The Group and the Person
THE time is passing, fortunately, when everyone felt it a point of honour to consider himself a self-made man. We are beginning to observe how deeply we are influenced by the men and women around us, by our social conditions, and our common habits of thought. It becomes impossible to treat ourselves as if we were quite detachable from our milieu. Our surroundings have entered into us at every moment of our lives, and without them our personalities would have no meaning. Personality is our whole system of relations with others ; to a great degree, therefore, it is a social product.
In these studies from the University of Chicago more than a score of writers deal, in different aspects, with the effects of communal life on personality. Professor C. H. Cooley, who contributes a paper on the " Study of Small Institutions," has written elsewhere :—
" We are dependent for moral health upon intimate association with a group of some sort, usually consisting of family, neighbours, and other friends. It is the interchange of ideas and feelings with this group, and a constant sense of its opinion, that make standards of right and wrong seem real to us."
The spirit of a community, in all the interactions of life and culture, reflects itself inevitably in the ideals and conduct of all its citizens. This truth has been given an almost epigrammatic turn in the definition of personality as the " subjective aspect of culture."
It is impossible to review adequately all the contributions to this volume, but the approach which they share may be illustrated from two of the papers. Mr. Norman S. Hayner gives an extremely interesting study of the effect on person- ality of hotel life. The statistical surveys which he has organized do not lead to surprising results ; they confirm what we might expect. It is particularly valuable, however, to have the social implications of these surveys so clearly stated.
Hotel life reduces group-influence to a minimum. The cultural restraints of acquaintance and intimacy are lacking, and where there is a migratory hotel population, the general moral will tend to break down. Among the heaviest offenders in stealing hotel property are " men and women who in their own communities command respect, but who, on going to a hotel, take a ' moral holiday.' " Prohibitionists are caught drunk : moral reformers are discovered in the most com- promising situations. How' gravely the ordinary standards of honesty are lowered may be seen in the fact that the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York loses two thousand face_ towels and three hundred bath towels every month. In the large
modem hotels even the relations of the hotel staff have becoine completely depersonalized. The relation of bell-boy and waiter with the guests is conditioned only by the size of the tip which may 'be expected.
Another aspect of the same problem is given in Mr. Clifford Shitieg short contribution on juvenile delinquency. A study of the boys brought before the courts of Chicago reveals many interesting facts. Even crime is not so much an indi- vidual as a social reaction 91 per cent. of cases of theft involve two Or 'more boys. The social nature of crime is still further marked When we observe that in certain districts of ChiCago crime 'May almbigt be called the current morality. In the areas -round the central business district, 37 per cent. of all the boys between ten and sixteen years of age were charged with offences in the year 1926. It is inthese areas, of course, that there are least ties of hOme and family. The rate of delinquency decreases almost directly with the increase in the proportion Of families owning honies.
What issues most 'clearly fiorn these studies is the fact that 'the multiplicity and degree of intimacy of social contacts is thegreateit single factcir contributing to a valuable person- ality. The'. Cultural inheritance of any group is its most webbing, though its most pervasive and least definable, posSession.. Modern industrialism brings new dangers to our social 'structure. The " mobility of labour " and the uprooting of individuals from family conditions have produced grave discirgaiiiiation ; and we have not yet created new forms of social contact to take the place of the old influences.
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