1 86 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



bility of response. The patterns of society are determinate but dynamic, 

 and to react successfully to them demands skill. To deal with this problem 

 in a little more detail I turn to another paper read before Section J at 

 Norwich, one by Prof. T. North Whitehead, since published in The 

 Human Factor (3). A group of five girls working at the same tasks 

 came in time to form a real social group with a complex but readily 

 discernible pattern. An objective record of it was obtained by study- 

 ing the relations between the output of individuals, and the writer was 

 able to reduce these to a clear diagrammatic form. Since conversation 

 is the chief instrument of social relationship, the seating arrangements 

 proved largely decisive for the pattern. When an experimental change 

 was made in the seating order the social and psychological pattern was 

 broken and a new one had to be formed, output being adversely affected 

 during the process. I hope that the memory of my hearers can carry 

 them back to the curiously exciting effect of taking a new seat in the 

 class-room, and the consequent disturbance of their work. 



Prof. Whitehead's interesting report is concerned mainly with the objec- 

 tive study of the group. There are, however, important implications on 

 the subjective side. In the first place, like everything else society is 

 only apprehended by individuals, whose perception will be shaped in 

 ways analogous to those revealed by Rubin in simpler material. This is 

 the common handicap of all science, and no more need be said of it than 

 to remind ourselves that each person must react to society as he sees it. 

 A more important matter is that society, whose dominating influence we 

 realise more and more, has proper significance for psychology only in its' 

 impact upon individual lives. It is, indeed, only actualised in those 

 moments. Its components are individuals acting, and their behaviour 

 is informed by the principles studied earlier. Yet their activities form 

 a system, and we have to reconcile that with individual psychology. 



A group only exists in virtue of conative tendencies developed by 

 individuals in the course of accommodating their behaviour to each 

 other's. It requires skill to live socially, and I see no reason why we 

 should not treat this as we did others. Social skills are predetermined 

 schematic preparations for adaptive responses to situations presented by 

 the presence of other persons whose behaviour forms a reciprocally inter- 

 acting system, and so it is the psychological character of individuals which 

 chiefly determines the social pattern. I should like to adapt a famous 

 conclusion of Rousseau, and say that society becomes a topic for psycho- 

 logy just because it exists immanently in the minds of its members. 

 Whitehead's subjects did not build up a real unified group merely through 

 the seating arrangements. The effects of the removal of the one who 

 had become the leader show this. The unity of the group broke up, 

 and though her successor became even more popular it was never fully 

 reconstituted. So, at least, the writer maintains. But I venture to think 

 that there was formed a new and firmly integrated pattern of a kind too 

 subtle and intimate to be revealed by the test of correlative fluctuations 

 of output. How otherwise can we account for the odd fact that when 

 the former leader came back to replace her temporary successor the group 

 was entirely broken up through the newly developed hostility to her, 

 formerly the outstanding member of the group ? What the experiment 



