5. What is meant by the phrase, exchange theory? Show how the concepts of reward and punishment are intrinsic to the theory?

The basic idea behind exchange theory is really very simple. It is that each person involved in social interaction metes out rewards or punishments to the other participants and he receives rewards or punishments from them in turn. Thus, people exchange rewards or punishments or both. To illustrate, consider a kind of interaction that occurs frequently between professor and student. The student may initiate the interaction by seeking out the professor, either for basic information or for clarification of some point discussed in class. The professor reacts to the student's behavior by providing the desired- information. The professor and the student have interacted, leading to an exchange of rewards. The student is rewarded by receiving the needed assistance, and the professor is rewarded by having his superior knowledge acknowledged. They have exchanged help and approval.

Some interaction involves punishments rather than rewards. The most obvious situation where punishment is involved is in conflict situations. One individual strikes, verbally or physically, at another. The other strikes back. Each tries to inflict greater hurt than he receives. The interaction comes to a halt when one has clearly defeated the other.

Such obviously punishing interaction is usually of short duration because the pain that each participant experiences is likely to be more of a deterrent than the backhanded satisfaction of inflicting greater pain upon one's adversary is to be a sufficient reward. The punishing is likely to persist only when neither participant has any meaningful options or when both participants believe that they have the opportunity to achieve victory.

Many situations involve combinations of rewards and punishments, or the exchange of rewards for punishments. One individual, for example, may threaten the other with punishment if the second individual does not prefer help to the first. To return to the professor-student illustration, the student may indicate to the professor that he will not major in the professor's field unless the professor helps him to perform at a satisfactory level.

6. Explain the statement 'cultures grow selectively.'

Any one date that might be established as the beginning of human culture would be extremely arbitrary. Unmistakably, tools existed half a million years ago and they might be considerably older than that. If, for purposes of convenience, we say that culture is 500,000 years old, it still is difficult to appreciate the length of the period during which it has grown and how much of what we customarily think of as culture today has appeared in the very recent past.

One dramatic way of representing the growth of culture over time is to select an arbitrary starting date and to divide man's experience from that point into "lifetimes". Alvin Toffler, for example, has divided the last 50,000 years of experience into 62-year lifetimes, placing man currently in his 800th lifetime.

According to this chronology, 650 lifetimes were spent in caves. Written language has existed only for the last 70 lifetimes, and the printed word has been widely available only for the last 6. The electric motor has existed for only 2 lifetimes. Television, airplanes, automobiles, and nuclear weapons all developed within the 800th lifetime. Ninety per cent of all of the scientists who have ever existed are alive during this lifetime.

All of modern technology has developed in less than 1/2500th of the total time it has taken for human culture to reach its present level of development. This means, of course, that, in the beginning, the growth of culture was exceedingly slow and only recently has culture begun to change rapidly. The explanation for this situation is to be found in the fact that culture grows in two ways; through invention of new traits within the culture, or through diffusion of new traits from outside the culture.