119 Sociology; Social Psychology

PART TWO PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

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CHAPTER VI ORIGINAL NATURE, INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES, AND INTELLIGENCE

I. INTRODUCTION

To understand social behavior it is essential to describe the organic basis of the mechanisms on which it rests. Too frequently the social scientist has ignored the biological background of individual action. As we noted in the general introduction, one can not understand the social process without recognizing the place which the biological foundations of behavior play in this same process. An important contribution to this field came through the work of Charles Darwin and for psychology especially through that of his cousin, Francis Galton, with his study of the importance of individual differences. Another contribution to social psychology came from McDougall with his insistence on the important place which the emotions and the instincts take in social conduct. Finally, we shall have to look to the contribution from general psychology on the nature of the learning process and the forms of mental organization which arise in the individual. In the present chapter we shall deal with the factors of individual differences and with the contrast between original and learned or acquired nature. We shall also consider the organic basis of intelligence.

The biological roots of human behavior are far deeper than the product of this behavior which we term "culture." Thorndike in his paper on original versus acquired nature indicates some of the fundamental contrasts that may be recognized at the outset in studying the individual. He indicates the units of original nature and the method by which they are combined into larger patterns. Kellogg’s paper deals with the inheritance of mental abilities first clearly pointed out by Galton. The law of ancestral inheritance has been somewhat modified, since it is now recognized that the percentage of 122 influence of various ancestors is not quite what Galton estimated it to be. Nevertheless, his fundamental point of a diminishing effect of any particular ancestor upon the present individual, in terms of the remoteness of this ancestor, is sound. Likewise, his law of filial regression shows that any combination of traits rests upon a variety of ancestral characters coming from a wide selection of persons. The work started by Galton in the field of inheritance of mental abilities is still going on. While many of the earlier assumptions are being modified by more careful study of early physical and social con-ditionings, thus upsetting the assurance of some of the earlier work, it still remains true that there is everywhere overwhelming evidence of the importance of heredity in human behavior.

Turner’s paper reviews further the nature of individual differences, giving some statistical evidence from the field of intelligence. Man’s life rests not only on his original nature, but also on the fact that this original nature varies, one man with another. Furthermore, social experience makes for further differentiation among men. But the fact remains that men differ in physical condition, in resistance to disease, innate mental abilities, in volitional qualities and even, perhaps, in instinctive and emotional tendencies. There is perhaps less variability in the racially older instinctive tendencies than in the newer abilities such as intelligence or learning capacity, which rest more particularly upon the higher nervous centers–those which were last to evolve. In short, while social surroundings play an enormous rôle in determining the direction which life organization takes, certainly heredity has a distinct part in limiting the direction and extent of this social influence.

White’s review of Kretschmer’s work on the relation of physical make-up to character traits is important. While the character or personality organization is taken up later, this paper is introduced here to show the possible correlation of physique and the whole personality development. Certainly the correlations reported by Kret-schmer are significant if further study shows that his own results are at all universal.

In the second section of this chapter are three papers dealing with intelligence. Herrick indicates the neurological foundation of both original and learned nature. One should consult Herrick’s Introduction 123 to Neurology for a fuller and more complete understanding of the interrelation of original to acquired nature on the neurological side. This is followed by a series of short definitions of intelligence from Thorndike, Terman, and Colvin. Finally there is a selection from Peterson indicating a probable mechanistic explanation of intelligence. By such conception intellectual capacity is more adequately brought into line with the functioning of the nervous system.

II. MATERIALS

A. ORIGINAL NATURE AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

30. The Original Tendencies of Man¹

Any man possesses at the very start of his life–that is, at the moment when the ovum and spermatozoon which are to produce him have united–numerous well-defined tendencies to future behavior. Between the situations which he will meet and the responses which he will make to them, pre-formed bonds exist. It is already determined by the constitution of these two germs, that under certain circumstances he will see and hear and feel and act in certain ways. His intellect and morals, as well as his bodily organs and movements, are in part the consequence of the nature of the embryo in the first moment of its life. What a man is and does throughout life is a result of whatever constitution he has at the start and of all the forces that act upon it before and after birth. I shall use the term "original nature" for the former and "environment" for the latter.

