| From ‘The Measurement of
Attitudes’ I should like to conclude this account, which has dealt with the method rather than the significance of attitude measurement, with a question about a similar bias in social psychology generally, a bias which seems particularly strange in the study of attitudes. And that is a question about, to borrow Kohler’s phrase, the place of value in a world of facts. Amidst all the measuring of attitudes all absolute values are forgotten. The figures which emerge are relative figures representing the position of a person on a favour/disfavour continuum. Is this objectivity necessary? Is it not within the scope of social psychology to decide which attitudes are right and which wrong, or at least which are utilitarian, or humanitarian or whatever? For unless it is in order to establish such absolutes as these that the study of the establishment and control of attitudes is being indulged in, it seems that a body of theoretical knowledge is being created which will have no use. Surely the point of knowing the determinants of an attitude is that you will then be able to change it. But how will you know which attitudes to change and in which direction if attitudes are studied in a vacuum and only in relation to one another? From ‘On what aspects of socialisation does the social psychologist focus?’ There are plenty more findings one could list, particularly in connection with the specificity of moralisation to its various dimensions and even to the various situations in which these dimensions are manifested. But I am concerned less with findings than with angle of approach, and I should like to conclude by mentioning an aspect of socialisation on which it seems to me social psychologists could focus more than they do. This is the aspect of the application of findings. As the milieu therapy discussed by Brown testifies, much socialisation research is motivated by the desire to improve techniques of socialisation and compensate for bad ones which have already taken their toll. And it is perfectly clear that before the findings of socialisation studies can be applied in this way, decisions must be taken about what state of affairs is desirable. A dreaded value-judgement must be made. For example, milieu therapy rests on the assumption that aggression and psychopathy are bad things: a fair assumption but not a self-evident one. Discussion of socialisation in the textbooks is aggravatingly silent on these important issues. Of course fact-finding must precede choice, but it must not preclude it. As Zigler and Child begin their review by saying: ‘Socialisation refers to a practical problem which is old and pervasive in human life – the problem of how to rear children so that they will become adequate adult members of the society to which they belong.’ True enough, but what do they mean by ‘adequate’? Scant attention is paid to this question, until the very last sentence, where they say ‘we have here a kind of knowledge which can already – and will increasingly, we are sure, in the future – contribute to the personal understanding which parents and others need as a basis for wise action.’ As a basis, yes, but once again there is no consideration here of the direction that this wise action should take. Brown too allows himself, right at the end of his section on socialisation, a normative remark or two, but neatly sidesteps a commitment to any specific morality by saying that the ideal outcome of the moralisation of the individual is, from a social point of view, participation in the moral argument of his time (notice he gives no hint as to what the outcome of this argument should be), and, from the individual point of view, consistency between judgement, feeling and action (notice he does not say what judgement, what feeling, or what action). Of course it is out of fashion to argue that scientists should assume a didactic role, but they seem to bring this obligation upon themselves by stripping away the conviction we might have previously attached to moral behaviour. To isolate the determinants of moralisation is to imply an arbitrariness in the adherence to one morality or another, and thereby to undertake an obligation to establish some other compulsion to be moral, some other criterion by which to choose the morality to adopt. |