people have very few children. For example: “Tensions have increased in the world over the past 15 years as a result of the arms race and other such developments, and people no longer believe in the future, they dare not establish permanent relationships and have chidren”.

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Or: “Environmental pollution and the threat of nuclear war have adversely affected marriage and birth rates, because people do not make long-term plans for the future”. Reference to fears and insecurity is much more common in the latter case than in the former, especially as an explanation for decisions not to have children. But it is also logical to say that people are driven by their fears to seek refuge in the family. To the researcher who is well-trained in survey analysis, this is of course nothing new. It is merely a challenge which invites him to further elaborations so that he can identlfy the additional factors which determine the direction in which people are pushed and pulled by their fears and feelings of insecurity in each case. Elaboration will no doubt produce better statistical predictions. The picture becomes clearer when the threat is specified. AIDS is never referred to as an explanation of why people do not get married, but it is referred to when explaining the tendency to establish lasting relationships. Therefore the combination of AIDS and a serious threat of war would perhaps provide the best explanation for the situation where people establish lasting relationships but do not have children. However, it is possible that no elaboration can turn decision-making into a mechanical and deterministic process. Perhaps there are always two opposed ‘logics’ at every step of the process, implying that any new factor which is added to the model may lead not only in one direction, but also in the other, opposite direction? In other words, whatever the combination of circumstances happens to be, people could always take it into account in different ways. This could be one formulation to talk of “free will”. To summarize, the purpose of this section has been to introduce a model which allows for both determinism and for what is known as “free will” in the explanation of human action. There are certain necessary relations in this world which we know for sure (for instance, we know that if people do not have children, the population will decrease; or that, at least for the time being, a person who has AIDS will die within a certain period of time). On the other hand, when actors take these relations into account, we cannot tell for sure how they will decide to act. We can only anticipate their action with a certain probability. Role-playing would seem to be a method which is well suited to this particular model. It gives us information about the kind of ‘laws’ or relations that people take into account when, for instance, they are considering marriage and having children, as well as about

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the kind of ‘logic’ that the decisions observe.

4. Self-Controlling Man In this last case we revert once again to the counterargument that roleplaying produces “mere stereotypes”. In addition to the uses described above, we also employed the method to study the theories or models applied by vocational councellors, cultural workers, and people working with alcoholics, in their owrt daily work. These theories may be stereotypes, but in this particular case they are also an integral part of, and important tools in, the daily work of the groups concerned. Let us start by taking a closer look at the stones written by a group of administrative employees from alcohol clinics. One quarter of them were presented with the following script: “The character in our story, Asko, has been drinking rather heavily for the past few years. There now seems to be something wrong with Asko’s health, and following a thorough check-up the doctor advises him to cut down on drinking. Ask0 decides to comply with the doctor’s orders. S i x months later, he is drinking far less than he used to. Try to imagine what kind of a person Ask0 is; also, try to imagine how he tried to change his life, and why he succeeded in his plans to drink less. Write a short story about all this - or at least give us a list of the main points.’’ The second quarter received a script where Askofails to cut down on drinking. The wording is precisely the same as in the previous script, but sentences four and five read as follows: “Six months later, he is drinking just as much as ever. Try to imagine what kind of a person Ask0 is; also, try to imagine how he tried to change his life, and why he failed in his plans to drink less.” The rest of the respondents were given two control tasks, where the problem is not alcohol but overweight. Here, the doctor recommends that Ask0 should lose some weight. In one script he succeeds, in the other he fails. Let us start with script version 2, where the problem is alcohol and Ask0 fails to become the subject of his own life. A number of respondents start their story by repeating the sentence that Ask0 decided to comply with the doctor’s orders. Since they were trying to find an explanation as to why

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Asko did not succeed, they were obviously trying to say that the individual’s own decision, however firm, is not always enough. There were some writers who pointed out that it takes more than medical advice to be able to change one’s behaviour, and who criticized the doctor for not giving ASKO more specific instructions. A couple of writers said that the doctor made a mistake in advising Asko to cut down on drinking; he should have told Asko to quit drinking altogether. Only two of our respondents explained Asko’s failure by the physical dependence of his body and central nervous system on alcohol. The majority of the stories where Asko failed discuss his problems at a social psychological level, and in all of these the plot is basically the same. That is, alcohol appears as a logical element of certain “life situations”. The individual is unable to stamp out this element unless he succeeds in analysing the whole situation and changing the rest of its components as well. When the writers try to describe a life situation in more detail, reference is often made to the importance of the family and certain goals of life. The story of Asko begins with him “cutting down on the drink, but otherwise trying to go on with his life as usual”. The same writer concludes his story: “Everything is back to square one, liquor has regained its place in the totality. Nothing was done to change the overall situation.” For the totality to be changed, Asko would need professional help. Some writers bring this up indirectly by writing a story where Asko makes several changes on his own, but merely goes from bad to worse (for instance, he changes his job or leaves his family, but only ends up drinking even more). What we have been explicating here have apparently not been “mere stereotypes”; we have uncovered a general philosophy underlying the practical work of staff members of Finnish A-clinics. According to this philosophy, the individual’s own will and determination are not enough to effect desirable changes. The individual must also have a certain amount of knowledge of his situation. This is something he is rarely capable of without the help and support of outside experts. The notion that excessive drinking is deeply rooted in genetic factors is not however part of the theory. If we presented the same task to people working on the basis of psychoanalysis or the AA-ideology, we would probably get slightly different stories. In the same way as in version 2 where Asko failed, most of the stories in version 1 where Asko succeeded in reducing his consumption of alcohol

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are basically different variants of the same theme. While the Asko who failed was more or less a whole individual, even though he was drinking too heavily under the pressure of a difficult “life situation”, the Asko in the success stories is split up into two parts. The first half, Askol, resembles Freud’s superego. Askol uses devious methods to keep a close watch on and to control Askoz, who is a close relative of the Freudian id. Askoz has found great delight in alcohol and his drinking cronies, but as a result of the skilful manipulation of Askol he has now begun to enjoy things like going out with the family, doing odd jobs in the garden, going to the theatre anything but going down to the pub for a booze-up. The fact that Ask0 is now “his own master” means he is also “his own slave”. Askol and Askoz are bound up with each other like the prisoner who is handcuffed to his guard. While the original problem was that alcohol played too central a role in Asko’s life, it has now become the most dominant element to which everything else is subservient. Askol would almost be prepared to kill his mother to stop Askoz from drinking. None of our respondents actually went quite this far in their stories, but the irony of the solution was clear at least to the writer who said that Asko was so thorough in his search for substitute activities and for changes in his life that in the end, he was “a lonely, active, divorced, but sober man”. Our scripts in which Ask0 has a drink problem describes a situation where a certain element of everyday life, the use of alcohol, is medicalized by allowing a doctor to define it as a health problem. The growing tendency in modem society to medicalize people’s everyday life - eating, drinking, aging, or the menopause - has been regarded as a phenomenon which “is rooted in our increasingly complex technological and bureaucratic system’ ’ (Zola 1972) - in what we described in the previous chapter as the elongation of mediating chains (cf. pp. 210-216). In our scripts, a medical expert and his interpretation come between the individual and his use of alcohol as a new factor which must be taken into account. In the control scripts we medicalized eating, using exactly the same method and wording: the doctor defines Asko as obese, advises him to lose some weight, and in this way makes his weight a health problem. However, in this case our writers were not all prepared to accept the medicalization, but tended to see Asko’s problem more as an aesthetic one. In many of the success stories Ask0 is motivated to change his way of life as soon as he looks at himself in the mirror, when he realizes that his old pair of

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trousers don’t fit, or when his wife starts to pass rude remarks about his overweight. Things like this make the general tone of these stories much more cheerful than in those where Ask0 had a drink problem. Besides, the writers seem to believe that losing weight should not be difficult for Asko: he can eat just as much as he does now, but he has to watch his diet and eat more vegetables and less animal fats. Our writers clearly felt that excessive drinking is a more serious and tragic problem than overweight. Our writers’ reluctance to accept the medicalization of overweight is also evident in the stories where Ask0 fails to slim. While Ask0 the alcoholic “really tried” to cut down on drinking, in many stories Ask0 the weightwatcher “did not really want to lose weight”. The doctor’s advice was and remained a will which was alien to him. Similarly, Ask0 the weightwatcher is very rarely described as suffering from any real hardship or a miserable “life situation’’. Usually he is described as a pleasant, cheerful, jovial fellow (which may of course be a “stereotype” of a fat person). He only becomes annoyed and irritable when he starts his diet. Therefore he often decides to give up rather than try to force himself into something “he is not cut out for”. As one of the writers summarizes Asko’s feelings, “sooner a short and happy life than continuous torment”. If Ask0 cannot come to terms with the will which from the outset was alien to him, he will reject it rather than become a prisoner of the “master and slave” chains. This kind of cheerful fellow who accepts his problems is rarely featured in the stories where Ask0 was trying to cut down on drinking. However, in both scripts we used exactly the same words to emphasize the seriousness of the problem: “There now seems to be something wrong with Asko’s health, and following a thorough check-up the doctor advises him to cut down on drinking / to lose some weight”. So what caused the stories to differ so much? Haven’t the writers ever met cheerful drunks who would prefer “a short and happy life to continuous torment”, or does Finnish alcohol culture forbid us to recognize the existence of such people?

