Social type

“ Man and His Social Relations.—A study of society starts with the obvious fact that human beings live together. The hermit is abnormal. However far back we go in the process of human evolution we find the existence of social relations, and sociability seems a quality ingrained in human nature. Every individual has his own personality that belongs to him apart from every other individual, but the perpetuation and development of that personality is dependent on relations with other personalities and with the physical environment which limits his activity. ”

“ One of them is our habit of making social classifications. We attribute distinctive characteristics to rich and poor, slum-dweller and captain of industry, rustic and suburbanite, officials, politicians, professors, to members of races, sets and parties. These judgments are usually too coarse to be of much use. But they show our practical awareness that personal traits are functions of social situations. ”

“ In particular, I have long felt that the prevailing tendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between individuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only might but naturally would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one of the greatest stumbling blocks to human improvement. ”

“ By the time we find ourselves here we are caught in a network of customs and attitudes, the major directions of our desires and interests have been stamped on our minds, and by the time we have emerged from tutelage and reached the years of discretion when we might conceivably throw our influence to the reshaping of social institutions, most of us have been so molded into the society [190] and class we live in that we are scarcely aware of any distinction between ourselves as judging, desiring individuals and our social environment. ”

“ It is safest to conclude that while personality is built up largely out of social influences, society is, on the other hand, also rooted in human nature, so that both objective and subjective causes combine to produce practically all social phenomena, and especially the phenomena of poverty and dependence. ”

“ SOCIAL WILL AND SOCIAL HABITS.—Within the province of the social will fall what may not inaptly be called the habits of a community—ways of acting acquired largely without premeditation and followed to a great extent through mere inertia. The province of the social will is a broad one. Deliberate choices; those half-conscious choices analogous to the unheeded expressions of preference which fill the days of the individual; impulses and tendencies which scarcely emerge into the light—all are expressions of the social will. ”

“ What else can human nature be than a trait of primary groups? Surely not an attribute of the separate individual—supposing there were any such thing—since its typical characteristics, such as affection, ambition, vanity, and resentment, are inconceivable apart from society. ”

“ Here a word must be said about the subjective aspect of society, which, in its objective aspect, as we have seen, is merely the struggle and process of adjustment. What is the relation of adjustment to sympathy and to understanding, to communication and to concerted purpose, to the evolution of a social constraint through which the community controls and shapes the individual, to cooperation and to social organization? ”

“ That means that every community, through the very character of the environment which it imposes upon the individuals that compose it, tends to determine the personal traits as it does determine the language, the vocation, social values, and, eventually, the personal opinions, of the individuals who compose it. ”

“ Individuals, born or reared in any form of society are adjusted, shaped and conditioned by the social pattern of which they are a part. Each society attempts to stamp the individuals with its own image and likeness. ”

“ Society, the special field for the cultivation of manners, would soon be sterile soil were it not abandoned during lenten intervals and summers in the country. After meeting a multitude of people and being obliged to adjust ourselves to only such matters as all can understand, what a relief it is to be in the open fields, social conventions dropped, responsibilities forgotten, and no regard for others marking our words, acts, or dress! ”

“ Thus Best Society is not a fellowship of the wealthy, nor does it seek to exclude those who are not of exalted birth; but it is an association of gentle-folk, of which good form in speech, charm of manner, knowledge of the social amenities, and instinctive consideration for the feelings of others, are the credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members. ”

“ Imagine a society composed of a leisure class with more or less intellectual tastes; men eminent in science and letters; men less eminent, whose success depended largely upon their social gifts, and clever women supremely versed in the art of pleasing, who were the intelligent complements of these men; add a universal talent for conversation, a genius for the amenities of social life, habits of daily intercourse, and manners formed upon an ideal of generosity, amiability, loyalty, and urbanity ”

“ Everything now which is present in the individuals—the immediate concrete locations of all historical actuality—in the nature of impulse, interest, purpose, inclination, psychical adaptability, and movement of such sort that thereupon or therefrom occurs influence upon others, or the reception of influence from them—all this I designate as the content or the material of socialization. In and of themselves, these materials with which life is filled, these motivations which impel it, are not social in their nature. ”

“ We observe two broadly contrasted types of human life—the isolated, admitting only of the family, and the associated. Between these types of life, and between the men and women who lead them, are certain great contrasts that must be due to the presence or absence of association. By the difference between the lone man and the social man, between the associated state and the life of single units or pairs, we can gauge the sociologic problem. The changes that attend association afford the best evidence that there exists a source of influence worthy of most zealous study. ”

“ The social classes are noted for a high development of the consciousness of kind; they constitute the positive and constructive elements in society. At the head of the list are the pre-eminently social. ”

“ Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our generic humanity. It is just here that the very highest society asserts its superior breeding. Among truly elegant people of the highest ton, you will find more real equality in social intercourse than in a country village. ”

