Understanding group behavior : A discussion guide / Harry L. Miller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Miller, Harry L., 1920- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Social psychology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (iii, 94 pages)

Other Title:

Understanding group behavior

Place of Publication:

Chicago, Illinois : The Center for the Study of Liberal Education for Adults, 1953.

Summary:

"Every person is born into and spends most of his life living in interaction with other people in groups of varying size and importance to him. This course is built upon a belief in the importance of that fact for an understanding of human behavior. It would be interesting to measure the importance of such interaction with groups by rearing a child in isolation, but an experiment of this sort, obviously, would be "inhuman." The use of this term itself suggests the value placed on contact with other people. There is occasional evidence, however, of the results of total isolation from human contact. Scientific attention to the influence of these groups on the individual, however, is of relatively recent origin. More recently it has been suggested that behavior must always be considered in relation to the particular field or environment in which it takes place, that there are no sharp boundaries between the person and the environment with which he interacts. As the influence of society on behavior became clearer to psychologists, the study of individual behavior and personality as they operate in social situations was marked off as a separate area, called social psychology, from which most of the material for this course was taken. The line which divides individual from social psychology is a reasonable one in a number of ways. The study of how people learn, for example, can be carried on in the laboratory by asking subjects to memorize nonsense syllables and noting the differences and range of learning. This, clearly, is very different from an inquiry into how a child, afraid of his classroom teacher, more shabbily dressed than his classmates, interested in tinkering with motors, learns about the fall of Rome. All of these psychological approaches, and many others, contribute valuable material and ideas which must be seriously considered by the student who enters the field professionally. This course does not propose to train people to be psychologists and is therefore able to cut off a segment of the large, complex, and varied study of human behavior. Each unit of this course is based on a reading assignment and some aids to the student. The readings often contain terms which have a technical meaning for psychologists; such terms are defined in the study guide. Where it seemed desirable a brief outline of the readings is given to help the student organize his thinking about them. And, finally, several problems for discussion are outlined"-- Introduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

Notes:

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