D. Objection: The First Step out of the Blind Alley In early 1987, as we were working on the last pages of this book, Finland released the following news cable to the world press:

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“Helsinki, Jan 21, Reuter - Finland’s Education Minister said today he would ask the government to remove three staff members of the National Theatre School after four of its students flung human excrement at a provincial theatre audience. (. ..) “The incident occurred in the city of Oulu last Saturday. Four male students stormed on to the stage after telling theatre staff they were going to perform a piece of their own entitled ‘Theatre of God’. They stripped and sprayed the audience with a fire extinguisher and pelted it with eggs, smoke bombs and what a cleaner later said was human excrement. They drove the public out of the theatre afterwards with impromptu whips, theatre officials said, but were later taken into custody by the police. They may face criminal charges soon, the police said.” The episode sparked off a heated debate in the Finnish press which went on for weeks and which probably took up more space in the papers than all the theatre reviews in the whole country during the previous year. There were also some serious analyses which attempted to understand the episode at a deeper level (e.g. Barchak 1987). The message of the Theatre of God, as it emerged from the general fracas, was something like this: we do not know how to produce better theatre, but we do know that we strongly object to the present kind. When the aim is to break loose from a blind alley, the first thing one must do is to categorically refuse to take any further steps in the old direction. And this must be done even though it might still be unclear where and how one eventually will get out. Protests based on this same idea have sometimes occurred in social psychology as well. At Carleton University in 1974,during a conference on ‘Research Paradigms and Priorities in Social Psychology’, which was supported by NATO, “a group from the ‘Labour Committee’ disrupted one session in urder to denounce and present indictments for ‘war crimes’ to several participants, for whom they used titles such as ‘Nazi doctors’ and ‘CIA agents”’ (Lubek 1974). At the same conference, Zajonc and Markus (1974)presented an analysis on birth order and intellectual development, which, technically, was a meticulous piece of scientific research and based on extensive empirical material. However, underlying the measurements one finds certain ill-founded and dubious assumptions, and some of the practical conclusions that one may draw from the study seem to be ethically unacceptable. Alan Moffit (1974),one of the critics, follows very much the same lines as the Finnish theatre students. He says that “I have little

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wisdom to contribute about priorities and paradigms in social science, specifically in terms of recommending what we should do”. However, “as individuals we can make choices about the kind of science we can choose not to do”. The recommendation is that we must refuse to do the kind of research represented by Zajonc’s paper: “Simply stop doing this kind of science. It is interesting, rewarding, and more-or-less legitimate, but if new paradigms and priorities are to develop individuals as individuals must choose to expend their energy, time and creativity in developing new approaches, not in perpetuating older methods with known deficits. New paradigms and priorities require that we stop doing this kind of science as a necessary if not sufficient condition for their development. ” We would like to conclude this book by saying something similar. The theoretical ideas outlined in chapter 3 and the role-playing method which we have been discussing in this chapter do not yet provide all the signposts we need to find our way out, but at least we have seen the blind alley in whch the prevailing paradigm is trapped. We should now stop and refuse to take any further steps along the old road, for both ethical and scientific reasons. The research designs and techniques which currently dominate in social psychology have been in use for several decades: they were firmly moulded by the famous studies carried out during World War I1 in the US Army. It was easy to carry out certain types of research because “the organization of the Army was such that at the word of command groups of men could be drawn out for study with a minimum of effort, provided only that the Army authorities were willing that such studies should be made” (Osborn 1949). Unless we want our society and the whole world to become this kind of an organization, there can hardly be very much use for the kind of social psychology that developed in those circumstances either. My own ideal of society is not modelled on the military hierarchy, but nor am I very keen on the kind of abstract and absolute freedom which would appear to charactenze Marx’s (1966, 954) utopia of “the true realm of freedom”. In the contemporary world, in all its various spheres and at all its levels, there are necessary relations which people must take into account. However, even within Marx’s “realm of necessity’’ we can pursue a freedom which consists of “the fact that socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; that they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under condi-

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tions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it” (ibid.). We should work to make social psychology a discipline whose theories and methods are adequate for the analysis of this kind of cooperative interaction.

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References

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315

Name Index Aaltonen, E., 179, 234 Abercrornbie, N., 193, 234 Aboud, F.E., 310, 311 Abrams, D.B., 75, 93, 94, 110, 114 Adesso, V.J., 112 Alberoni, F., 147, 148, 154 Alestalo, M., 160, 234 Alexander the Great, 160 Allardt, E., 234 Allport, F., 18, 55 Allport, G.W., 11, 12, 14, 60, 62, 293, 309 Amin, S., 237 Andersen, H.C., 205 Aristotle, 18, 257 Armistead, N., 64, 102, 110 Aronson, E., 62 Arrighi, G., 237 Asch, S.E., 21, 22, 29, 62, 183 Asplund, J., 17, 18, 62, 183, 217-218, 234 Axelrod, R., 206, 234 Bach, P., 129, 154 Back, K.W., 186, 234 Backrnan, C.W., 2, 9, 12, 62, 274, 311 Bagley, S.K., 111 Bailyn, B., 262, 309 Baldwin, A.L., 51, 62 Bales, R.F., 38, 39, 40, 62 de Balzac, H., 152 Barchak, L., 306, 309 Baron, R., 118, 127, 154 Baron, R.A., 20, 25, 62 Barr, R.M., 74, 110 Barry, B., 66, 206, 234 Beckermann, A., 204, 234 Bennett, R.M., 79, 81, 110 Berelson, B., 275, 309 Berg, M., 286n. Berglas, S., 97-98, 99,100, 110, 111 Berkowitz, L., 9, 62, 113 Berne, E., 265, 309 Bertaux, D., 263, 264, 309 Bertaux-Wiame, I., 263, 264, 309 Bertillon, A., 18 Black, M., 50, 62, 66 Blau, P.M., 177, 234

