Abstract
The fact that psychological phenomena are sociohistorical does not preclude the existence of universal features. However, the nature of these universals is quite different from the way they are ordinarily construed by mainstream psychologists. Universals are ordinarily conceived as a separate class of phenomena from variable features, originating in psychobiological properties of the human organism in contrast to variations which reflect socially mediated experience. Sociohistorical psychology rejects this dichotomy and argues that universal features of psychological phenomena have a social basis just as variations do. The social basis of psychological universals lies in common features of social life. What Rosaldo said about emotions—that they are similar to the extent that societies are alike—holds true for all psychological phenomena. Whereas socially relative aspects of psychology reflect differences in social life, psychological universals reflect uniformities of social existence. Some of these commonalities were described in Chapter 1 where universal aspects of social existence such as division of labor, social organization, cooperation, language, and tool use were shown to generate universal aspects of psychology such as symbolization, thought, logic, self-concept, mnenomic strategies for remembering information, volition, self-control, a broad sensitivity to things, and comprehension of things’ essential features and interrelationships which are invisible to sense experience.
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Notes
Since universal features of psychological phenomena are devoid of form and content, they cannot be governed by meaningful laws. There cannot be universal laws governing perception, memory, language, cognition, or emotions because there is nothing specific to govern on the universal level. The abstract features that comprise the universal level are only amenable to extremely general descriptions such as were found in Chapter 1 above. But such descriptions are far from laws. Laws can only apply to concrete psychological phenomena and are therefore historically variable, not universal.
For instance, to establish general stages of psychological development, developmental psychologists must: consider separately the steps by which each of the relevant behavioral capacities—for bodily control, sequential behavior, symbolization, internalization, problem solving, etc—is elicited and developed in the course of a child’s life, and look to see in what different patterns all those various capacities are associated at one point or another in life. Only then will it be time to select ‘milestones,’ so as to define general’ stages’ of psychological development, and, even then, there will be no guarantee that the’ stages’ relevant to one psychological enquiry will do more than rough justice to other psychological changes—still less to the overall character of psychological development as a whole—if there is such a thing. (Toulmin, 1971, p. 53) Now the path from the specific to the general is not linear. One does not suspend speculation about the general until after numerous specifics have been investigated. Instead, one properly uses the local instance to surmise possible generalizations, and then tests these hypothetical generalizations against additional specific examples. In Berry’s (1989) words, an “emic” (specific example) generates an “imposed etic” (an asserted generalization) which is then tested against other emics to establish a “derived etic” (a true universal which derives from particulars).
It is, of course, important to avoid the opposite mistake of assuming a particular social basis when a more general basis really underlies a psychological function. Buck-Morss (1975) commits this error in interpreting Piagetian formal operations as bourgeois thinking. Actually, as Buss (1979, chap. 9) points out, formal operations are employed by people in noncapitalist societies (ancient Greece, the Soviet Union, and China, to name a few) which means that they must at least reflect formal social characteristics, and possibly even abstract social features as described in Chapter 1. Buck-Morss is wrong on another point, namely her characterization of formal operations as intrinsically reified and depersonalized. However much this may be true in bourgeois society which uses formal operations in certain ways for certain ends, formal operations are not necessarily reified. Even in capitalist society such diverse thinkers as Marx and Husserl (1970) have used abstractions beneficently because they have remembered the human, social basis of their abstractions. Formal operations have a far greater capacity of generating profound, comprehensive, flexible thinking than “concrete operations” do. As such they have far greater potential for humanitarian purposes. Whether this potential is realized is a social question.
The lure of “basic” emotions is so strong that Ekman (1972), after acknowledging that most of the elicitors and expressions (“display rules”) of emotions are socially learned and variable, has avoided researching this issue and has spent his career in pursuit of a few postulated universal facial expressions. (His success is critically evaluated in Ratner, 1989a.) Actually, identifying universal as basic is quite arbitrary. As Ortony et al. (1988, p. 25) and Ortony and Turner (1990) point out in their critique of basic emotions, toenails are universal among humans but are hardly anatomically basic. Moreover, “basic” can equally be identified with other characteristics that are unrelated to universality. “Basic emotion” has been used to denote primary, in the sense that it is a building block for other emotions. (Sometimes the basic emotions are posited as adding together to form the derivative emotion, sometimes they are posited as compounding into a new whole qualitatively different from the ingredients.) And “basic” has also been used to refer to emotions that appear chronologically early in ontogenetic development. These competing uses of “basic” undermine its identification with “universal.” But they also undermine each other’s claim to be the true meaning of basic. Furthermore, no logical justification is provided for calling any of these meanings basic. Just as universal is not necessarily basic, neither is the early appearance of an emotion. Initial emotions may be temporary, or insignificant for later life, thus not basic at all. Compounding the ambiguity of the term “basic emotion” is the lack of agreement as to which emotions are, in fact, basic. Some psychologists posit only two basic emotions (Mowrer: pleasure and pain), others posit three (Watson: fear, love, rage), while others posit a large number (Arnold: anger, aversion, courage, defection, desire, despair, fear, hate, hope, love, sadness). Psychologists have no monopoly on the penchant for human universals. Mead and Geertz criticize this proclivity among anthropologists as well. Geertz (1973, chap. 2) complains of anthropologists’ preoccupation with a metaphysical entity, “Man,” in the interests of which empirical “man” is sacrificed. And Mead (1963) complains of anthropologists’ tendency to treat childhood, youth, maturity, and old age as biologically defined statuses, apart from the socially variable character that these have in different cultures.
Portraying Piaget as a naturalist should not slight his acknowledgement that cognitive growth requires physical and social stimulation. This is why Piaget rejects the idea that logic is innate. However this concession to experience does not compromise Piaget’s essential naturalism. For experience only acts to trigger off endemic determinants of growth. Experience functions as a general threshold in the sense that it must reach a minimal intensity in order to elicit cognitive development. However, endemic mechanisms stipulate the path that development takes. Experience has no such specific effect. Indeed, any environment that is minimally stimulating is sufficient to elicit cognitive growth. This relationship is analogous to—and inspired by—that of a tree and its environment. While the conditions must provide at least a minimum of nourishment for the tree to grow, and while conditions affect the eventual size of the tree, what the tree will become and its path of development are internally determined. This characterization of Piaget’s theory as quasi-interactionist, at best, is supported by Rosenthal and Zimmerman (1978) who state: We [have] characterized Piagetian and other, closely related structural positions such as Kohlberg’s view of moral development as basically nativistic, a conclusion drawn by other writers (e.g., Baldwin; Bruner, Olver, & Greenfield). Piagetians often object to such labels, claiming that their theory is interactional, and adding, that just as experience is interpreted in light of existing structures, new events can also reorganize cognition. However, the impact of experience is delimited by the child’s prevailing logic, whose scope, in turn, is rooted in an assumed sequence of biological development. Furth, a respected spokesman, is clear on this point: The form of the child’s mental structure is neither induced by nor gradually evolves from the organization of experienced events; rather, it has biological origins. Piaget himself raised the same issue by denying that the logical features of thought can arise from experience.... Although new events can qualify structural content, the sequence of mental development is assumed to be invariant and irreversible. Further, a child at one developmental stage should not profit from, and may actively resist, guidance appropriate to a later stage, (p. 149) Glick similarly notes that “Piaget has preserved the notion of organism-environment interaction as a central aspect of his account of development, but has given it the sort of twist necessary to meet the idealist requirement” (Glick in Broughton et al., 1981, p. 160). That is to say, “What Piaget was really seeking was a conception of the environment and the organism that, in a necessary interaction, would yield not random, not novel, but essentially what you might call ‘fated’ structures” (ibid., p. 171). Kitchener (1986, p. 80) is thus correct in stating that for Piaget cognitive development is a priori in the sense of being an inevitable outcome for all individuals. Such a universal outcome rests on endemic proclivities which structure cognitive development equally in everyone (Elbers, 1986, p. 382).
Not all psychologists consider universals to include form rather than content. In a few cases, specific content is regarded as universal. Focal colors, as described by Berlin and Kay and by Rosch are perhaps the most obvious example. Focal colors are specific hues and saturations that are taken as being universally salient by virtue of a natural sensitivity on the part of visual sense receptors. Since such universals of content are exceptional in psychological theory, they will not occupy our attention here. They will be discussed in the following section.
Marx (1973, pp. 85ff.) provides a classic example from economics of how universal and particular must be distinguished, and the danger of collapsing the distinction. Discussing production, he says that production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction insofar as it really brings out the common element. A general feature of production is utilizing instruments. Capitalism as a particular mode of production partakes of this general element and certainly employs instruments. However, it is absurd to conclude that capitalism is a universal, natural mode of production just because it includes this general facet. While this one facet of capitalism is universal, the entirety of the capitalist mode of production, which surrounds this common feature with numerous particular ones, is definitely sociohistorical. Capitalism only appears to be eternal if we leave out just the specific quality which alone makes “instrument of production” into capital. Throughout his writings, Marx painstakingly exposed false universalizing of culturally specific practices. One of his most trenchant critiques, as relevant today as it was in his time, condemns Hegel for universalizing alienation, when in fact alienation is peculiar to class society, and is presumably absent from classless society. Hegel conflates the truly universal human practice of objectifying activity into stable forms (artifacts, social institutions) with the historically specific alienation of people from control over those forms. This mistaken identification of objectification (Vergegenstaendlichung) and alienation (Entausserung) assumes that all objectification is intrinsically alienated. Alienation can therefore never be eliminated short of ceasing to engage in productive activity altogether. R.D. Laing (1969, p. 58) has indicated that Marx’s distinction between abstract universals and variable particulars is useful for understanding psychopathology: “Marx said: under all circumstances a Negro has a black skin but only under certain socio-economic conditions is he a slave. Under all circumstances a man may get stuck, lose himself, and have to turn round and go back a long way to find himself. Only under certain socio-economic conditions will he suffer from schizophrenia.” The same holds for emotions: People everywhere experience frustration; however, only under certain socioeconomic conditions will they become angry, depressed, or violent. The tendency to overgeneralize capitalism as a universal system of production is paralleled by the tendency to overgeneralize schizophrenia as a universal pathology, and anger or depression as universal emotions.
The real content that is being decided may often supercede calculations of profit and loss even within commercial societies. The immorality of a crime may outweigh the personal gain that could accrue from committing it. Thus, overlooking the social values and moral complexities which individuals are deciding about, and recasting these as simple quantities of profit and loss, does not even fully tap the decision-making process of individuals in Western society (Billig et al., 1988, pp. 8-15). Decision-making, like all psychological phenomena, is a function of concrete social values and practices; it does not obey abstract psychological laws.
Greenfield and Bruner also associate animism with individualistic societies and realism with collective societies. This appears to be untrue in view of the fact that the Manus are individualistic (cf. Fromm, 1973, pp. 199-200) as are lower-class Italian children. Evidently, it is the extent of indulgence and protection that children receive, regardless of individualism or collectivism, that engenders animistic thinking.
Fraiberg (1977, chap. 11) reports that blind children have great difficulty employing self-referential pronouns and they persist in referring to themselves with third-party terms which others use to address them. Blind three-year-olds typically refer to themselves as “her” or “him” and ask people to “give it to her” when they want something for themselves. And this deficiency persists into the school years for many blind children. Interestingly, blind children also have difficulty fantasizing or pretending to be different from their real behavior. They also have difficulty pretending that dolls or toys are different from their real, everyday reality.
Henle (1942) used two kinds of stimuli which were presented normally and in reversed form. Letters that were familiar to subjects were recognized more frequently than their mirror reversals (79% vs. 58%). In contrast, when unfamiliar Chinese and Arabic characters were used as stimuli, characters presented normally were not more readily perceived than their reversed images. Since a letter’s closure and other organizational forms remain the same whether it is observed “normally” or reversed, and regardless of whether the character is familiar or not, Gestalt theory would predict no difference in identifiability among any of the characters. Yet familiarity obviously did enhance identifiability of “normally” presented, familiar English letters.
In their effort to rule out the influence of experience on perception, Gestalt psychologists have presented the famous Gottschaldt figures hundreds of times to subjects in order to induce familiarity. The simple figure was then embedded within a larger, complex figure where it was difficult to perceive. Gestalt experimentalists explained the subjects’ failure to discern the embedded simple figure as caused by perceptual laws which naturally led the perceivers to focus on the good form of the larger, complex figure and to override the hundreds of encounters with the smaller, familiar, but “unnatural” one. However, such a formulation is gratuitous. An experiential theory readily explains the results by acknowledging that the smaller figure was difficult to perceive simply because it was fused into the larger figure, thereby losing any recognizability and wholeness. Familiarity does not ensure that an object will be recognized under any and all conditions. Camouflaged, even the most familiar object will be difficult to discern. Familiarity with objects not so disguised does sensitize subjects to perceive them in novel circumstances (Braly, 1933).
My analysis of Rosch contrasts with Lakoff s contention that she significantly modified her notion of prototypes. I agree with him, however, in lamenting the fact that Rosch’s original position has become the model for much of cognitive psychology (Lakoff, 1987, p. 137).
