THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF MODERNIZATION

The world is too big for us. Too much going on. Too many crimes. To much violence and excitement. Try as you will, you get behind in the race. It's an incessant strain to keep pace and still you lose ground. Science empties discoveries on you so fast that you stagger beneath them in hopeless bewilderment. Everything is high pressure. Human nature cannot endure much more.
                                            --Atlantic Journal editorial, May 16, 1833

[I] attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved ...
                                           --The Unabomber

Over the past few centuries humanity has witnessed the most dramatic and rapid cultural and social transformations ever known. Indeed, the defining characteristic of modernization is continuously accelerating change. So great has this rate become that generations now alive absorb within their lifetimes the social and technological change that traditionally occurred over the course of many centuries.

Jean Twenge's "The Age of Anxiety? Birth Cohort Change in Anxiety and Neuroticism, 1952-1993"

Gene Shackman's Social Change page

THOUGHTS ON OUR POSTMODERN TIMES

According to social scientists, owing to massive urbanization, economic globalism, multiculturalism, rapid change in transportation and communication technologies, secularization, and the accelerating growth of the knowledge industries, the developed nations of the planet are entering a new evolutionary stage in the human condition--one they oxymoronically refer to as "postmodernism." (For overview of theories and measurements of social change see Gene Shackman's site.) Supposedly fundamentally altered is the very game board of social life, with new rules, new strategies, new players, and a new realm of unintended consequences.  Such change has supposedly led to "future shock," and perhaps accounts for our current millennial angst. As far as I can tell (perhaps the obtuse descriptions of postmodernist writers reveal the essence of their message), this new condition features:

• the absence of absolute truth (hey, it's all relative!) and common moralities (with moral relativism the new norm), yielding a dissent-based ethos;
• the absence of certainty (with, in fact, the entire cultural cosmogony built upon science's uncertainty principle) and of possibilities for generalizations or general theories, leading to the evaporation of faith in science and in the idea of "progress;"
• the perceived growing irrelevancy of the past (as history supposedly provides no frame of reference for grasping the present) and future (where are the voices of optimism, such as those of Whitman and Emerson?);
• experiences being increasingly mediated by technology (see Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular)
• social symbols and codes without fixed meanings (their messages, in fact, often revealing contradictory meanings, leading to their greater irony);
• the "Disneyfication" of reality: living in a world of simulations and simulacra
• increasing personal autonomy (depicted by Christopher Lasch in Culture of Narcissism as the result of the collapse of parental authority and of "ancient control mechanisms") and the proliferation of life-style choices;
• the barrage of "factoids," graphs, charts, warning labels, etc. leads to "information overload," the evaporation of common-sense, and greater anxiety and indifference;
• and new structures of connectedness between social actors (often characterized by their relatively shallow and transitory nature) as old social forms and institutions have outlived their times.

Postmodernism represents the final break between the social and natural orders, where individuals' central motives and activities focus exclusively on social relationships rather than reacting to the life challenges posed by Mother Earth. In other words, the everyday realities preoccupying most individuals most of the time are largely man-made--often the simulated realities of various mass mediums.

Typologizing the new kinds of people produced by this new kind of society has preoccupied a number of social observers. They are described as being increasingly individualistic, other-directed, narcissistic, atomistic (Robert Putnam bowls alone rather than on a team in a league), and unable to develop intimacy with others.  Their identities are continuously in flux as they constantly move through changing relationships (as opposed to growing up and growing old with the same supporting cast). These new people go through new childhoods: at least in the middle class, a life stage largely bereft of socially-meaningful (and contributive) roles (instead of dealing with the ever-present chores of the farm--ol' Bess can't wait to be milked at 5 a.m. and 6 p.m.-- what is an urban child to do in a service-oriented economy?).  And those now "elderly" are trailblazing a newly-guaranteed life-cycle stage: old age.

Let's consider the responses to the following statement posed to a random sample of Americans in the 1993 NORC General Social survey: You have to take care of yourself first, and if you have any energy left over, then help other people. Fifteen percent of Americans strongly agreed with this statement, 47% agreed somewhat, 11% neither agreed nor disagreed, and the remaining 27% either disagreed somewhat or strongly. Among the correlations we find:

• agreement generally increases with age, from 58% of those 18-29 to 77% of those 70 years of age and older.
• agreement declines with education, from 73% of high school dropouts to 56% of those with four or more years of education.
• though the level of agreement was almost identical among those identifying themselves as being members of the working and middle classes (62%), those of the lower class were significantly more likely to agree (77%) than those of the upper class (58%).
• as expected, agreement generally declines with increasing religiosity, from 57% of those claiming to be strongly religious to 70% of those having no religious affiliation.
• and, in apparent support of the Putnam thesis, as individuals' group memberships increase the likelihood of agreeing consistently declines, from a 70% agreement rate among those belonging to no organizations to 57% of those belonging to three or more.

THE RISE OF PSYCHOCULTURE

The theme of these pages is the profound interrelationships between mind, self and society. Is it not interesting that in an era when we are witnessing the rapid shrinking of our planet due to international communications, transportation, and trade--and at a time when we are appreciating the increasing interdependencies between peoples and between ourselves and the environment--we simultaneously see a retreat into the self and the infusion of psychologically-based explanations of behavior in the social sciences? In our service-oriented economy, the soul industries--i.e., counseling, psychotherapy, industrial psychology--are among the fastest growing.  Online personality tests have become a source of entertainment.

In part, this cultural focus on the self--as opposed to its dynamic interrelationships with society--is a consequence of individualism, whose Romantic legacy views human motivations deriving from mysterious, hidden forces from within. It is also a consequence of the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis and the growing use of the mind as a mechanism of social control.  Historically it was the church that had a monopoly over "soul knowledge," the recipes for making sense out of one's identity. Religious knowledge provided coherence, continuity, and overarching comprehensibility to the meanings of socio-historical and personal-biographical events. It provided the schemata by which one's past experiences could be sedimented so as to reveal the sacred story implicit in one's biography (as Peter Berger observed, "the experience of conversion to a meaning system that is capable of ordering the scattered data of one's biography is liberating and profoundly satisfying").  However, with the increasing differentiation and specialization of individuals' life worlds, life plans became increasingly pluralized. With changes in the division of labor, the church became increasingly unable to retain its monopoly over "soul management" when challenged by scientifically-legitimated experts such as psychiatrists, job counselors, and gerontologists. The sacred-profane distinction became transformed into a healthy-unhealthy dichotomy. And with this service sector absorption of biographical recipes came the idea that any "social improvement" occurs not through institutional reconstruction but through the modification of individuals, with, as Ivan Illich observed, "health, education, personal mobility, or psychological healing ... [becoming] defined as the result of services or `treatments.'"

Signs of the time:

• In 1984, a National Institute of Mental Health study (Darrel Regier, director), found nearly one in five adult Americans having a mental disorder (a figure similar to the Surgeon General's 1999 Mental Health Report). Four years later it published another study (published in the November 1988 issue of Archives of General Psychiatry) finding that about one-third of all Americans suffer from an acute mental illness at some point in their lives.

• Each new edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) comes replete with new disorders and new sufferers. In 1917, the classification system used by the APA included only 59 forms of mental complaint. By 1952, when the first DSM appeared, the number of disorders had increased to 106; the third edition listed 292. Among the over 300 possible diagnoses detailed in the 886-page 1994 D.S.M.-IV are:
• "Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder"
• "Nicotine Dependence"
• "Disorder of Written Expression," evidenced by poor use of grammar or punctuation, sloppy paragraph organization, awful spelling, and bad handwriting.
• "Oppositional Defiant Disorder," which describes children who frequently do any four of the following eight things over a period of six months: lose their tempers, argue with adults, refuse to obey adults' rules, annoy people, blame others for their own misbehaviors, or who act toughly, angry or spiteful.
• Do you suffer from lexical anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure while reading?
• The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), the world's most widely used psychological assessment test, is increasingly employed as a job-screening tool. See Delikat and Kathawala's "Personality and Aptitude Tests: A Good Idea for Employers?"
• Between 1980 and 1987, even though the number of Americans aged 10 to 19 decreased by 11%, their numbers discharged from psychiatric units rose by 43%.
• Need a label for that curious fear of yours? Check out the Phobia List.

• At Denmark's Institute of Basic Psychiatric Research is the Department of Psychiatric Demography.
• In addition to the rise of such professions as sports psychologists and motivational speakers, add pet psychologists.
• In 1987, California announced that it was establishing a state Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility
• In sporting events, broadcasters explaining a dropped pass or a strikeout as the result of the athlete's loss of confidence, concentration, or psychological momentum.
• In 1992, Paramount paid a Los Angeles psychologist $150,000 to tailor a script "to the needs of a mass audience."

PBS' Frontline documentary "Medicating Kids," on the widespread diagnosis of and drug treatments for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) among American children

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THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF URBANIZATION

Perhaps the greatest demographic phenomenon the the past century has been the massive urbanization occurring throughout the world. Nearly nine out of ten Americans now live within an urban context, one-half within just thirty-seven metropolitan areas. Within these man-made environments new ways of thinking and acting have evolved.

What are the social psychological effects of living in urban milieus? Cities represent sizable populations, high densities, and considerable heterogeneity of residents. They are places that intensify life's stimulations (hence their attractive power on artists and intellectuals) and that deindividualize social interactions. Cities are also places that supposedly liberalize (or relativize) individuals' moral outlooks. They are also places, as Ferdinand Töennies observed in the 1880s, of weakened kinship ties, contractual relationships, extreme individualism, and where traditional bonds of shared sentiments and religious faith are replaced by monetary obsessions.

Let's investigate the supposed liberalizing effects of urbanization: the impact of where one was living at age 16 on attitudes toward premarital sex. As can be seen, the more urban individuals' roots the less likely they believe that premarital sex is always wrong, even when their education is controlled for? But have we really demonstrated an environmental effect on moral outlooks? Consider the other factors that might account for these differences:

• older people are more likely to say premarital sex is always wrong and older people are more likely to have been raised on farms and in rural areas;
• older people are more likely to be strongly religious, and the more strongly religious one is the more likely one believes that premarital sex is always wrong;
• those from farms are more likely to be strongly religious than those from large cities and their suburbs, and the more religious one is the more likely one believes that premarital sex is always wrong.

Summarized below is the relationship between where one was raised and attitudes toward premarital sex both in raw percentages and when the data is standardized controlling for sex, age, religiosity, and education.

WHERE LIVED WHEN 16	% SAYING PREMARITAL SEX ALWAYS WRONG (RAW)	% ALWAYS WRONG (STD.)
FARM	46%	36%
RURAL	28%	29%
< 50K	27%	27%
50-250K	23%	25%
SUBURB	16%	22%
250K+	20.5%	21%

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SCIENTIFIC MENTALITIES

Among the supposed hallmarks of the modern mind is the reliance on scientific ways of knowing whereby fiction can be separated from fact.

In this supposedly scientifically enlightened era, the results of a basic science survey, reported in 1996 by the National Science Foundation (n=2,006) are most intriguing. Less than 50 percent of American adults understand that the Earth annually orbits the sun, only one in five could explain what DNA is, and but 9 percent knew what a molecule is. Nevertheless, Americans respect scientists and doctors more than most other professionals; roughly 40 percent of those surveyed expressed high confidence for scientists and medical workers.

Let's examine the relationship between Americans' scientific knowledge and their confidence in the leadership of the scientific establishment. To gauge scientific knowledge, we here focus on what probably is the best-supported scientific theory: the theory of evolution. In 1993, the NORC General Social Survey included Americans' responses to the following statements (with percent falling into each category of response):

• FITSURVIVE: Nature is really a fierce struggle for survival of the fittest. [Do you] strongly agree (8%), agree (54.7%), neither agree nor disagree (22.6%), disagree (12.3%), strongly disagree (2.1%).
• HUMANEVOL: Human beings developed from earlier species of animals. [Do you think this is] definitely true (15.2%), probably true (33%), probably not true (14.8%), definitely not true (37%).
• CONSCI: I am going to name some institutions in this country. As far as the people running the scientific community are concerned, would you say you have a great deal of confidence (41.1%), only some confidence(51.6%), or hardly any confidence at all (7.4%) in them?

It is interesting to note that while more than six out of ten American adults either agree or strongly agree that nature's game is the survival of the fittest, more than half disagree that humans evolved from earlier species. This ambivalence toward human origins is evident in the weak relationship between FITSURVIVE and HUMANEVOL: of those agreeing in the survival of the fittest, 51% believe it is definitely or probably true that humans evolved from earlier species, compared to 44% of those disagreeing or neither agreeing or disagreeing with FITSURVIVE.

Of the two measures of belief in the theory of evolution, HUMANEVOL has the stronger relationship with confidence in scientific leadership: those believing (either definitely or probably) that humans developed from earlier species are 13.5 percentage points (or 40 percent) more likely to have a great deal of confidence in scientific leadership (47.1% so having) than those not believing (of whom 33.6% have high confidence).

Examining this HUMANEVOL-CONSCI relationship further we find that this percentage difference (which, again, is 13.5% in total) in high confidence among believers versus nonbelievers in human evolution:

• generally increases with education, from 2% among high school dropouts to 22% among those with four or more years of college;
• is greatest among those in their 60s (23.6%) and least among those 18-29 years of age (4.2%);
• is greater among Protestants (15.7%) than among Catholics (7.3%) or those with no religious affiliation (8.4%);
• and increases the more liberal one is, from a difference of 10.9% among conservatives, to 15% for moderates, to 16% among liberals.

Click here for further analyses of Americans' attitudes toward science and their concerns about global warming.

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