63 Sociology; Social Psychology

14. The Nature of the Primary In-Group¹

The most fundamental division of social groups as to type is that between the "in-group" and the "out-group" (the others-group). This separation runs throughout society, primitive as well as modern. The in-group attitudes and habits are those of loyalty, co-operation, mutual aid, concern for social welfare of other members, and sense of social solidarity and oneness. All of these attitudes and habits are integrated around the group ideals and standards, around the need for group survival. In sharp contrast with them stand the attitudes and habits built up in reference to the out-group, that is to those groups to which one does not belong. Around these, one integrates his dislikes, his disgusts, his prejudices, his fears. There is either group conflict, open or implied, or else indifference at all times.

This ambivalent situation, love, sympathy, loyalty, mutuality, and the like, directed toward the in-group, and hatred, fear, suspicion, avoidance, or even warfare directed toward the out-group, corresponds in social evolution to the deepest division of one’s trends as a personality. Thus, in time of war it is possible to love ardently one’s country, and at the same time to hate and fear the enemy with equal vigor.

One process accompanies and abets the other. To love one’s friends and to hate one’s enemies is natural; one might say, inevitable. But to love one’s enemies, following the injunction of The Master, is a severe doctrine; indeed it is, like many of His wise sayings, a paradox. That is to say, Jesus, of course, intended, by this doctrine, to eliminate hatred, for He perceived that one could not "love" an enemy, a member of the out-group, a Gentile, an Auslander.

The paper by Sumner presents some valuable aspects of this matter of in-group versus out-group, touching especially on ethnocentri-cism.

But there is another dimension in social groupings. Within any given set of in-groups there may be other groupings, themselves dividing into in-group versus out-group relations. Thus we come to Cooley’s fundamental concept of the "primary" and the "secondary" groupings. The family, for example, is the most fundamental primary group; it is the group in which biological trends and social patterns are integrated. In this sense it is primary, as also in the sense used by Cooley. Both Ellwood and Cooley make pertinent comments on these two types of groups. Secondary groupings tend also to be much more voluntarily and self-consciously formed than do the primary groupings. The present period of culture is one marked by the increasing domination of the secondary groupings.

Of the primary groups other than the family, we may mention the neighborhood and the play group. Growing out of the play group is the important gang group. This is of great value in the process of forming new attachments not related to the family or group of elders. In most cases it does have a geographic unity, but it cuts across many other types of groupings which adults might regard as true barriers to social intercourse. That is to say, it overrides religious, racial, and other cultural barriers. For example, Catholic and Protestant boys are found in the same gangs. So, too, boys of Italian or Greek homes mingle with Irish-American and German-American and with the older American stock of British extraction. The paper by Puffer, while of older date, and of somewhat looser terminology, than the investigations of Furfey and Thrasher, contains the essential features of the in-group attitudes and habits of the gang. Among these are leadership, division of tasks, subordination to gang purposes, and typical antagonistic responses to outside groups. Criminalistic gangs which infest our urban centers are fed by these boy gangs. Their organizations have all the features of the close-knit primary group abetted by all the devices of modern rapid communication and transportation and of sophisticated warfare.

There is also a form of primary group hitherto little studied which has been termed the congenial group. The writer has included a section taken from a series of examples which he has collected of this type of intimate, face-to-face group. The congenial group grows out of play groups originally, but in adolescence and adulthood it seems dependent rather on conscious common interests and less on geographical locality than is the case in the primary groups described by Cooley. In this aspect the congenial group partakes of some characteristics of the secondary group.

Another type of grouping in both primitive and modern social life and partaking of primary group characteristics, though often formed on the basis of conscious interests and thus akin to secondary groupings, is the so-called "secret society." These associations are sometimes more or less purely recreational in the sense of possessing club-house and amusement features; but at other times, they play a distinctive part in social control. Such were the men’s societies among primitive peoples. Such is our own Ku Klux Klan. Such have been the religious cults organized in every society at all complex. There are also, both in primitive and present societies, groupings of military classes, occupational and professional classes, and, among pre-literate peoples, groups known as "age-classes." An enormous literature on this type of grouping among primitive people is available. There exists also some descriptive material bearing on the secret fraternities of our own time, although, of course, little of reliable sort on their secret features since they are still a vital part of current culture. Given our complex political organization in the Western World, and our notions of democracy and open classes, it is of great interest to note how large a place these cults play in present social control. While no selections are given to illustrate this type of grouping, the student will find in the bibliography materials to which he can refer for interesting and enlightening data.

Industrialism and political democracy as culture patterns have produced certain profound changes in our modes of life—changes of which many of us are hardly aware. It is amazing to note that college students of the present generation know so little, for instance, of the horse-drawn wagon and carriage stage of transportation which existed everywhere before 1900. This is merely a current instance of the speed of change and the attendent unconsciousness of what has taken and is taking place all about us. New modes of travel, better means of communication, advanced commercial and industrial techniques, ever-changing scientific appliances are everywhere making for increased wealth, health, and comfort. Yet, while material culture has made great changes, the moral codes, the mores, belong distinctly to another age. This has produced a crisis in our social life, perhaps the most profound crisis in history. As a concluding section of the present chapter the paper of Cooley on changes in group life in present-day society indicates some of the more important alterations which democracy and industrialism have produced.

By primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face association and co-operation. They are primary in several senses, but chiefly in that they are fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual. The result of intimate association, psychologically, is a certain fusion of individualities in a common whole, so that one’s very self, for many purposes at least, is the common life and purpose of the group. Perhaps the simplest way of describing this wholeness is by saying that it is a "we"; It involves the sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which "we" is the natural expression. One lives in the feeling of the whole and finds the chief aims of his will in that feeling.

It is not to be supposed that the unity of the primary group is one of mere harmony and love. It is always a differentiated and usually a competitive unity, admitting of self-assertion and various appropriative passions; but these passions are socialized by sympathy, and come, or tend to come, under the discipline of a common spirit. The individual will be ambitious, but the chief object of his ambition will be some desired 64 place in the thought of the others, and he will feel allegiance to Common standards of Service and fair play. So the boy will dispute with his fellows a place on the team, but above such disputes will place the common glory of his class and school.

The most important spheres of this intimate association and cooperation—though by no means the only ones—are the family, the play-group of children, and the neighborhood or community group of elders. These are practically universal, belonging to all times and all stages of development; and are accordingly a chief basis of what is universal in human nature and human ideals. Such association is clearly the nursery of human nature in the world about us, and there is no apparent reason to suppose that the case has anywhere or at any time been essentially different.

As regards play, I might, were it not a matter of common observation, multiply illustrations of the universality and spontaneity of the group discussion and co-operation to which it gives rise. The general fact is that children, especially boys after about their twelfth year, live in fellowships in which their sympathy, ambition and honor are engaged even more, often, than they are in the family. Most of us can recall examples of the endurance by boys of injustice and even cruelty, rather than appeal from their fellows to parents or teachers—as, for instance, in the hazing so prevalent at schools, and so difficult, for this very reason, to repress.

Of the neighborhood group it may be said, in general, that from the time men formed permanent settlements upon the land, down, at least, to the rise of modern industrial cities, it has played a main part in the primary, heart-to-heart life of the people. Among our Teutonic forefathers the village community was apparently the chief sphere of sympathy and mutual aid for the commons all through the "dark" and middle ages, and for many purposes it remains so in rural districts at the present day.

In our own life the intimacy of the neighborhood has been broken up by the growth of an intricate mesh of wider contacts which leaves us strangers to people who live in the same house. And even in the country the same principle is at work, though less obviously, diminishing our economic and spiritual community with our neighbors.

Besides these almost universal kinds of primary association, there are many others whose form depends upon the particular state of civilization; the only essential thing, as I have said, being a certain intimacy and fusion of personalities. In our own society, being little bound by place, people easily form clubs, fraternal societies and the like, based 65 On congeniality, Which may give rise to real intimacy. Many Such relations are formed at school and college, and among men and women brought together in the first instance by their occupations—as workman in the same trade, or the like. Where there is a little common interest and activity, kindness grows like weeds by the roadside.

But the fact that the family and neighborhood groups are ascendant in the open and plastic time of childhood makes them even now incomparably more influential than all the rest.

Primary groups are primary in the sense that they give the individual his earliest and completest experience of social unity, and also in the sense that they do not change in the same degree as more elaborate relations, but form a comparatively permanent source out of which the latter are ever springing.

These groups, then, are springs of life, not only for the individual but for social institutions. They are only in part molded by special traditions, and, in larger degree, express a universal nature.

To return to primary groups: the view here maintained is that human nature is not something existing separately in the individual, but a group-nature or primary phase of society, a relatively simple and general condition of the social mind. It is something more, on the one hand, than the mere instinct that is born in us—though that enters into it—and something less, on the other, than the more elaborate development of ideas and sentiments that mattes up institutions. It is the nature which is developed and expressed in those simple, face-to-face groups that are somewhat alike in all societies; groups of the family, the playground, and the neighborhood. In the essential similarity of these is to be found the basis, in experience, for similar ideas and sentiments in the human mind. in these, everywhere, human nature comes into existence. Man does not have it at birth; he cannot acquire it except through fellowship, and it decays in isolation.

¹ Reprinted by permission from C. H. Cooley, Social Organization, pp. 23; 24; 25; 26–27; 29–30. New York. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909.