“ If, however, the standard of living which one has inherited from his class is adopted as an individual standard, and is made the object of effort and self-denial, the individual and social results are of high value. ”

“ In spite of diversity of character and temperament, the conduct and morals of the individuals in each group are as predicable and as alike in the main as if they were a flock of sheep, morals being mostly only social habits and circumstantial necessities. ”

“ The people generally would be dignified and educated by their participation in industrial, as now in political decisions. If some of the tougher strains of character, grit, push, endurance, etc. would be less fostered, the gentler and more social aspects of character would find better soil. ”

“ Even at the present time, however, it is possible to support sociological arguments by means of considerations provided by psychological motives, and the assistance thus rendered to sociology will become far greater as the science of social psychology advances. ”

“ The high development of the individual culminating in powerful personality has been an exceptional occurrence, due to special circumstances. A communal social order, often repressing and invariably failing to evoke the higher human faculties, must express its real nature in the language, literature, and customs of the people. ”

“ Human nature falls into types of character far more than into social and racial divisions. In the ultimate issue society is divided into two sets of people: those who behave decently and those who do not. ”

“ Part I consists of an analysis of the types of behavior, a survey of individual traits and their significance in social life, a brief consideration of the nature and development of the self, individual differences, language and communication, racial and cultural continuity. Those fruits of psychological inquiry have been stressed which bear most strikingly on the relations of men in our present-day social and economic organization. ”

“ In the preceding chapters I have discussed the public and social relations of classes, and those social topics in which groups of persons are considered as groups or classes, without regard to personal merits or demerits. I have relegated all charitable work to the domain of private relations, where personal acquaintance and personal estimates may furnish the proper limitations and guarantees. A man who had no sympathies and no sentiments would be a very poor creature ”

“ We remind our young people from time to time that conventions established in sophisticated society have usually a sound basis in social experience, and the cultivation of the minor morals of good manners develops consideration for others. ”

“ In short, the primary facts of social psychology center about collective habit, custom. In addition to the general psychology of habit—which is general not individual in any intelligible sense of that word—we need to find out just how different customs shape the desires, beliefs, purposes of those who are affected by them. The problem of social psychology is not how either individual or collective mind forms social groups and customs, but how different customs, established interacting arrangements, form and nurture different minds. ”

“ To the student of ethnology no point in the character of primitive man is more interesting and surprising than his vanity. This unique susceptibility to social influence is, indeed, essential to the complex institutional and associational life of mankind. The transmission of language, tradition, morality, knowledge, and all race experience from the older to the younger, and from one generation to another, is accomplished through mental suggestibility, and the activity of the individual in [pg 207] associational life is mediated largely through it. ”

“ The social impulse is also positively defined by the law of perfect internal harmony, and thus we arrive at the peculiar vocation of man in Society. All the individuals who compose the human race differ from each other ”

“ I pointed out an important law in Social Psychology, namely, that greatness of individuality is inversely proportional to the mass of the social aggregate. ”

“ Eventually the life of the individual is the measure of the totality of social influence, and the institution should be studied in the light of the personality development of the individual. And as we accumulate records of personal evolution, with indications of the means by which the wishes seek expression and of the conditions of their normal satisfaction, we shall be in a better position to measure the influence of particular institutions in the formation of character and life-organization and to determine lines of change in the institutions themselves. ”

“ The purposeful and systematic types, in common with the Individualist and Marxist, regard the Normal Social Life, for all the many thousands of years behind it, as a phase, and as a phase which is now passing, in human experience; and they are prepared for a future society that may be ultimately different right down to its essential relationships from the human past. ”

“ This world would appear to such an insight as a Social Order. For the categories of the World of Appreciation, as we shall later more fully see, when we come to the study of our human Social consciousness, are the categories of the Self in Social form and expression. But as I discriminate the world, taking account now of ɑ and now of b, my discrimination, determined as it is by the interest of ray individual development, does not seize upon the facts in the order in which they are actually determined by the Will whose expression is the world. ”

“ We shall see that, in the light of the specific and natural tendencies toward social behavior which are part of man's original equipment, this sharp psychological isolation between the individual and the group is an altogether unwarranted assumption. ”

“ All the elements of human character crop up in men's social relations; in the foreground are their self-interest or sense of self-preservation, together with their social and anti-social promptings; a little farther back are their active energy, their intelligence, their artistic feelings, and their religious susceptibilities. ”

“ Otherwise, as we have pointed out, the conflicts in the acquirement of habit and character on the part of individuals would be so great that there would be no possibility of their working together harmoniously in a common social life. ”

“ Much, too, and this in the pleasantest fashion, may be done to extend one’s knowledge of good form by observation of people who have unusual tact and social discrimination. In every city, town and village, there are such persons who are distinguished above their fellow citizens by social instinct, by the talent for performing gracefully and acceptably the offices of society. ”