An Introduction to Social Psychology
Chapter 27: Primary and Derivative Attitudes and Ideals
Luther Lee Bernard
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The shift in emphasis from primary to derivative group control which we have just described has had a marked influence upon the personality building process, not only in the actual mechanism of imitating models, but also in the content of the personality itself. The change in social organization has produced a corresponding change in the ideals and attitudes necessary for adequate adjustment within it. This development of derivative attitudes and ideals will be the subject matter of this chapter.
THE NATURE OF ATTITUDES AND IDEALS— Attitudes and ideals grow up in the inner or symbolic behavior of individuals as a result of their functioning in groups. These attitudes and ideals are the inner aspects of behavior corresponding to incompletely expressed or partially inhibited overt behavior. There is more or less consciousness of relationships and of objectives involved, even in the case of primary or emotional attitudes, and this consciousness is tinged with desire or a sense of obligation, however dim the desire or the sense of obligation may be. Desire in its simplest form is a condition of readiness for some inhibited behavior which it is dimly or clearly perceived will bring about a removal of the inhibiting factors. The simpler form of the sense of obligation is negative and consists of more or less well recognized impulses or ideals which tend to inhibit some behavior which it is recognized should not take place.
The more clearly conscious desires or wishes consist in the projection of overt behavior which is inhibited from completion by some factors which may or may not be clearly recognized. A well-defined sense of obligation is the recognition of certain considerations or motives which either should
(426) further a type of inhibited behavior or which should inhibit or strengthen a process of behavior projected or actually undergoing execution. These better defined and more highly conscious forms of desires and the sense of obligation are ideals rather than primary or simple attitudes. The main distinction between an ideal and a primary emotional attitude lies in the greater degree of intellectualization of the former, which is in reality a specialized subdivision of the latter. All ideals may be said to have a moral aspect also, and this is true of all attitudes which have developed sufficient mental content to recognize a fitness of relationship between subject and object, that is, some degree of the sense of obligation.
THE PRIMARY ATTITUDES develop in the primary group. They are essentially emotional appraisals of the functional relationship between individuals in a group, or possibly even of an individual to the group as a whole. The sense of obligation or of desire may also form a part of the attitude, as stated above, and the attitude may rise to the status of an ideal, even in the primary group. This latter possibility will be realized if there is sufficient intellectual analysis of relationships and of obligations or if the desire sufficiently objectifies means and ends. The simplest primary attitudes are probably hedonic seeking of a pleasure giving object and aversion for unpleasant objects. Out of these, as a result of social conditions, grow love, tenderness, devotion, trust, loyalty, the feeling for truthfulness, and the desire to give and receive fair play, etc., on the one band; and hate, brusqueness, dislike, distrust, disloyalty, deceit, and cunning or trickery, on the other hand.
All of these are relatively primary attitudes before they are ideals, for we learn to practice them and to have a feeling for them, that is, to recognize them in a semi-intellectual or in an emotional manner before we can objectify them as comprehensive adjustment patterns, and thus set them up as objectives to be attained in our own conduct, or in that of others. "'heir we can analyze them and objectify them as ends they become ideals. This process of increasing recognition, intellectualization, and objectification of attitudes and ideals follows, of course, the evolution of the integration of personality
( 427) traits and of symbols which was discussed earlier. The attitude is recognized through an integration of perceptual-emotional experiences when in contact with objects, usually personal, and when we have come to recognize in some degree the relationship of those objects to ourselves and of ourselves to them. The ideal arises in the projective stage of personality integration, when we are able to set up fairly complex types and processes of behavior as ends.
DERIVATIVE IDEALS are of course primarily intellectual and abstract. They arise in connection with the recognition of distance contacts, which also involves a recognition of the meaning of the symbols by means of which the indirect contacts are effected. Here the attitudes— the wider and more inclusive term— are cast in the form of ideals. That is, they are intellectualized and abstracted. They consist of a statement or recognition of the types of social organization and relationships which should exist. Abstract or derivative ideals are expressed almost exclusively in terms of the social organization which it is recognized would produce the desired individual responses and adjustments, or the social organization which we feel should obtain, usually with ourselves as central in the situation. It is because of this close connection between the statement of the ideal and the type of social organization viewed as an objective that we say the ideal is the product of the group contacts in which it develops. It is the projection of a plan of adjustment of self or of another to the environment. This is, of course, also true of ideals and attitudes formed in connection with primary group contacts as in the derivative.
Both primary and derivative attitudes and ideals represent projections of contact relationships. In the one case these projected contacts or adjustments are concrete and mainly emotional. In the other case they are abstract and largely intellectual. The derivative ideals are simply the primary attitudes and ideals expanded and intellectualized in such ways as to enable them to picture or project wider and more abstract relationships. Thus attitudes of personal love and hate, or of trust and distrust, of loyalty and disloyalty, of truthfulness and deceit, come in their derivative form to be ideals for the promo-
( 428) -tion of local group or national or even international welfare or destruction, of confidence in or distrust of the good sense and honorable intentions of governments, business enterprises, religions, or even the masses of mankind. We may also seek in a similar way to support or to betray the aims of states, business enterprises, and classes or masses. We may, when in positions of trust or power, that is, in situations where we have many and effective abstract or indirect contacts with people in many places, act in good faith for the promotion of an abstract or symbolical understanding of relationships, or we may attempt to pervert the sources and content of news, books, propaganda, etc. The highest and most abstract ideal of truthfulness is that which motivates the scientist in his meticulous endeavor to verify each fact and to test rigorously all of his conclusions. But there is also a high degree of loyalty to society in the abstract which may motivate even the statesman and the diplomat to be perfectly frank and aboveboard in their dealings with men and to consider always the public welfare first when it is in conflict with their own. This is civic loyalty and truthfulness. Perhaps their opposites, civic disloyalty and untruthfulness, are all too common and are sometimes extended to the point of actual and corrupt betrayal of the public interest.
A PARTIAL LIST OF ATTITUDES AND IDEALS, both primary and derivative, arranged in the order of their increasing derivativeness, will help us to form some notion of how the derivative ideals grow out of the primary and less derivative attitudes. It will also enable us to observe the increasing abstractness and intellectualization of the attitude as it becomes more and more derivative in character. The list is presented in two parallel columns, the expansive and positive attitudes and ideals on the left and the recessive and negative attitudes and ideals on the right. A horizontal line divides the personal and more primary attitudes and ideals from the social and more derivative. This line marks the hypothetical point at which the individual begins to expand his view and includes people in his attitudes and ideals beyond the range of his immediate contacts. But of course the dividing line can be drawn only approximately.
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Positive Attitudes and Ideals
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Negative Attitudes and Ideals
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| Group and class loyalty, clannishness | Intellectualized or constructive attitude of service toward one's |
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| Humanitarianism for all mankind (Gregariousness) | Misanthropy
(Recessiveness) |
Devotion to abstract principles of
(Idealism) |
Repudiation of the principles of
(Machiavellianism) |
| Intellectualized or constructive attitude of service toward one's | Systematically seeking to exploit one's |
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Other items which should be included in the lists will occur to readers, and critics will also observe here, as in the case of the list of groups in the preceding chapter, that the sequential relationship must vary according to circumstances and the problems of adjustment. In fact the list of attitudes above the horizontal line should perhaps be divided into three major sections or groups of attitudes representing as many general Points of view. The possibility of such separation or subsidiary classification has been indicated by the device of wider spacing. The principle to be emphasized by this list is that attitudes and ideals have become increasingly abstract and
(431) derivative as our direct contacts with others have widened into indirect contacts. As a result mankind is now dominated largely by derivative ideals, both positive and negative.
THE EXPANSION OF RESTRICTIVE PRIMARY' ATTITUDES INTO CONSTRUCTIVE DERIVATIVE IDEALS— Such great composite social ideals as democracy, internationalism, humanitarianism, or Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and the like, contain both primary and derivative elements. Originally the primary attitudes and ideals predominated in these great emotional and intellectual complexes. Democracy was a matter of brotherhood or equality of members of the same primary group. Humanitarianism was clannishness or tribalism or love for one's own. Internationalism was at first impossible, because there had been no analysis and recognition of collective behavior patterns or groups other than of one's own kind. Religion, like the patriotism which in all probability originally sprang from it, was the application of the primary attitudes and ideals mentioned above to the supernatural personality or personalities worshiped in common, and thence by induction to all of those who engaged in the common worship of the supernatural beings. Thus the group itself comes to be objectified as a spirit or as a quasi-personality which is worshiped or reverenced, and we come to conceive ourselves as having very great obligations to it which are expressed in the form of the primary attitudes. This is patriotism of the more primitive sort. It is indicated familiarly by such colloquial phrases as "Motherland," "Fatherland," "Uncle Sam," "John Bull," "La Belle France." It demands devotion to our town or tribe or country, right or wrong, and regardless of who rules it. The clan and the state, like the gods, can do no wrong.
But modern patriotism and democracy and religion are much less concrete and emotional and are more abstractly constructive. They have been intellectualized, and derivative ideals are supplementing or replacing the primary attitudes. The true patriot in the modern sense may criticize his country if he thinks it is pursuing unethical or mistaken policies. He may seek to dispossess the dominant government, if he is sincere in offering a better one, although the persons in power or who profit from the situation which exists, however undesirable
(432) in general it may be, are certain to cast many unsavory epithets upon him, to call him traitor and perhaps attempt to defend their interests by discrediting him or even by doing him bodily or economic injury.
Likewise, every one who attempts to dispossess false gods and substitute more humane and rational religious controls is likely to be branded as infidel and punished as strongly as lies in the power of the "faithful." Every old religion based upon primary group or personality conceptions, which has now, like the Greek and Norse theologies, passed into the innocuous estheticism of mythology, has persecuted those philosophers who were trying to substitute a higher and more intellectual type of religious control. Religion has been increasingly intellectualized until abstract or derivative ideals of social welfare and public duty have come to supplement, and even to assume dominance and direction over, the more restrictive primary attitudes, especially of the more emotional sort, which formerly constituted its core. Every great evolving religion of which we have a record has advanced from magic and ritual towards rational social controls as guiding principles in just that degree to which intellectual analysis has taken the place of primary attitudes in the understanding of the explanatory content of these religions.
DEMOCRACY AS AN EXAMPLE— Democracy has also become largely intellectualized. Personal equality and a feeling of friendliness and of brotherhood are still important in democracy. But we no longer place the chief emphasis on these attitudes, important as they are. We recognize that we cannot have friendliness and brotherhood without equality of opportunity, and further that we cannot have either this equality of opportunity or the more personal amenities without first securing certain abstract and far-reaching types of social organization which stand back of and promote the democratic personal relationships. Hence the first consideration in modern democracy is the building up of derivative democratic ideals, such as those of social service, intelligent discharge of citizenship duties, and the discomfiture of those politicians who prey upon the public, which will bring into existence protective social organization calculated to foster justice and friendliness
( 433) in the wider social contacts. The rendering of justice itself is now an abstract as well as a concrete process, involving adjustments reaching very far afield beyond the borders of the primary group.
This necessity of first giving attention to the derivative or abstract overhead organization in order to secure democracy and justice has not always existed. In the early stages of social evolution where the primary group dominated practically all collective and individual behavior, democracy and justice could be secured by means of the direct promulgation of primary attitudes and ideals. But now that the primary and less derivative groups are themselves dominated and shaped by the more abstract derivative group ideals, we must either look first after the more abstract ideals and adjustments or lose the fruits even of the primary democratic ideals. Social life has become highly abstract and intellectual, at least in the control centers. Just as industry has outgrown the empirical invention and demands the projected or logically synthetic invention, so also has society grown beyond the point where it can be successfully and properly controlled by primary emotional attitudes. There must be projective thinking — projective social invention— in the process of evolving modern democratic social controls. And back of this process of abstract projective social organization for the common welfare lie the method inventions of social science as the intellectual materials out of which the new democratic order must be projected and fashioned. Primary emotional attitudes can be made to support this new abstract system, but they could never create it.
THE HYGIENE OF POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE ATTITUDES AND IDEALS— From our discussion it will be apparent that both primary and derivative ideals may be bad or anti-social as well as good or socially approved. Aversion, hate, disloyalty, deceit, as primary attitudes, are bad only when they cause harm to the group or to individuals without protecting greater interests or larger numbers of individuals. We might well prefer to abolish these negative attitudes from our thoughts and behavior altogether as a protection against injustice or other evil, for it is not always easy to apply such weapons to
( 434) the defense of positive ideals and efforts without harm. But so long as the world of collective behavior is subject to conflicts and to maladjustments, intended or unintended, this apparently is not possible. We sometimes regard it as a virtue to hate evil or even to deceive the deceivers and to betray those who work in unrighteous causes. Certainly as the world is organized it appears not infrequently to be good policy to do these things, and almost no one is averse to attacks upon the unesthetic and the immoral and the injurious.
But it is not so clear that we are justified in espousing the negative derivative ideals, at least in our own group, and possibly even in the world at large. It is a question whether we should ever hate a whole people, even our martial enemies, or be disloyal to any social cause however doubtful its validity for which we profess loyalty, or deceive a whole people with regard to our attitudes regarding public policy. If the world were free from adverse and unjust compulsion by derivative group organizations we might lead the wholly positive idealistic life. As it is, perhaps we cannot. But that we are obligated not to entertain or promulgate any of the negative ideals against just and righteous social organization and primary group relationships is now clearly recognized. The only question is with reference to the criterion of righteousness and justice which we employ, and that changes from time to time and from place to place. The best rule to follow, perhaps, is to employ the positive ideals and attitudes where possible and to use the negative ones when necessary to defend the positive ideals, but to use them temperately and sparingly.
DERIVATIVE IDEALS MUST DOMINATE IN CASE OF CONFLICT— The derivative ideals are difficult to formulate. They are abstract and their statement is feasible only after an intellectual analysis of collective relationships and behavior has been made. They are dependent upon the mastery of abstract intellectual symbolism, or the conditioning of collective behavior to abstract symbolic stimuli. But the primary attitudes and ideals grow directly out of elementary and largely emotional direct contact behavior itself. Hence they are easy to formulate, so much so in fact that most of them are objectified before the person has developed intellectual analyses of suffi-
(435) -cient breadth or scope to test their validity. Since the derivative ideals grow up as extensions and as correctives or perversions of the primary attitudes and ideals in a complex and abstractly organized world, the two types of ideals often are in conflict. Love and loyalty, freedom and truthfulness, and the like, are now to be employed in the service of good causes, not merely on impulse, as formerly they often were. We no longer believe it wise to give money or sympathy to beggars regardless of circumstances, nor should we necessarily stand by friends or family contrary to the public interest. The narrower social relations must be organized within the wider social relationships, and we must see to it that the wider ones are just and helpful in order that the narrower may also be just and good. If the primary contacts are in opposition to a rational derivative social order and if our primary attitudes ignore just derivative ideals, the former in each case are anti-social and must give way to the latter.
MISUSE OF THE PRIMARY ATTITUDES— Sometimes designing persons are guilty of anti-social conduct in the more indirect and derivative relations of social life under the cover of approved primary attitudes and contacts. The corrupt politician or "boss" very frequently wins his way to popular favor by personal friendliness, generosity, and apparent sympathy for the poor, and intercession with judges and other officials in behalf of the criminal and unfortunate. At the same time he is perhaps filching the produce of their labor from these same poor and unfortunate through some form of public graft or corruption. The people whom he befriends, and most of the public at large perhaps, are not able to detect or understand and disapprove the significance of the latter behavior, but it is easy for them to see and approve the former. Such methods of blinding the popular intelligence by interposing the strong appeal of emotional primary attitudes before intellectual analysis have been in use from the earliest times of which we have a record. Such people may keep the letter of the law of righteousness (especially of the ancient law, den duped iii primary group relationships), but not the spirit of modern social righteousness. An industry may pay its employes well and still overcharge the public. A church may be generous
( 436) with individuals and seek to save their souls and still cast its immense power against the realization of the great derivative ideals of social justice, democracy, and scientific truth and investigation. All too frequently the much abused word "fundamentalism" means a return to emotional judgments and prejudices instead of an advance forward toward fundamental intellectual analysis and derivative ideals.
Many people trained in primary attitudes and ideals, but ignorant of the wider derivative ideals, are often unwittingly guilty of great breaches in social morality. Ross calls the disregard of derivative ideals "sinning by syndicate." That is, men who are above reproach in primary contacts may still own unsanitary and condemned tenements. The men who act upon the principle "Let the public be damned" are very frequently kind and considerate in primary contacts. Neglect in inculcating derivative ideals and attitudes is dangerous to social welfare. That is, personality integration in our day must include an adequate emphasis upon derivative ideals as well as upon primary ones.
CONCLUSION— In our collective capacity we must learn to understand the derivative ideals and to make them effective as behavior patterns, if we wish to be truly good or socialized members of our groups. We live in larger and more abstract groups now and we must not ignore the needs of these overhead or derivative control organizations. If any institution is still organized primarily on the basis of a primitive interpretation of and loyalty to uncorrected primary attitudes and ideals which bring it in conflict with the intellectualized and socialized derivative ideals, that institution must be reorganized and put into line with modern derivative organization of thought and institutional behavior. This means that the members of such institutions must be taught to think in terms of abstract or derivative adjustments, made on the basis of scientific ideals of collective behavior, instead of on the basis of traditions and beliefs coming down unmodified from the primary group life and emotional behavior of primitive times. Our age is vastly complex and our contacts are indirect and derivative and our thinking must be more and more complex and intellectually constructive also. Because of this our forma-
( 437) -tive institutions, especially the schools, must learn to teach the young, and the old, to think abstractly and intelligently about all phases of social behavior. They must teach us to imitate or assimilate principles as well as personalities. Personal and primary ideals and behavior are not to be discarded, but they must be made to conform to the scientifically projected and organized derivative ideals and values by which collective behavior must in the future be regulated.
MATERIALS FOR SUPPLEMENTARY READING
- Blackmar and Gillin, Outlines of Sociology, Chs. XVII, XVIII, XXIII, XXIV XXVII, XXVIII
- Bogardus, E. S., Fundamentals of Social Psychology, Chs. VI, XX, XXI, XXVI, XXVIII
- Carmichael, R. D., "The Need of an International Mind," Sci. .Mo., XIX 47-52.
- Cooley C. H., Social Organization Chs. IV, V, XI
- Ellwood, C. A., The Psychology of Human Society, Chs. X, XIII, XVI
- Giddings, F. H., Studies in the Theory of Human Society Ch. X
- Howard, G. E., "Ideals as a Factor in the Future Control of International Society" Pub. Amer. Sociological Society, XII: 1-10.
- Pillsbury, `V. B., The Psychology of Nationalism and Internationalism, Ch. VIII
- Ross, E. A., Principles of Sociology, Chs. XLVI, XLVII
- — , Latter Day Saints acid Sinners
- — , Sin and Society
- — ,Social Control, Chs. XVII, XVIII
- Steiner, J. F., Community Organization, Ch. III