The Problems of Original Nature

Elementary psychology acquaints us with the fact that men are, apart from education, equipped with tendencies to feel and act in certain ways in certain circumstances–that the response to be made to a situation may be determined by man’s inborn organization. It is, in fact, a general law that, other things being equal, the response to any situation will be that which is by original nature connected with that situation, or with some situation like it. Any neurone will, when stimulated, transmit the stimulus, other things being equal, to the neurone with which 124 it is by inborn organization most closely connected. The basis of intellect and character is this fund of unlearned tendencies, this original arrangement of the neurones in the brain.

The original connections may develop at various dates and may exist for only limited times; their waxing and waning may be sudden or gradual. They are the starting point for all education or other human control. The aim of education is to perpetuate some of them, to eliminate some, and to modify or redirect others. They are perpetuated by providing the stimuli adequate to arouse them and give them exercise, and by associating satisfaction with their action. They are eliminated by withholding these stimuli so that they abort through disuse, or by associating discomfort with their action. They are redirected by substituting, in the situation-connection-response series, another response instead of the undesirable original one; or by attaching the response to another situation in connection with which it works less or no harm, or even positive good.

The behavior of man in the family, in business, in the state, in religion and in every other affair of life is rooted in his unlearned, original equipment of instincts and capacities. All schemes of improving human life must take account of man’s original nature, most of all when their aim is to reverse or counteract it.

Names for Original Tendencies

Three terms, reflexes, instincts, and inborn capacities, divide the work of naming these unlearned tendencies. When the tendency concerns a very definite and uniform response to a very simple sensory situation, and when the connection between the situation and the response is very hard to modify and is also very strong so that it is almost inevitable, the connection or response to which it leads is called a reflex. Thus the knee-jerk is a very definite and uniform response to the simple sense-stimulus of sudden hard pressure against a certain spot. It is hard to lessen, to increase, or otherwise control the movement, and, given the situation, the response almost always comes. When the response is more indefinite, the situation more complex, and the connection more modifiable, instinct becomes the customary term. Thus one’s misery at being scorned is too indefinite a response to too complex situation and is too easily modifiable to be called a reflex. When the tendency is to an extremely indefinite response or set of responses to very complex situation, and when the connection’s final degree of strength is commonly due to very large contributions from training, it has seemed more appropriate to replace reflex and instinct by some term like capacity, or tendency, or potentiality. Thus an original tendency to 125 respond to the circumstances of school education by achievement in learning the arts and sciences is called the capacity for scholarship.

There is, of course, no gap between reflexes and instincts, or between instincts and the still less easily describable original tendencies. The fact is that original tendencies range with respect to the nature of the responses from such as are single, simple, definite, uniform within the individual and only slightly variable amongst individuals, to responses that are highly compound, complex, vague, and variable within one individual’s life and amongst individuals. They range with respect to the nature of the situation from simple facts like temperature, oxygen or humidity, to very complex facts like "meeting suddenly and unexpectedly a large animal when in the dark without human companions," and include extra-bodily, bodily, and what would be commonly called purely mental, situations. They range with respect to the bond or connection from slight modifiability to great modifiability, and from very close likeness amongst individuals to fairly wide variability.

Much labor has been spent in trying to make hard and fast distinctions between reflexes and instincts and between instincts and these vaguer predispositions which are here called capacities. It is more useful and more scientific to avoid such distinctions in thought, since in fact there is a continuous gradation.

The Components of an Original Tendency

A typical reflex, or instinct, or capacity, as a whole, includes the ability to be sensitive to a certain situation, the ability to make a certain response, and the existence of a bond or connection whereby that response is made to that situation. For instance, the young chick is sensitive to the absence of other members of his species, is able to peep, and is so organized that the absence of other members of the species makes him peep. But the tendency to be sensitive to a certain situation may exist without the existence of a connection therewith of any further exclusive response, and the tendency to make a certain response may exist without the existence of a connection limiting that response exclusively to any single situation. The three-year-old child is by inborn nature markedly sensitive to the presence and acts of other human beings, but the exact nature of his response varies. The original tendency to cry is very strong, but there is no one situation to which it is exclusively bound.

