Introduction to the Science of Sociology

by Robert Ezra Park; E. W. Burgess

In the list of social forces just enumerated, attitudes are, for the purposes of sociology, elementary. They are elementary because, being tendencies to act, they are expressive and communicable. They present us human motives in the only form in which we can know them objectively, namely, as behavior. Human motives become social forces only so far as they are communicable, only when they are communicated. Because attitudes have for the purposes of sociology this elementary character, it is desirable to define the term "attitude" before attempting to define its relation to the wishes and sentiments.

a) The social element defined.—What is an attitude? Attitudes are not instincts, nor appetites, nor habits, for these refer to specific tendencies to act that condition attitudes but do not define them. Attitudes are not the same as emotions or sentiments although attitudes always are emotionally toned and frequently supported by sentiments. Opinions are not attitudes. An opinion is rather a statement made to justify and make intelligible an existing attitude or bias. A wish is an inherited tendency or instinct which has been fixed by attention directed to objects, persons, or patterns of behavior, which objects then assume the character of values. An attitude is the tendency of the person to react positively or negatively to the total situation. Accordingly, attitudes may be defined as the mobilization of the will of the person.

Attitudes are as many and as varied as the situations to which they are a response. It is, of course, not to be gainsaid that instincts, appetites, habits, emotions, sentiments, opinions, and wishes are involved in and with the attitudes. Attitudes are mobilizations and organizations of the wishes with reference to definite situations. My wishes may be very positive and definite in a given situation, but my attitude may be wavering and undetermined. On the other hand, my attitude may be clearly defined in situations where my wishes are not greatly involved. It is characteristic of the so-called academic, as distinguished from the "practical" and emotional, attitude that, under its influence, the individual seeks to emphasize all the factors in the situation and thus qualifies and often weakens the will to act. The wishes enter into attitudes as components. How many, varied, ill-defined, and conflicting may be and have been the wishes that have determined at different times the attitudes and the sentiments of individuals and nations toward the issues of war and peace? The fundamental wishes, we may assume, are the same in all situations. The attitudes and sentiments, however, in which the wishes of the individual find expression are determined not merely by these wishes, but by other factors in the situation, the wishes of other individuals, for example. The desire for recognition is a permanent and universal trait of human nature, but in the case of an egocentric personality, this wish may take the form of an excessive humility or a pretentious boasting. The wish is the same but the attitudes in which it finds expression are different.

The attitudes which are elementary for sociological analysis may be resolved by psychological analysis into smaller factors so that we may think, if we choose, of attitudes as representing constellations of smaller components which we call wishes. In fact it has been one of the great contributions of psychoanalysis to our knowledge of human behavior that it has been able to show that attitudes may be analyzed into still more elementary components and that these components, like the attitudes, are involved in a process of interaction among themselves. In other words there is organization, tension, and change in the constituent elements of the attitudes. This accounts, in part, for their mutability.

b) Attitudes as behavior patterns.—If the attitude may be said to play the rôle in sociological analysis that the elementary substances play in chemical analysis, then the rôle of the wishes may be compared to that of the electrons.

The clearest way to think of attitudes is as behavior patterns or units of behavior. The two most elementary behavior patterns are the tendency to approach and the tendency to withdraw. Translated into terms of the individual organism these are tendencies to expand and to contract. As the self expands to include other selves, as in sympathy and in fellowship, there is an extension of self-feeling to the whole group. Self-consciousness passes over, in the rapport thus established, into group consciousness. In the expansive movements characteristic of individuals under the influence of crowd excitements the individual is submerged in the mass.

On the other hand, in movements of withdrawal or of recoil from other persons, characteristic of fear and embarrassment, there is a heightening of self-consciousness. The tendency to identify one's self with other selves, to lose one's self in the ecstasy of psychic union with others, is essentially a movement toward contact; while the inclination to differentiate one's self, to lead a self-sufficient existence, apart from others, is as distinctly a movement resulting in isolation.

The simplest and most fundamental types of behavior of individuals and of groups are represented in these contrasting tendencies to approach an object or to withdraw from it. If instead of thinking of these two tendencies as unrelated, they are thought of as conflicting responses to the same situation, where the tendency to approach is modified and complicated by a tendency to withdraw, we get the phenomenon of social distance. There is the tendency to approach, but not too near. There is a feeling of interest and sympathy of A for B, but only when B remains at a certain distance. Thus the Negro in the southern states is "all right in his place." The northern philanthropist is interested in the advancement of the Negro but wants him to remain in the South. At least he does not want him for a neighbor. The southern white man likes the Negro as an individual, but he is not willing to treat him as an equal. The northern white man is willing to treat the Negro as an equal but he does not want him too near. The wishes are in both cases essentially the same but the attitudes are different.

The accommodations between conflicting tendencies, so flagrantly displayed in the facts of race prejudice, are not confined to the relation of white men and black. The same mechanisms are involved in all the subordinations, exclusions, privacies, social distances, and reserves which we seek everywhere, by the subtle devices of taboo and social ritual, to maintain and defend. Where the situation calls forth rival or conflicting tendencies, the resulting attitude is likely to be an accommodation, in which what has been described as distance is the determining factor. When an accommodation takes the form of the domination of A and the submission of B, the original tendencies of approach and withdrawal are transformed into attitudes of superordination and subordination. If primary attitudes of expansion and of contraction are thought of in terms of lateral distance, then attitudes of superiority and inferiority may be charted in the vertical plane as illustrated by the following diagram: