Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

142 P. F. Luzarsfeld
described competently in the book by Ruth Wylie, mentioned above; she
provides one of the most concrete discussions on the problem of ‘construct
validity’ - how to decide whether a scale really represent the intent of a con-
cept. Sociologists have accepted these scales and raised the question of how
self-esteem is related to their more conventional variates. The most extensive
American study is Rosenberg’s survey of 5,000 high school students in New
York State.z11 He measured self-esteem by agreement or disagreement with
such items as ‘satisfied with self‘, ‘self no good‘, ‘do things well’. High self-
esteem, as reflected by this test, ‘expresses the feeling that one is “goodenough” ’.
He found that the lower the subject’s self-esteem level, the more likely were
reports of the physiological indicators of anxiety. Participation and leadership
were greater for those with high esteem, and there was much similarity between
the value systems for boys and girls. From an examination of the data, it appears
that the values of the higher classes and the values of the national educational
system are similar.
One of the most important uses of this variate emerges if one finds that
self-esteem affects the way people react to a variety of natural or experimental
situations. More on this point will appear as we now turn to our next trend.
Dissonance theories
If one drops from the philosophical heights of the discussion on society and the
individual, one can move into various levels of concreteness. How is law and
order maintained in a state? How do people collaborate in an organization?
How does a family stay together? Across all these levels of generality there is
the constant of how individuals adjust to the norms that they have to obey, the
pressures which propaganda and advertisements exercise upon them, or the
demands of their fellow men. In some cases they simply submit to brute or
subtle force. Probably more often, however, they merely comply; they change
attitudes, lower their own demands, shift to substitute gratifications, etc. It is
along this latter line that social psychologists have done much work in recent
years. Their studies and theories are usually summarized under the heading of
a need for congruence or a desire to avoid cognitive dissonance. Interest in this
topic has moved through several stages. It began with Heider who asked what
happens if a friend and I disagree on a certain matter? Wil one abandon his
opinion, will our friendship dissolve, orwill we find some other mode of balance?
Heider indeed believed that a tendency to balance existed. Some of his followers
have translated his ideas into the mathematics of graph theory. Later, a group
of psychologists around Osgood tested the matter in a more precise quantitative
form. Suppose a communicator whom I respect tells me something which con-
tradicts one of my personal convictions. Osgood convinces us, through his dis-
cussion and experiments, that the following will happen : I wil strike a compro-
mise; I like the communicator somewhat less but move somewhat closer to his
opinion. The outcome will not be an average of both opinions, because I will
move a somewhat longer way on less extreme points of my previous position.
Finally, Festinger came out with a general theory of dissonance, which, though
somewhat vaguer in its formulation, was so seductive in its generality that it has