Discussion: The group fallacy in relation to culture.

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Abstract
Presents a commentary on F. C. Bartlett's book Psychology and Primitive Culture (New York: Macmillan Co., 1923). Social psychologists who are laboring to assert the claims of the group as a fundamental condition of social behavior will welcome Mr. Bartlett's analysis of primitive culture and its application to the problem of modern society. The current author examines the concept of "group difference tendencies," and how they exert a control upon the individual. To say that group difference tendencies exert a control upon the individual is only to say in an inexact manner that other individuals, through mechanisms of learning and control understood by the behavior psychologist, so stimulate the individual in question that his original responses become modified in conformity with behavior patterns common to the group. There are involved in this three questions: two of them are of an explanatory nature, and one is descriptive. To consider the explanatory questions first, we may ask (1) what were the origin and nature of development of the group difference tendencies (a common response pattern in others that stimulates and modifies the individual)--how, that is, can we explain institutional and cultural behavior; and (2) given such common behavior just how does it operate as a cause in helping to determine the conduct of the individual? The descriptive question (3), which may be stated rather as a viewpoint, is as follows: Disregarding process of cause and effect in the sense understood by natural science, we may trace, as it were, the "influence" of the culture of the group, the culture, that is, either of contemporary or ancestral group life, upon the mental content and behavior of the individuals. Group difference tendencies, institutions and the like thus flow on in a continuous stream, one portion showing its influence successively upon other portions through time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)

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