Bloch, E., 233, 234 Blumer, H., 29, 30, 62 Boden, M., 145, 154 Bond, C., 86, 113 Bondarenko, L.I., 144, 154 Booker, A., 154 Borges, J., 7 Bower, G., 155 Bowles, R., 141, 154 Boyatzis, R.E., 79, 110 Boyle, R., 166-167 Braid, J., 15, 16 Brenner, M., 309 Brick, J., 112 Briddell, D.W.;83, 93, 110 Brotherton, P.L., 85, 113 Brown, R., 41, 42, 43, 54, 62, 181, 234, 275, 276, 309 Brown, R.A., 85, 110 Bruno, G., 141 Brunswik, E., 3, 9 Burish, T.G., 112 Buss, A., 110, 128, 154 Buss, E., 154 Byme, D., 25, 62 Cacioppo, J.T., 65 Caddy, G.R., 110 Campbell, D.T., 27, 64 Capasso, D.R., 114, 157 Cappell, H., 72, 88-89, 110, 113 Carnap, R., 3, 10 Carpenter, J.A., 110 Castren, M.A., 183-184, 234 Cattell, R.B., 49-50, 62, 63 Cervantes, 7 Chadwick-Jones, J.K., 177, 234 Charcot, J., 15, 16 Chubb, N.C., 111 Cohen, J., 82, 110 Coleman, J., 141, 154, 309 Collins, R., 202, 209, 210, 234 Cornte, A., 5, 11, 12, 60 Conger, J.J., 71-72, 110 Cook, J., 154 Critchlow, B., 113 Cutter, H.S., 85, 110

316

Darley, J.M., 246, 247, 310 Darwin, C., 16, 120, 122 Davidson, P.O., 19, 63 Defoe, D., 199 Dembo, T., 310 Demming, B., 92, 112 Dengerink, H.A., 73, 110 Derrida, J., 281 Deutscher, I., 195, 234 Diamond, W., 112 Diethelm, O., 74, 110 Dodge, C., 154 Doise, W., 59, 63, 117, 154, 279, 309 Doleschal, E., 141, 154 Dormer, K., 184, 234 Doreshtov, B., 139, 154 Dorsch, P.E., 234 Dostoyevsky, F.M., 139 Duncan, H.D., 39, 63 Durkheim, E., 2, 9, 26, 63, 117, 142, 154, 163, 164, 180, 186, 187, 188, 197, 202, 216-228, 235 Eco, U., 122, 154 Einstein, A., 1, 10 Eisler, R.M., 113 Ekman, G., 56-57, 63 Elias, N., 193, 214, 230, 235 Engels, F., 32-34, 56, 63, 65, 170, 171, 174-175, 201, 236 Eriksson, K., 115 Eskola, A., 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 57, 63, 160, 168, 235, 250, 309 Eskola, K., 160, 234 Eysenck, H.J., 15, 63, 276, 279, 309 Fagan, M.A., 73, 110 Fahrenkrug, H., 284n., 285, 309 Farkas, G.M., 82-83, 111 Fekjaer, H.O., 100, 111 Festinger, L., 272, 309, 310 Fishman, P.M., 45, 63 Fleck, L., 14-15, 63 Forsander, O., 115 Foucault, M., 18, 63, 231, 235 Frank, A.G., 237 Frankl, V., 227, 235 Freed, E.X., 70, 111 Freud, S., 7, 48, 51, 53, 63, 119, 154, 188, 213-214, 221-222, 224, 228-232, 235, 295, 304 Frornrn, E., 196-197, 235

Name Index Gadzella, B., 128, 154 Galen, C., 275 Galilei, G., 141 Galperin, P.J., 13, 63 Gammon, C., 114, 129, 156, 157 Garfinkel, H., 39, 64 Gekle, H., 234 Gerard, H.B., 25, 64 Gergen, K.J., 5, 9, 165-166, 235, 310, 311 Gergen, M.M., 166, 235 Gerth, H.H., 237 Giddens, A., 5-6, 9 Gillham, W.E., 47, 64 Ginsburg, G.P., 7, 9, 65, 240, 241, 243-244, 309, 310 Goeckner, D.J., 112 Goldmann, L., 200, 235 Greenwood, J.D., 7, 9, 103, 105, 111 Griffitt, W., 25, 62 Grossrnan, L.M., 112 Gronfors, M., 24, 64 Guetzkow, H., 62 Haines, H., 12, 64 Hamachek, D., 155 Hardin, R., 66, 206, 234 Hare, A.P., 12, 17, 50, 64 HmC, R., 24, 40-41, 64, 102, 111, 155, 181, 235 Hams, M., 120, 142, 155 Harris, S., 155 Harvey, O.J., 66 Hastings, W., 138, 155 Heelas, P., 6, 9 Heingartner, A., 20, 67 Heiskanen, P., 286n. Heller, A., 145-146, 148, 155 Helmholtz, H.L., 125 Hempel, C.G., 31 Henshel, R.L., 24, 64 Herman, C.P., 72, 89, 110, 113 Herman, E.M., 20, 67 Hemstein, R.J., 43, 62 Hersen, M., 113 Hiebert, E., 1, 10 Higgins, R.L., 76-77, 111 Hill, S., 193, 234 Hilsrnan, G., 113 Hintikka, J., 257, 310 Hippocrates, 275 Hitler, A., 49 Hockey, R., 128, 155

Name Index Hofstadter, R., 16, 64 Holroyd, K.A., 77-78, 111 Homans, G.C., 35, 64, 166, 167, 177, 235, 236 Hood, W.W., 66 House, J.S., 47, 60, 64 Howarth, C.I., 47, 64 Hull, J.G., 86, 111 Hunt, J., 310 Hurst, P.M., 82, 111 Israel, J., 102, 111 Ivanov, N., 228, 236 Jacobs, R.C., 27, 64 James, W., 125, 134, 147, 155 Jamieson, D., 128, 156 Jefferson, T., 21, 22 Joas, H., 29, 64,122, 153, 155 Jones, E.E., 25, 64, 97-98, 99, 100, 110, 111, 277, 310 Kahn, M., 111 Kalin, R., 73, 80, 111 Kanoyse, D.E., 310 Kastl, A.J., 71, 111 Katkin, E.S., 114 Kaye, M., 112 Keane, T.M., 73, 112 Kecskemeti, P., 202, 236 Keller, M., 142, 155 Kelley, H.H., 310 Kelley, W.R., 19, 63 Kepler, J., 141 Kernberg, O., 222, 236 Kihlstrom, A., 7, 263n. King George, 279 Kivinen, D., 8, 9 Klapmuts, N., 141, 154 Kroskowska, A., 160, 234 Koch, S., 63, 66 Kohlberg, L., 180, 236 Korytnyk, N.X., 94, 112 Kramer, G.G., 112 Krawitz, G., 110 Kropotkin, P., 16, 64 Lagerspetz, K., 309 Lalive d’Epinay, C.J., 264, 310 Lang, A.R., 93, 112 Lansky, D., 93, 112 Lasch, C., 222, 236 Latane, B., 246, 247, 310

317 Laudan, L., 19, 64 Lauerman, R., 112 Lawson, D.M., 92, 93, 94, 114 Lazarsfeld, P.F., 262 Lazarus, R.S., 24, 64 Le Bon, G., 48-49, 51, 53, 65 Lenin, V.I., 13, 21, 65 Lerner, D., 207, 208, 236 Le Roy Ladurie, E., 174-175, 182, 230, 236 Levenson, R.W., 94, 112, 127, 156 Levine, E.N., 70, 112 Levine, J.M., 112 Lewin, K., 36, 65, 124, 129, 140-141, 155, 172-174, 236, 259-261, 278, 310 Lieberson, S., 166, 172, 236 Lindgren, H.C., 28, 65 Lindrnan, R., 78, 84, 112 Lindzey, G., 62 Lippman, W., 275 Lipscomb, T.R., 114 Lipset, S.M., 236 Liska. A.E., 36, 65 Lisman, S.A., 73, 112 Lock, A., 6, 9 Loomis, C.P., 187, 236 Lowenthal, L., 236 Lubek, I., 306, 310 Lukics, G., 200 Lukes, S., 192-193, 236 Luria, A.R., 134, 155, 184-185, 236, 244 Magnusson, D., 311 Maisto, S.A., 112 Manstead, A S . , 19, 65 Markus, G.B., 306, 311 Marlatt, G.A., 72, 76-77, 92, 111, 112 Marrow, A., 173, 236 Marsh, P., 148, 155, 309 M X X ,K., 18, 20, 55-56, 60, 63, 65, 118, 155, 170-171, 174-175, 188-193, 195, 196, 199, 201, 206, 207, 210, 212, 216, 218, 227, 228, 236, 286, 307, 310 Maslow, A., 145, 155, 228, 237 Mayfield, D.G., 70, 73, 112 Mbiti, J.S., 208 McCarty, D., 94, 112 McClelland, D., 207, 237 McClelland, D.C., 111 McCollam, J.B., 94, 112 McCord, J., 128, 155

Name Index

318

McCrady, B., 120, 156 McDougall, W., 11, 15, 65 McGuire, M.T., 71, 84, 113 McNamee, H.B., 74, 84, 113 Mead, G.H., 64, 122, 155 Mead, M., 196, 237 Melbin, M., 268, 310 Mello, N.K., 113 Mello, W., 128, 155 Mendelsohn, E., 10 Mendelson, J.H., 74, 75, 80, 84, 113, 114, 128, 155 Merton, R., 204, 237. 309 Mesrner, F., 15, 16 Milgram, S., 35, 36, 65, 245, 248-249, 262 Mill, J.S., 191 Miller, P.M., 77, 113 Mills, C.W., 237, 242, 310 Mintz, A., 54, 65 Mkon, D., 35, 65, 245, 248-249, 262, 310 Moffit, A., 306, 310 Monod, J., 31-32, 65 Moore, D.L., 20, 65 Morris, C., 3, 10 Mulkay, M., 37, 39, 65 Munthe, A., 15, 16, 65 Murchinson, C., 28 65 Mussolii, B., 49 Nagibin, J., 135 Nagy, K., 113 Napoleon, 56 Nathan, P., 114, 142, 155 Nederhof, A.J., 105, 113 Neurath, O., 3, 10 Newell, S., 156 Newlin, D.B., 112 Newrnan, J., 112 Niaura, R., 113 Niemi, P., 309 Nisbett, R.E., 277, 310 Noble, E.P., 113 Nucci, L., 127, 156 Nye, R.A., 15, 49, 65 O’Keefe, D., 140, 155 O’Neill, E., 42 O’Neill, J., 37, 65 Orane, P., 12 Ortega y Gasset, J., 49, 66 Osborn, F., 307, 310

Osrnond, H., 139, 156 Paolino, T.,120, 156 Parker, E.S., 113 Parsons, T., 38, 39, 49, 50-51, 66 Paustovski, K., 131 Pavlov. I.P., 21 Perkins, D.V., 94, 112 Petrovski, A.V., 150, 156 Petrusic, W., 128, 156 Petty, R.E., 65 Phorecky, L.A., 112 Piaget, J., 133 Pickering, W.S., 235 Pihl, R.O., 72-73, 75, 80, 89, 113, 115 Pliner, P., 88-89, 113 Polivy, J., 89, 113 Potter, R.J., 40, 67 Pruitt, D.G., 114 Pushkin, A., 131 Radlow, R., 111 Rapoport, A., 52, 66 Rappaport, H., 209, 237 Rappaport, M., 209, 237 Rappoport, L., 154 Reid, J.B., 92, 112 Renvall, P., 182, 237 Ricardo, D., 199 Rieker, P., 284n. Riesman, D., 201-202, 237 Rimm, D.C., 110 Robbins, S.J., 85, 113 Robinson, D., 140, 156 Roediger, H., 133, 156 Rohrberg, R.G., 84, 113 Rommetveit, R., 252, 254, 311 Rorty, R., 281, 311 Rosen, R.C., 82-83, 111 Rosenberg, M., 36, 66 Ross, E.A., 11, 66 Rosser, E., 155 Rossi, P.H., 309 Russell, J., 86, 113 Sacks, H., 45, 66 Sarnelson, F., 11, 66 Sarason, I.G., 112 Sarbin, T.,127, 156 Saunders, D.R., 49, 63 Schachter, S., 87-92, 113 Schaefer, J., 129, 154 Schmidt, C., 9

Name Index Searle, J.R., 41, 66 Searles, J., 112 Sears, P.S., 310 Secord, P.F., 24, 40, 64, 102, 111, 181, 235, 274, 311

Seebass, G., 234 Semin, G.R., 19, 65 Senghaas, D., 9 Seve, L., 60, 66, 143, 156 Shakespeare, W., 82, 146, 276 Sher, K., 112, 127, 156 Sherif, C.W., 26, 58-59, 66 Sherif, M., 25-26, 58-59, 66, 166, 183 Sholis, D., 110 Shotter, J., 117, 156 Siegler, M., 120, 156 Sigismund, 230 Simenon, G.,131, 153 Simmel, G., 63, 118, 121, 156, 180, 188, 210, 212-213, 214, 216, 218, 267, 311 Simpura, J., 256, 265, 270, 272, 311 Singer, I.B., 222 Singer, J.E., 87-88 113 Skinner, B., 119, 156 Slotkin, J., 207, 237 Smith, A., 199 Smith, J.L., 246, 311 Smith, R.C., 71, 113 Sobell, M.B., 91, 112, 114 Sousa-Poza, J., 84, 113 Southwick, L.L., 113 Spencer, H., 126, 156 Spielberger, C.D., 112 Steele, C.M., 73, 113 Steffen, J.J., 74-75, 114 Stein, S., 113 Steiner, C.M., 138-139, 156 Steiner, G.A., 275, 309 Stice, G.F., 49, 63 Stoke-Heiskanen, V., 2, 10, 282, 311 Stouffer, S.A., 310 Strickland, L.H., 310, 311 Sumner, G., 16, 66

Tajfel, H., 102, 111 Tamerin, J.S., 74, 80, 84, 114 Tarde, G . , 12 Taylor, H.A., 114 Taylor, S., 128, 129, 145, 156, 157, 225-226, 227, 237

Taylor, S.P., 80, 114 Teckentrup, K.H., 234

319 Tedeschi, J., 128, 157 Teger, A.I., 82, 114 Tilly. C., 217, 237 Titchener, E.B., 125 Tolman, E.C., 109 Tolstoi, L., 129, 131 Triplett, N., 12, 17, 18, 23 Tucker, J.A., 90-91, 95, 98-99, 114 Tulving, E., 133, 156 Tuomela, R., 152, 157, 234 Turner, B., 193, 234 Turner, R., 66, 67 Turner, R.H., 36, 66, 193 Tonnies, F., 186-187, 197, 202, 237, 273, 311

Ullman-Margalit, E., 27, 66, 147, 150, 157, 167, 237

Uznadze, D.N., 22-23, 66 Uzoka, A.F., 208, 237 Valins, S., 92, 95, 114, 310 Vaughan, G.M., 12, 64 Voionmaa, V., 177, 178, 237 Volosinov, V.N., 254, 311 Vuchinich, R.E., 90-91, 93, 95, 114 Vygotsky, L.S., 40-41, 67, 151, 157, 184

Vayrynen, R., 9 Wallerstein, I., 170, 237 Wallraff, G., 291 Watson, J., 40, 67 Watt, I., 199, 200, 237 Weber, M., 30, 38, 67, 188, 202-204, 207, 210, 212, 216, 218, 225, 237

Weckroth, K., 8, 14, 161-162, 217 Weiner, B., 310 Wertheimer, M., 154 Weslowski, W., 234 Westermarck, E., 208, 237 White, B.J., 66 Whitehead, D., 128, 154 Willer, D., 217, 237 Willer, J., 217, 237 Williams, A.F., 73-74, 114 Williams, R., 139, 157 Wilson, G.T., 75-76, 83, 92, 93-94, 110, 112, 114

Wilson, T.P., 42, 67 Wirilander, K., 276, 311 Wispe, C.G., 49, 63 Wittgenstein, L., 162-165, 238

320 Wolff, K.H., 63, 156, 180, 238, 311 von Wright, G.H., 121, 157, 165, 238 Wrightsman, L.S., 25, 67 Wunderlin, R.J., 110 Wundt, W., 125 Ylijoki, 0-H., 8, 23, 239 Ylikahri, R., 108, 115 Zacchia, C., 113 Zajonc, R.B., 19-20, 21, 25, 57, 67, 306, 307, 311

Zeichner, A., 72-73, 75, 80, 113, 115 Zeitlin, I.M., 30, 67 Zelenf, J., 191, 238 Zetterberg, H., 171, 238 Zimmerman, D.H., 39, 67 Zola, I.K., 304, 311 Zwier, A.G., 105, 113

Name Index

321

Subject Index

activity psychic vs. practical, 132-137 actor-observer divergence, 277-278, 290 aggression, 79-81 agro-industrial complex, 211 AIDS, 292, 300-301 animal experiments, 70, 73, 82, 87, 102 anomie, 223-224 anxiety, 229-233, 294-295 appearance, see essence arms race logic of, 167 artificiality of experiments, 24, 103 attribution, 96-100 authenticity, 200 autokinetic effect, 26 autonomy, 192-193 biofeedback, 24 book reading, 160, 172, 197-201 Buridan’s ass, 29, 145, 225 capitalism from feudalism to, 189-201 logic of, 191-194, 206 categorization, 274-279 chain complex, 41-42, 126 chance, 31-33, 97, 119-122, 129, 145, 147-148, 153, 226, 291 Chernobyl nuclear accident, 292 civil society, 199 collective, 150 competition, 17-18 cooperation, 33-34, 51, 61, 159, 308 logic of, 147, 149-153 covering law, 31 critical mass, 56 cross-cultural study, 282, 288 death, 175 deception, 102, 245-247 deconstruction, 281 Denmark alcohol culture in, 282, 285-286

developing countries, 196, 207-210 deviant behaviour, 141 dignity, 192 and social psychological experiments, 247 division of labour, 179, 187 double-bind, 45-46 dyad, 151-152, 212-213 ego-involvement, 293 emotions, 52, 54-55, 182 Schachter’s theory of, 87-92 tension-reduction hypothesis, 71-78 episode and its meaning, 252-255 as unit, 41 elements of, 42-47 internal logic of, 256 essence vs. appearance, 192 ethics of science, 24, 162-163, 250, 307 and deception, . 246 and role-playing methodology, 242-243. 245 ethnocendsm, 59 of social psychological theories, 176, 178 ethnomethodology, 38-40 exchange, 175, 177-181, 187 C-M-C’ VS. M-C-M’, 190-191 externalization, 58 fact vs. evidence, 279-280 factor analysis, 42, 49 Federal Republic of Germany alcohol culture in, 282, 284-285 conceptions of, 288-291 feeling, 135-137 free-rider behaviour, 215 free will, 301 future, 130-132, 256-260 fears of, 291-298 of family and marriage, 298-302 Gemeinschaft, 186-188, 206, 273, 280

