Английский язык учебник
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ject of any of them. In fact, it is plausible to interpret phantasia and sensus communis as different aspects or modes of a single faculty, depending on whether it is regarded as receptive or productive, or on whether it is operating in the presence or the absence of whatever is being mentally represented. Imagination came to be particularly associated with thinking about things that are not actually currently present to the senses: things that are not really there.
Some of Aristotle’s successors tended to lay the stress on the conceptual separation of the notions of imagination and sensus communis. Thus Early Chris tian and Medieval anatomists often located sensus com munis at the front of the brain’s first ventricle, ready to receive sense impressions, whereas imagination was placed at the rear of this ventricle, and was responsible for holding and perhaps consolidating the resultant images, and passing them back to the other ventricles and faculties. Imagination might also, sometimes, be responsible for the recombining of various parts into chimerical forms.
This latter type of process would allow the individ ual mind a degree of freedom and a scope for idiosyn cracy that would hardly been available from the other traditional faculties, constrained as they were by reali ty and the laws of logic. It would also, of course, give rise to images even more removed from present actual ity than images retrieved intact from memory, and thus even more quintessentially imaginary. In this vein, we sometimes find modern writers making a dis tinction between “memory imagery” and “imagination imagery”, or even restricting the use “imagination” to thoughts about things that have never been actually experienced.
Return to Aristotle’s Psychology. Copyright
by Christopher Shields, 2000
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PERSONALITY FORMATION
Every man is in certain respects
a.like all other men,
b.like some other men,
c.like no other man.
He is like all other men because some of the deter minants of his personality are universal to the species. That is to say, there are common features in the biolog ical endowments of all men, in the physical environ ments they inhabit, and the societies and cultures in which they develop.
It is possible that the most important of the undis covered determinants of personality and culture are only to be revealed by close attention to the common place. Every man experiences birth and must learn to move about and explore his environment, to protect himself against extremes of temperature and to avoid serious injuries; every man experiences sexual ten sions and other importunate needs and must learn to find ways of appeasing them; every man grows in stat ure, matures, and dies; and he does all this and much more, from first to last, as a member of a society. These characteristics he shares with the majority of herd animals, but others are unique to him. Only with those of his own kind does he enjoy an erect posture, hands that grasp, three dimensional and colour vision, and a nervous system that permits elaborate speech and learning processes of the highest order.
Frequently remarked, however, are the similarities in personality traits among members of groups or in specific individuals from different groups. In certain features of personality, most men are “like some other men.” The similarity may be to other members of the same socio cultural unit. The statistical prediction can safely be made that a hundred Americans, for example, will display certain defined characteristics more fre
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quently than will a hundred Englishmen comparably distributed as to age, sex, social class, and vocation.
But being “like some other men” is by no means limited members of social units like nations, tribes, and classes. Seafaring people, regardless of the com munities from which they come, tend to manifest simi lar qualities. The same may be said for desert folk. In tellectuals and athletes all over the world have some thing in common; so have those who were born to wealth or poverty. Persons who have exercised author ity over large groups for many years develop parallel reaction systems, in spite of culturally tailored differ ences in the details of their behaviours. Probably ty rannical fathers leave a detectably similar imprint upon their children, though the uniformity may be su perficially obscured by local manners. Certainly the hyperpituitary type is equally recognizable among Eu ropeans, African Negroes, and American Indians. Also, even where organic causes are unknown or doubt ful, certain neurotic and psychotic syndromes in per sons of one society remind us of other individuals be longing to very different societies.
Finally, there is the inescapable fact that a man is in many respects like no other man. Each individual’s modes of perceiving, feeling, needing, and behaving have characteristic patterns which are not precisely duplicated by those of any other individual. This is traceable, in part, to the unique combination of biolog ical materials which the person has received from his parents. More exactly, the ultimate uniqueness of each personality is the product of countless and successive interactions between the maturing constitution and different environing situations from birth onward. An identical sequence of such determining influences is never reproduced. In this connection it is necessary to emphasize the importance of “accidents,” that is of events that are not predictable for any given individu al on the basis of generalized knowledge of his physi
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cal, social, and cultural environments. A child gets lost in the woods and suffers from exposure and hunger. Another child is nearly drowned by a sudden flood in canyon. Another loses his mother and is reared by an aged grandmother, or his father remarries and his education is entrusted to a stepmother with a psycho pathic personality. Although the personalities of children who have experienced a trauma of the same type will often resemble each other in certain respects, the differences between them may be even more appar ent, partly because the traumatic situation in each case had certain unique features, and partly because at the time of the trauma the personality of each child, being al ready unique, responded in a unique manner. Thus, there is uniqueness in each inheritance and uniqueness in each environment, but, more particularly, uniqueness in the number, kinds, and temporal order of critically deter mining situations encountered in the course of life.