Original nature seems to decide that the individual will respond somehow to certain situations more often than it decides just what he will do, and to decide that he will make certain responses more often than 126 it decides just when he will make them. So, for convenience in thinking about man’s unlearned equipment, this appearance of multiple response to one same situation and multiple causation of one same response may be taken roughly as the fact.

It must not, however, be taken to mean that the result of an action set up in the sensory neurones by a situation is essentially unpredictable –that, for instance, exactly the same neurone-action (paralleling, let us say, the sight of a dog by a certain two-year-old child) may lead, in the two-year-old, now to the act of crying, at another time to shy retreat, at another to effusive joy, and at still another to curious examination of the newcomer, all regardless of any modification by experience. On the contrary, in the same organism the same neurone-action will always produce the same result–in the same individual the really same situation will always produce the same response. The apparent existence of an original sensitivity unconnected with any one particular response, so that apparently the same cause produces different results, is to be explained in one of two ways. First, the apparently same situations may really be different. Thus the sight of a dog to an infant in its mother’s arms is not the same situation as the sight of a dog to an infant alone on the doorstep. Being held in its mother’s arms is a part of the situation that may account for the response of mild curiosity in the former case and fear in the latter. Second, if the situations are really identical, the apparently same organism really differs. Thus a dog seen by a child, healthy, rested and calm, may lead to only curiosity, whereas, if seen by the same child, ill, fatigued, and nervously irritable, it may lead to fear.

Similarly, the really same response is never made to different situations by the same organism. When the same response seems to be made to different situations, closer inspection will show that the responses do differ; or that the situations were, in respect to the element that determined the response, identical; or that the organism is itself different. Thus, though "a ball seen," "a tin soldier seen," and "a rattle seen" alike provoke "reaching for," the total responses do differ, the central nervous system being provoked to three different responses manifested as three different sense-impressions–of a ball, of a tin soldier, and of a rattle. Thus, if "ball grasped," "tin soldier grasped," and "rattle grasped" alike provoke "throwing," it is because only one particular component, common to the three situations, is effective in determining the act. Thus, if a child now weeps whenever spoken to, whereas before he wept only when hurt or scolded, it is because he is now exhausted, excited, or otherwise changed.

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The original connections between situation and response are never due to chance in its true sense, but there are many minor co-operating forces by which a current of conduction in the same sensory neurones or receptors may, on different occasions, diverge to produce different results in behavior, and by which very different sensory stimulations may converge to a substantially common consequence.

The original tendencies of man, however, rarely act one at a time in isolation one from another. Life apart from learning would not be a simple serial arrangement, over and over, of a hundred or so situations, each a dynamic unit; and of a hundred or so responses, fitted to these situations by a one-to-one correspondence. On the contrary, they co-operate in multitudinous combinations. Their combination may be apparent in behavior, as when the tendencies to look at a bright moving object, to reach for a small object passing a foot away, and to smile at a smiling familiar face combine to make a baby smilingly fixate and reach for the watch which his father swings. Or the combination may take place unobserved in the nervous system, as when a large animal suddenly approaching a solitary child makes him run and hide, though the child in question would neither run nor hide at solitude, at the presence of the animal, or at the sudden approach of objects in general.

It is also the case that any given situation does not act absolutely as a unit, producing either one total response or none at all. Its effect is the total effect of its elements, of which now one, now another may predominate in determining response, according to co-operating forces without and within the man. The action of the situations which move man’s original nature is not that of some thousands of keys each of which unlocks one door and does nothing else whatever. Any situation is a complex, producing a complex effect; and so, if attendant circumstances vary, a variable effect. In any case it does, so to speak, what it can.

¹ Reprinted by permission from E. L. Thorndike, Educational Psychology, (Briefer Course), pp. 2–7; 9–10. New York. Columbia University, Bureau of Publications of Teachers College, 1914. (Author’s copyight).