322 Gesellschaft, 186-188, 206, 273, 280 Green movement, 186, 215-216, 291 human essence, 60 hunger strike, 47 Id, 304 imitation, 15 individual as research unit, 25, 108, 117-118 individualism, 192-194, 199, 219-222 logic of, 222 instinct, 46 institutionalization, 51 Interaction Process Analysis (IPA), 38-39

internationalization, 51 irrationality, 48, 51-53 knowledge vs. prediction, 132, 153, 301 labelling, 88-92, 95, 99 language, 134 language-games, 165, 181 laws biological and physiological, 20, 137 historical and sociological, 31-32 method of discovering, 171-173 necessary relations vs. empirical regularities, 109, 128-129, 153, 167, 201, 218-219

physical, 20, 29, 31, 141 place of, 168-171 psychological, 20, 29, 32, 166-168 taking account of, 169, 258, 280, 298-302, 307

learning, 46-47, 71, 138, 140 life space, 259-260 loneliness, 197 Luddites, 194 macrosocial, 48 masculine perspective, 82 mass phenomena, 55 meaning, 252-255 meaning potential, 107, 252, 254 mediation, 21-23, 30, 34, 47, 75, 83, 85, 87, 95, 103, 131, 135, 150, 230-233, 284

elongation of mediating chains, 210-216, 304

medicalization, 304-305

Subject Index medieval man, 17, 230 Finnish, 182-183 French, 174-176 memory, 133-135 methodological individualism, 37-38, 42 mode of life, see way of life moral Kohlberg’s theory of, 180-181 motivation, 44, 57 narcissism, 221-222 national character, 48 needing, 135-137 need vs. desire, 224-225 object of research, 12-13, 24, 37, 109 of psychology, 117-124 of social psychology, def., 61, 159, 308 Oedipus complex, 54, 213 Olympic Games, 292-295 ordeal, 145, 225-228 panic, 54-55 perception, 133-135 personality, 44-45, 50, 146-147, 162, 164

praxis, 107, 132 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 44, 52-55, 167-168 PD norms, 150, 177, 204-206 privacy, 193-194 production, 33-34, 170, 174-175, 185, 190-192, 194, 197, 212

projective tests, 240-241, 279, Protestant ethic, 202 psychodrama, 244 psychohistory, 230 psychophysiology, 20 publicity, 277

297

rationality, 48, 52-53 individual vs. collective, 205-207 means-end, 147, 202-210, 228, 247 value, 147, 203-207, 228, 247 reduction, 28-29, 36 religion, 163-164 reproduction, 34 risk taking, 81-82 role theory, 242 saturation. 263-264 science as institution, 27-28, 35, 39, 95, 143. 227

Subject Index

and demand characteristics, 81-83 self-handicapping, 97-99 sensitivity training, 186 sexuality sexual arousal, 82-83 situation logic, 242, 251-256 social vs. societal, 34, 51 social comparison process, 272 social Darwinism, 16 social facilitation, 18-19, 55 social responsibility, 183 socialization, 195, 213 sociodrama, 244 sociogram, 175-176 Soviet Union, 195 conceptions of, 288-291 stereotype, 255, 274-281, 302-303, 305 S-R formula, 21-22, 100, 106-109, 129-130

R-R’, 130, 132 S-0-R, 106, 108, 130 S-A, 271 A-A, 271 subject, 44-45, 302 and action, 124-137, 143-144 and interaction, 144-149 and organism, 137-140 VS. VS. VS. VS.

323 and personality, 140-142 suggestion, 15-16, 22-23 superego, 304 surplus value, 190-192 survey analysis, 256, 285, 301 symbolic interactionism, 29-30, 47 sympathy, 15-16, 20 smtality, 49-50 syphilis as scientific fact, 14-15, 18 tension, 173 thematization, 13, 18, 31, 159, 188, 253 thought, 133-135 totality, 128, 197, 201, 303 trait theories, 276 typology, 275-276 underdetermination, 19 understanding, 30 wanting, 135-137 WX,

33, 35-35, 204-207, 232, 292, 301

way of life, 159-173, 194, 211, 214, 262, 272, 284

logic of, 253-254, 264 work, 147-148

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