In personal relations, in psychotherapy, and in the arts, this uniqueness of personality usually is, and should be, accented. But for general scientific purpos es the observation of uniformities, uniformities of ele ments and uniformities of patterns, is of first impor tance. This is so because without the discovery of uni formities there can be no concepts, no classifications, no formulations, no principles, no laws; and without these no science can exist.
The writers suggest that clear and orderly think ing about personality formation will be facilitated if four classes of determinants (and their interactions) are distinguished: constitutional, group membership, role, and situational. These will help us to understand in what ways every man is “like all other men,” “like some other men,” “like no other man.”
Personality Formation: the Determinants. Kluckhohn C., Murray Henry A. Abridged from Chapter 2 of Personali ty in Nature Society and Culture, New York: Knopf, 1948
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WHAT IS A PERSONALITY/SOCIAL
PSYCHOLOGIST?
A boy, barely a teenager, sprays his schoolyard with bullets. A black woman and a white man become lifelong friends despite living in a town filled with racial conflict and strife. A group of top level execu tives – the best and the brightest – blunder into an avoidable decision that bankrupts their company, all because they fail to share crucial information with one another.
What causes people to become murderously vio lent? Why do some people maintain their racial preju dices throughout their lives whereas others replace their hatreds with tolerance and respect? When do peo ple work best as a group and when are they better off alone? If you find questions such as these intriguing, you should consider a career in personality and/or so cial psychology.
How do people come to be who they are? How do people think about, influence, and relate to one another? These are the broad questions that personality and social psychologists strive to answer. By exploring forces within the person (such as traits, attitudes, and goals) as well as forces within the situation (such as so cial norms and incentives), personality and social psy chologists seek to unravel the mysteries of individual and social life in areas as wide ranging as prejudice, romantic attraction, persuasion, friendship, helping, aggression, conformity, and group interaction. Al though personality psychology has traditionally fo cused on aspects of the individual, and social psycholo gy on aspects of the situation, the two perspectives are tightly interwoven in psychological explanations of human behaviour.
At some level, we are all personality and social psy chologists, observing our social worlds and trying to understand why people behave, think, and feel as they
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do. In the aftermath of schoolyard shootings we can hardly help but hypothesize answers to the many ques tions that come to mind. We do the same when we en counter less dramatic events in our everyday lives: Why is that person smiling at me? Will my profes sor be a hard grader? How might I persuade my neighbour to keep his cats off my car? But personali ty and social psychologists go beyond pondering such questions and their possible answers. If the lives of individuals and social groups are full of mystery, then personality and social psychologists are the detectives investigating these mysteries. Systematically observing and describing people’s ac tions, measuring or manipulating aspects of social situations, these sleuths use the methods of science to reveal the answers to the kinds of puzzling ques tions we each encounter every day.
Scientists in all fields distinguish between basic and applied research. Basic research in personality and social psychology tends to focus on fundamental ques tions about people and their thoughts, feelings, and be haviours. Where does an individual’s personality come from? What causes us to fall in love, hate our neigh bour, or join with others to clean our neighbourhoods? How are the psychologists of being male and female similar, how are they different, and why? How does culture shape who we become and how we interact with one another? Questions such as these aim at the very heart of human nature.
Applied research in personality and social psychol ogy focuses on more narrow areas of human life, such as health, business, and law. By employing the lessons learned from basic research, and by searching for in sights specific to particular domains, applied research often seeks to enhance the quality of our everyday lives. Personality and social psychologists contribute to areas as diverse as health, business, law, the envi ronment, education, and politics. For example, person
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ality and social psychologists have designed, imple mented, and evaluated programs to help employers hire and train better workers; to make it easier for peo ple with cancer to cope successfully with their chal lenge; to increase the likelihood that people will re duce pollution by relying on public transportation; to reduce prejudices and inter group conflict in the classroom and in international negotiations; to make computers and other technologies more user friend ly; and to make many other societal contributions as well. Of course, the distinction between basic and applied research is often a fuzzy one. One can cer tainly perform basic research in applied domains, and the findings from each type of research enrich the other. Indeed, it would be fair to say that most personality and social psychologists have both basic and applied interests.
