Historical Summary
The social sciences are fundamentally concerned with relationships between individuals and individuals, individuals and groups, and groups and other groups. Language, gossip, customs, codes, institutions, organizations, governments, professions, etc., are concerned with the mediation of these relationships.
The central problem in the general life process is one of adjustment, and the forms of adjustive effort are "behavior." In a human as distinguished from an animal society the problem of the adjustments of individuals and groups is related to a cultural situation, that is, one in which a body of values has been accumulated and preserved (mainly through the instrumentality of language) in the form of institutions, mores, and codes, together with a reinforcing set of attitudes or tendencies to act in conformity with prescribed behavior patterns or norms. The attitudes and values, or, we may say, the attitudes toward values, which reflect the personality of the individual are the result of a process of conditioning by the influences of the cultural milieu, eventuating in a body of habits.
The reaction of different individuals in the same culture to identical cultural influences will depend partly on their different trains of experience and partly on their biochemical constitutions and unlearned psychological endowments. Local, regional, nationalistic and racial groups are in turn conditioned, in the formation of their behavior patterns and habits, by their several trains of experience and conceivably by their particular biochemical and psychological constitutions.
From this standpoint the problems of individual and group adjustment involve study of the following factors:
1. The culture situations to which the individual is to make adjustments (studies of cultures).
2. The devices and instrumentalities for adjusting the individual to the cultural situations (social organization and education).
3. The capacity and opportunity of the individual to be adjusted (constitutional factors, incentives, social position).
4. The failures of adaptation, meaning: for the individual, dependency, vagrancy, crime, alcoholism, drug addiction, psychoneurosis, etc.; and for the group, decline, subordination, extermination.
5. Changes in cultural situations (e.g., internal mobility of populations, urbanization, migration, invasion, colonization, the dissemination of cultural traits, race prejudice, technological advance, shifting of occupation, changes in attitudes and values, etc.) requiring continuous readjustment of individuals and reorganization of culture and learning, and involving questions of the participation of individuals and groups in promoting and directing cultural change.
In this connection it is a frequent experience that the problems of a given situation are soluble only by going outside that immediate situation. Thus the widest and seemingly most irrelevant excursion from human situations is the exploration of the cosmic universe, but the hypothesis-forming implications of this research for our own material universe have been pointed out by an eminent astronomer: