SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY. Social psy chology is that branch of psychology which deals with the mind as it is affected by and manifested in relations with other minds. It deals with the behavior of human beings and animals in groups, and the emotions and thoughts which group behavior involves. There is a tendency on the part of certain writers to regard it as the psychology of the group mind or of group behavior, while others would em phasize rather the individual in the group and consider it as dealing with the behavior and experience of individuals when they form part of groups. The former hold that the mind of a group of individuals is a real being; something more than the aggregate of the individual minds which compose it. In this article we shall take the position of the latter, that all psychology deals with individuals and that social psychol ogy deals with them in their relations to one another.
Social behavior is manifested throughout the animal kingdom (1) in the form of special re sponses to living, that is, moving, stimuli ; (2) in that of special responses to individuals be longing to the same species, in the tendency to form collections of individuals, to respond with aid to sounds of alarm, to imitate the sounds and movements of other animals, and even, in the case of ants and bees, to assume certain special functions in the service of the social group. Certain individual bees, for instance, take upon themselves the work of ventilating the hive by placing themselves near its mouth and rapidly moving their wings. Social be havior is manifested also (3) in the sex reac tions of animals, both those connected with mating itself and those concerned in guiding the sexes to each other, through the senses of smell, hearing and sight. It is manifested (4) in parental behavior, where the movements of the parents are adapted to secure the welfare of offspring. From our animal ancestors we in herit all these forms of social behavior as in nate tendencies or instincts. Excellent discus sions of social instincts may be found in Mc Dougall's 'Social Psychology) and Shand's The Foundations of Character) The social instincts of man, however, differ from those of the lower animals in being ac companied by imaginative sympathy. The so
cial behavior of animals shows features which indicate that it is not accompanied by any real ization of the mental state of others. For in stance, an adult wasp engaged in feeding the young, lacking other food to present to a larva, bit off a piece of the larva itself and offered it as food to the larva's mouth. The social be havior of animals is determined wholly by ex ternal stimuli and by the animal's physiological state; that of human beings is determined largely by these, but also by the imaginative in terpretation of other persons' minds. Thus ani mals imitate merely the movements of other ani mals; human beings imitate the mental states of others.
Derived from such animal instincts as the gregarious instinct, the imitative instinct, the fighting instinct, the self-exhibiting instinct, the sex and parental instincts, we have the social emotions, anger, jealously, sex and parental love, and the sentiments such as admiration, con tempt, agreement, vanity and so on. It is pos sible also to trace the moral sentiments and the religious sentiments to innate roots which are derived from the lower animals. Thus social psychology furnishes the scientific basis of ethics.
The instinct of imitation has been given es pecial prominence by social psychologists. The French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, in his works, 'Les lois de limitation' and 'La logique so ciale,' regarded imitation as the most funda mental phenomenon in sociology. He defined a society as a group of persons who imitate each other, and pointed out that, like undulation in the physical world and heredity in the world of life, imitative currents in society spread in geometrical proportion, are modified by the medium through which they pass and interfere with each other. Out of the interferences of imitative currents inventions arise. E. A. Ross' 'Social Psychology) is based largely on Tarde's teachings. Recently the tendency has been to lay less emphasis upon imitation, but it seems clear that only through imitating other persons are we enabled to understand their mental states and that an innate tendency to imitate is the root of that imaginative sympathy which accompanies social behavior in man.