Documenting universal cognitive competence requires penetrating and systematic observation. Meaningful psychological activity in a variety of situations must be compared. Isolated, circumscribed responses provide no indication of cognitive processes or competence. Cole’s argument for universal cognitive competence is unconvincing because he appeals to such responses. The same difficulty plagues Shweder and his colleagues’ attempt at proving universal decontextualized thinking. Working in the area of personality attribution, Shweder and Bourne (1984) and Miller (1984) originally found that, under free instructions to describe a friend, Indians’ attributions were more particularistic than Americans’: Americans used abstract attributes such as friendly, intelligent, arrogant, whereas Indians employed context-bound descriptions such as, “She brings cake to my family on festival days.” However, under prodding, the Indians were able to combine their particular descriptions into more abstract attributions. The authors conclude that the Indians’ particularistic attributions are therefore not due to their lack of abstract thinking. Their attributions are simply the product of certain cultural conceptions of people that differ from Western conceptions. Indians and American cognitive processes are similar although the products differ. Now, the fact that Indians can be prodded to abstract categorizing in a single experiment indicates that they are capable of some abstract thinking, but it does not prove that their abstract thinking is the same as ours. True similarity of performance and competence is only revealed over a range of situations (a social norm of reaction, so to speak); it is never evident in isolated instances. A competence to think in a certain manner that is restricted to a simple situation is quite different from that competence which can function in diverse, complex circumstances. Since Shweder failed to establish the distribution of circumstances in which Indians employed abstract thought, his pronouncement of cross-cultural equivalence is presumptuous. Shweder’s experimental methodology also makes it difficult to ascertain the abstractness of the Indian’s attributions. Descriptions of personality were decomposed into simple subject-predicate-object units and compared for frequency of general versus situation-bound traits (Shweder 8c Bourne, 1984, p. 174; cf. Miller 1984, p. 965, who employed the same method). Such bare responses obscure the subjects’ meaning and make any psychological interpretation hazardous. Margaret Mead (1963) trenchantly criticized generalizations that are contrived from decontextualized observations and which overlook substantial social differences in phenomena. She attributed this error, in part, to premature quantification which strips events from their historical contexts in order to measure them. Unfortunately, this critique applies to Shweder’s study. It seems that Shweder has fallen into the same error that plagues his antagonists, namely, drawing conclusions about competence from limited instances of performance. Whereas his antagonists overgeneralize from differences in performance to conclusions about differences in competence, Shweder overgeneralizes from apparently similar performances to universal competence.
Shweder’s universalism also contradicts his relativistic view of psychological processes. For instance, he distinguishes between primary, universal processes and secondary, socially variable products just as the universalist Piaget does. In fact, Shweder may be more of a universalist than Piaget insofar as he argues for a high degree of similarity between 5-year-old children and adults. Congruent with his belief in a universal competence which makes any and all psychological phenomena available to every individual, Shweder rejects Piaget’s developmentalism and contends that 5-year-old children already possess adult-type mental structures (Shweder & LeVine, 1984, p. 50). Concurring with Cole and Bruner’s (1971, p. 874) thesis that ontological development involves the transfer of childhood skills into adulthood, rather than creating new skills, Shweder (1982) contends that cognitive differences between children and adults are quantitative, not qualitative. Shweder attacks Piaget’s distinction between cognitive processes among age groups and he argues in favor of a general competence that takes different forms in different situations: “By varying the content of a task it is possible to elicit either preoperational thinking from a college-educated adult or formal operational thinking from a four year old” (Shweder, 1982, p. 357). Shweder’s critique of Piaget’s developmentalism thus has the ulterior purpose of establishing an even more absolute universalism. In contrast to Harris and Heelas (1979) who emphasize the manner in which social conditions lead to truly different cognitive processes, Shweder, in his effort to banish fundamental cognitive differences, denies the influence of conditions such as schooling and class on cognitive processes (Shweder, 1982, p. 360; J. Miller, 1984, p. 975). He acknowledges their effect on concepts, purposes, and interests, but not on fundamental processes. Regardless of age, culture, or conditions, then, all of us are essentially identical, not simply in our abstract humanness, but in our concrete psychological functions.
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Ratner, C. (1991). Psychological Universals, True and False. In: Vygotsky’s Sociohistorical Psychology and its Contemporary Applications. Cognition and Language. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2614-2_4
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