Because personality and social psychologists com bine an understanding of human behaviour with train ing in sophisticated research methods, they have many opportunities for employment. Many psychologists teach and do research in universities and colleges, housed mostly in departments of psychology but also in departments of business, education, political science, justice studies, law, health sciences, and medicine. The research of such individuals may be based in the labo ratories, in the clinic, or in historical archives. Many personality and social psychologists are employed in the private sector as consultants, researchers, market ing directors, managers, political strategists, technol ogy designers, and so on. Personality and social psy chologists also work in government and nonprofit or ganizations, designing and evaluating policy and pro grams in education, conflict resolution, environmental protection, and the like.
Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 1998
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WISDOM AND AGE
The concept wisdom contains within it a dimension that ranges, at one end, from religion and the belief that God alone possesses the ultimate wisdom to a more mundane view that practically minded administrators, leaders, business persons, and others can acquire the necessary experience and shrewdness in the conduct of daily affairs to be termed wise. In other words, people can become wise as they ripen in a particular culture. In particular, there is the notion in our culture that wisdom must ripen, and it is therefore attributed most often to older persons.
Another dimension of wisdom relevant to its attri bution to older persons is the fact that it involves a changing balance between acting and reflecting. Young men are not regarded as likely persons to dis play wisdom because they are prone to act rather than to reflect upon the consequences of their ac tions. Thus, youth may have capacity to be wise but are too impelled to action to demonstrate this capac ity. There is little doubt from the literature on crim inal behavior and deviance that a youth is likely to act precipitously in pursuit of property and passion. The antithesis lies in wise behavior. This avenue of thought opens a door to attempts to distinguish wise and unwise behavior and between individuals re garded as wise and unwise.
Clayton (1975) defined wisdom as a construct that describes a way of thinking and an approach to life typ ical of the aged. A pilot study by Birren (1969) exam ined the strategies used by successful middle aged ex ecutives. The results indicated that as the executives matured, they noticed an increasing ability to general ize and to deal in a more detached manner or more ab stractly with information in order to reach the most ef fective solution. Erikson and Kivnick (1986) also noted the element of detachment displayed in wisdom and its
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role in transcending limits: “Wisdom is detached con cern with life itself in the face of experience, in spite of the decline of bodily and mental functions” (pp. 37 38). This research begins to link the concept of wisdom as it may be displayed in daily life to the kinds of deci sion strategies gained over time.
If individuals employ effective decision strategies and their reputation spreads, then as they grow older, they will be increasingly sought for advice. Thus, one avenue to the study of wisdom lies in the identification of persons who are sought for advice and presumably display the behavioral patterns that are characteristic of wisdom or wise people.
The elements of wisdom
Setting aside the theological question of whether one can seek wisdom through prayer and searching for God’s will, the everyday world offers the opportunity to examine whether and how some elders obtain the ad mirable quality of being wise. Our cultural background encourages us to believe that there is a ripening of qualities, a maturing and flowering in the later years that is good for the self and others. As noted earlier, the ability to be wise is often related to the ability to remain detached. However, the essence of wisdom may be a question of degree. If young men are too impul sive, cannot old men be too reticent? If young men can be foolhardy, are not the old too cautious? In addition to the ability to consider information more effectively, wisdom also requires an ability to act effectively on this information. This dimension of wisdom, the proneness to act, embraces the elements of one of the traditional fields of psychological investigation, that of drive and motivation. It can be subsumed under the older concept of conation.
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The writings on wisdom also invariably reflect the necessity to have experience. Thus, the growth of knowledge is related to the attainment of wisdom. Knowledge in itself, however, is not enough, and one must add reasoning ability or how one uses this knowledge, to the criteria for wisdom. Thus, cogni tion and cognitive style, along with conation, are important and necessary elements in the attainment of wisdom.
The remaining element of behavioral processes is the emotional or affective component. The wise person is thought to show emotional mastery such that his or her decisions are not likely to be dominated by such passions as anger or fear. However, the wise person is not entirely detached from the situation. This person will be able to maintain a reflective state of mind that generates alternative, if not novel, solutions to prob lems.
This excursion into the connotations and denota tions of the term wisdom suggests that wisdom is an optimum form of behavior that humans can exhibit and that it represents a balance of elements compound ed in such a way that, as individuals age, they may in creasingly show behavior judged to reflect wisdom and may be thought of as wise persons.
This line of reasoning supports the idea that wis dom is a multidimensional construct, a blending of cognitive, affective, and conative elements. These are familiar domains for behavioral research, and research techniques are available for assaying such traits. Not all of the contributions in this book, how ever, are necessarily organized around the concept of trait. The state of the individual is also relevant as individuals pursue an optimum or wise course of action. To this should be added the context of the problem.