Investigation Of The Factors Influencing Human Behavior
I decided to take it upon myself to observe and record some of the behavior I’ve seen in the past few days in myself and others. Operating from Elliot Aronson’s first law “people who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy, ” I decided to treat people as a social psychologist would: taking an attitude that makes me more as a passive observer than someone who is actively trying to influence his environment. However, I first had to begin from my own psychology – how do I feel about my own actions?
My first hypothesis was that human beings are, first and foremost, social creatures. Their sense of ‘self’ derives itself from the social mass. This much as been proven repeatedly in social psychology, but I would go as far as to say that without a ‘society’ there would be no individual; without something to differentiate oneself with, one would not be able to see oneself as a person. This line of thinking brings me back to my childhood. I at times felt anxious, even socially afraid of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. This much is natural, but I failed to understand that my anxiety was because of my own desire to make friends. Fundamentally, my complexes in my youth were spurred by my social environment. And in this regard, I consider my own psychological pathologies – many of which remain with me – to be a product from where and with who I was raised. This is a fundamental aspect of social psychology but it worth re-investigating since I had not yet fully applied it to my own experiences until recently.
Upon further investigation, I found that similar complexes emerged in my friends growing up, molded by their social environments. Aronson is keen on quoting Aristotle’s Politics in his description of the social necessity of man. As quoted by Aronson, “anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god”. When then, do we make of the countless lonely individuals today? – the so-called “drop outs” of society, of who there are many and are only growing? I know individuals in my life who find themselves confined to their screens and seldom ever go out. Still, others I also know who feel that they are better suited to be alone and have accommodated themselves towards this reality. All of this comes to as strange, but I have noticed in these individuals a fractured ego. They announce their isolation seemingly as a source of pride, perhaps even to hide their own longing for others. However, I would not go as far as to say that individuals need others to survive, but I have a hard time grasping how one can live without others. The disproportionate number of individuals alone, sometimes without volition, would preposterously mean that a greater proportion of ourselves are now either beasts or gods. This current day and age has brought with it new social pathologies spurred by the internet and our dependency to it. Therefore, although Aronson’s findings are still correct fundamentally, they were written during a time before this new social phenomenon.
After all, let’s face it: the internet has created a whole slew of new complexes, ones which we have barely even begun to understand. The internet has left us scrambling for more than what Elliot Aronson writes about. Aronson writes of what drives people to “madness” – what, for example, was the psychology of killing others as during the Kent State shooting? Ultimately, it is a question, in some cases, of authority. For “permissiveness granted by authority can give those under that authority the impression that they possess more power than they had”. This has been the case repeatedly. Even if we look at the highest levels of power, oftentimes power seems to grant one a feeling that they are sometimes above morality. Even worse is the commonly-cited excuse that “I was just following orders. ” The dynamic of my own friend groups is usually in this same vein. Of course, there are some more liked than others. Although I have been the kind of individual to want to level the dynamic between friends, such inequalities oftentimes occur because people have preferences.
My question is: how does this affect their impression of themselves? Given that we live in a time of constant, instant validation online, and that so many crave it, what can we say about this same authority from others that gives us our sense of self online? The most important element that Aronson seems to point out repeatedly is the importance of self-actualization. I think to my own life: ultimately, we want to be liked. However, we want to also be appreciated for the hard work we do. Part of feeling ‘comfortable’ with ourselves and our egos is understanding our relation to others. This is why in my own life I have gone a long time without sometimes feeling this element of self-actualization. However, the realities of social media and constant communication has rendered us craving the fundamental aspects of human relationships that were once relegated to person-to-person interactions.
Now, they come at the click of a button. The culture of instant gratification has created problems with our own ego and self-actualization. I have felt it and so have all my friends: we are a generation who grew up right at the beginning of this generational change. And it seems obvious to me that it has led to a new category of social diseases, of isolation and narcissism, and of extreme dissonance. Aronson helps us to understand the social mass in relation to the individual. However, I have to ask: how can we possibly begin to understand this new, digital social mass in relation to ourselves?
