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The Social Self: Activist Social Psychology, Race and Prejudice

The Social Self: Activist Social Psychology, Race and Prejudice. What is Social Psychology?.

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The Social Self: Activist Social Psychology, Race and Prejudice

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  1. The Social Self: Activist Social Psychology, Race and Prejudice

  2. What is Social Psychology? The study of “the ways thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of other human beings.” For Allport, it was also to further free inquiry and “a philosophy and ethics of democracy.” Gordon Allport, Historical Background of Social Psychology, p. 3, 4.

  3. Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) Founded in 1936; Afflilated with APA Some Early Members: KurlLewin, Otto Klineberg, Gordon Allport, Gardner Murphy, Kenneth Clark

  4. Activist Social Psychologists • Focus on the whole personality • Case studies rather than experimental studies • Observational, natural history methods • Research to be socially relevant • Called “experiential modernists” by historian Katherine Pandora; connected science to the realms of feeling and morality.

  5. Culture and Personality movement • The Authoritarian Personality (1950), by ThedorAdorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, Nevitt Sanford @ UC Berkeley. “F Scale” – Fascist Personality: Conventionalism, submission, Aggression, anti-intellectualism, projectivity, cynicism, stereotypy, and others).

  6. F-Scale Test: Respondent would Disagree/Agree Strongly to Mildly • Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn. • A person who has bad manners, habits, and breeding can hardly expect to get along with decent people. • If people would talk less and work more everybody would be better off. • The business man and the manufacturer are much more important to society than the artist and the professor. • Every person should have complete faith in some supernatural power whose decisions he obeys without question. • What this country needs most, more than laws and political programs is a few courageous, tireless, devoted leaders in whom the people can put their faith.

  7. F-Scale Sought to Test “Fascist Receptivity at the Personality Level”: • Conventionalism • Authoritarian Submission • Authoritarian Aggression • Superstition • Power and Toughness • Cynicism • Projectivity (Projection of Negative Traits onto others)

  8. Gordon Allport (1897-1967) Personality and Social Psychologist at Harvard University (1930-1967)

  9. Personality was a Gestalt (form-quality)Form-quality was integrated and emerged in one’s artistic and expressive acts, including handwriting, gestures, posture, and speech. It could be best captured by interviews, interpersonal contact.

  10. Allport’s critique of psychological tests: • “The result is a certain artificiality I fear; but when we play the testing game, we must play according to its rules. But you know I am fundamentally skeptical of the approach. I thought by attacking this high level in personality I might prove to my own satisfaction just what are the defects and merits of the entire method.” • Allport to Downey, March 14, 1931; Downey,Papers, 400025. Box 5, Folder 14, American Heritage Center

  11. Allport’s “Becoming” • Unfolding from the center of one’s interest, which took place over a lifetime. • One had a definitive style that unified one’s actions and expressions. • Personality was unique. • “Functional autonomy:” Our behavior was not reducible to more originary drives and impulses, but earlier tendencies became incorporated into later developments in the process of becoming.

  12. Seminar on Morale • Social Relations 284, Prejudice and Group Conflict. • Allport: “the most urgent problem of national unity, namely group conflict and prejudice.” • The class was interdisciplinary in nature, allowing for case studies, empirical investigations, and interviews and personal writings on students’ own prejudices. Much of this material became incorporated into Allport’s 1954 Nature of Prejudice. • From Cherry, 2000, 490)

  13. Postwar Developments in Social Psychology • Human Relations and Great Issues Courses offered at many Universities • New Departments of Human Relations (Yale) • Behavioral Science Institute at Stanford (funded by Ford foundation). • Dept. of Social Relations at Harvard (1946) united sociology, social psychology, social anthropology and clinical psychology. • Allport’s first course in Social Relations after the war had 900 subscribers, the department had 600 concentrators, admitted 40 graduate students, and graduated 208 Ph.Dsby 1960.

  14. “We need it. Our human relations is poor; our education is poor; our chances for survival are poor – unless we can improve mankind’s understanding and control of social and personal factors.” • Allport on the Social Relations Department. HUG 4119.50, Box 3; Folder 95, Radcliffe Alumnae Behavioral Science, 1960 –Development of Social Relations of Harvard

  15. Whites experienced psychological conflict Between the American Creed of equality for all, and the stark realities of prejudice, segregation and discrimination. Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987)Economist from Sweden Pub. 1944

  16. Those with personality traits – excessive moralism, inability to tolerate ambiguity, the misrepresentation of reality, embodied what Allport called functional prejudice. • The social setting, the immediate contexts of school and community, along with broader social-cultural factors contributed to what he called “conformity prejudice.” • Gordon Allport, 1957

  17. Ways to alleviate Prejudice, and Intergroup Conflict • Contact Hypothesis: Interaction between groups could ally prejudice, but only when contact occurred on an equal basis, were pursuing common goals, and had social institutional support. • Intercultural Education: Work of Rachel Davis-Dubois in school and communities to incorporate immigrant experience with Unity Home Festival, and other interventions.

  18. “Family of Man” Photography Exhibit at Museum of Modern Art, Jan. 1955

  19. Kenneth B. Clark (1914-2005) Howard University, B.A., Masters (1935) Columbia University, Ph.D. (1940) Psychology Professor (1942) City College of New York

  20. Mamie and Kenneth B. Clark Doll Studies, 1939-1940 This data was cited as Social Science Evidence in the 1954 Supreme Court Case, Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, which ruled that Separate but Equal is NOT equal, thus beginning the legal process of desegregating schools in the U.S.

  21. Social Psychology & Social Activism • Mamie and Kenneth Clark founded Northside Treatment Center in Harlem in 1946 • HARYOU - Harlem Youth Opportunities, Unlimited, which sought to provide educational and social services to youth in Harlem • The think tank, Metropolitan Applied Research Center (M.A.R.C.) • Kenneth Clark served on the Kernercommission, or the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, appointed by Lyndon Johnson in 1967

  22. It may be that where essential human psychology and moral issues are at stake, noninvolvement and noncommitment and the exclusion of feeling are neither sophisticated nor objective, but naïve and violative of the scientific spirit at its best.” (DG, p.80).

  23. “Clark is tired of the false objectivity, the ‘balanced view’ of many of his liberal white friends…” and Myrdal continued: “In the demand for true objectivity he must, indeed, demand human empathy and even compassion on the part of as many as possible of those who can read, think, and feel in free prosperous, white America.’ Gunnar Myrdal, Foreword, Black Ghetto p. xxii

  24. Dark Ghetto is, in a sense, no report at all, but rather the anguished cry of its author. But it is the cry of a social psychologist, controlled in part by the concepts and language of social science, and as such can never express the pure authenticity of folk spontaneity or the poetic symbolism of the artists. Dark Ghetto, “Introduction to an Epilogue” p. xxxiv.

  25. Moynihan Report 1965: The Negro Family: The Case for National Action • Daniel Patrick Moynihan, author, was Assistant Secretary of Labor –later to become US Senator. • Argued that single-mother Black families were a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws. • Concluded that the structure of family life in the black community was a “tangle of pathology.”

  26. New York Times, April 4,1965

  27. (1963) (1975)

  28. “But the chances for any major transformation in the ghetto’s predicament are slim until the anguish of the ghetto is in some way shared not only by its victims but by the committed empathy of those who now consider themselves privileged and immune to the ghetto’s flagrant pathologies.” Kenneth Clark, Dark Ghetto, 1965, p. 222. 1980s Interview Quest for Peace

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