Why are we here at all? Why do people join groups and participate in their activities? Probably nearly everyone has asked himself these questions as he has looked about a meeting room. Again, why do people react so differently to the various ideas and situations which confront the group? These questions are basic, and might be summed up as:
Why do people behave the way they do?
To answer this in breadth and depth would obviously carry us beyond the scope of this book. A limited discussion aimed at locating the individual member within the group must suffice.
Man, the Thinking, Organizing Being
Man differs in one great quality from the lower animals.
The elemental drives for food, shelter, and sexual gratification are present in man, as in any animal; but because man can think abstractly his desires go infinitely further. What is this ability to think abstractly?
Fundamentally it is the ability to recall mental images of past experiences, to make value judgments about them, and to project the lessons of such judgments into the future. Using this ability man can benefit by his experience and by the experience of his fellow men, living and dead, through communication systems. Symbols, words, and gestures have been developed to communicate phenomena which are part of the general experience of mankind, not necessarily a part of his personal sensory experience. The following simple illustration may sharpen this aspect of the differences between animal and man.
A mother bear, in order to train her cubs, might take them with her as she tears apart bee trees and eats honey. The cubs observe and do likewise. Thus they are conditioned to smell honey and find it. If the air is suddenly filled with the odors of man, steel, and gunpowder, the mother bear can take off full speed in the opposite direction and the cubs will follow. This conditions them to the fact that man-smell means “run away.”
This is simple imitation. A mother bear cannot sit back in the quiet and safety of the den and communicate to her cubs that certain insects of the order Hymenoptera gather nectar and, through a special digestive process, deposit this product in waxen containers inside hollow trees. She cannot tell them that this honey has a unique odor and that the trees may also be located by following the bees. They must be beside her as she does these things in order to go through the direct sensory experience. She cannot tell them about man and guns; she can only run away and have the cubs do the same.
On the other hand, man – using word symbols derived from the thinking process – can tell his fellow men about these experiences without ever having to take them to the actual situations.
With this ability to think abstractly, man projects himself into the future. He establishes goals toward which he can direct his actions and he anticipates problems which will confront him. Also, because of this ability, he is able to have a mental picture of himself as a social being. He visualizes himself as a person associating with others more or less like himself. He has ideas of how others regard him and what they expect of him. He has ideas about whether or not he is liked by others and whether or not others consider him to be important to them and their lives. He evaluates others and he often acts on the basis of how he thinks others are evaluating him. He can consider these evaluations and expectations of his fellow men in terms of their potentialities for enhancing or impeding the attainment of goals which he desires.
Only man, because of this ability to think about abstractions, can project himself into the future and establish in his mind the things he wants in his future. He can communicate his complex thoughts to others and in turn receive similar communication from them.
A dog can be conditioned to come for food at the sound of a whistle simply by providing him with rations every time his master whistles in a certain way. A bear cub learns to avoid man by associating the odor of man and the mother bear running away. These constitute a simple stimulus-response reflex arc. Given a stimulus – the whistle – the dog responds by coming to the master to receive the food or other rewards. The bear cub is nudged along by the mother bear or cuffed behind the ear. A system of rewards and punishments is built around immediate sensory experience and acceptable response. Non-acceptable response leads to hungry dogs and dead bears.
Man, because he has this ability to deal with abstractions, responds to many stimuli in different ways. Man not only can think in abstractions, but he must think this way. His responses are always based upon his interpretations of the stimuli which he receives. Interpretation of stimuli include: (1) recall of similar stimuli received in the past; (2) responses made to these similar stimuli; (3) comparison of the existing circumstances surrounding the immediate stimulus to which he anticipates responding with the conditions surrounding the response patterns of the past experiences; (4) evaluations of the relative satisfactions received from the ways in which he responded in the past; and (5) an evaluation and comparison of the goals and ends which he desired when he responded to former stimuli with the goals or ends which he hopes to achieve in responding to the present stimulus.
It is only after an individual has gone through these thought processes that he responds to the stimulus. There are great differences in the degree to which various individuals go through these steps.
When an individual receives a stimulus which is familiar to him because of the number or intensity of previous similar experiences, he remembers these past experiences, what responses he made, and how satisfied he was with the results of his subsequent behavior. For the average American, an alarm clock’s ringing demands very little considered thought as to the nature of the response because it is a stimulus which has been received many times before. However, this same average American might respond quite differently to the sound of a lute playing because he probably has not received this stimulus before.
After an individual has recalled similar stimuli and his responses to them, he considers his past responses in the light of his satisfactions with the outcomes. He considers the circumstances under which those past stimuli were received and compares them with the conditions surrounding the immediate stimulus to which he must respond. The conditions surrounding a given stimulus greatly affect the response.
If a young college man and a male companion are seated at a table in a restaurant and a beautiful girl of similar age passes by and smiles invitingly, the direction of the response is easily predictable, as well as the speed with which it will be made. Now consider this same young man in the same restaurant at the same table except that instead of a male companion he has his “best girl” with him. When the same beautiful girl passes by and smiles invitingly the response will undoubtedly be quite different than in the first situation.
The stimulus in both instances was identical. The circumstances under which it was received differed. In both situations the young man’s experiences with similar stimuli in the past would certainly have been reflected upon. He would have considered the circumstances surrounding the immediate stimulus with those surrounding the receipt of past similar stimuli; in both instances he would have evaluated the satisfactions received from responses to similar past experiences and he would in both illustrations have compared his goals or objectives at the time of receipt of the new stimulus with those held in the past.
This simple set of illustrations bypasses other important parts of the framework in which stimuli are received. Two mental phenomena commonly called “frame of reference” and “mood” may be used as examples.