Individualism and the Social

Abstract

In the last chapter it was suggested that Floyd and Gordon Allport and their followers were committed to a restrictive empiricist form of ontological individualism that blinded them to the social dimensions of human psychology and behavior and to the possibility of a distinctively social form of social psychology. They rejected the social dimensions of human psychology and behavior because they rejected everything associated with the notion of a social mind. However, this cannot be the whole story. For on one level at least, both Floyd and Gordon Allport did recognize a fundamental difference between socially and individually engaged psychological states and behavior. In “The J-Curve Hypothesis of Conforming Behavior,” Floyd Allport (1934) cited numerous examples of “conforming behavior” whose statistical distribution was highly asymmetrical. The statistical distributions of these forms of behavior were often J-shaped, with the mode on the terminal step, in contrast to the distributions of behaviors expressive of random personal differences, which tended to be normal and symmetrical. One of the interesting features of Allport's examples of conforming behavior is that they included social forms of consciousness and behavior that violated Allport's own interpersonal definition of social consciousness and behavior. For example, they included the practice of bowing in silent prayer before church service among Episcopalians, the practice of stopping before a red light among motorists, and belief in the deity (as a personal creator and ruler) among Catholics (D. Katz & Allport, 1931).

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