Few European social psychological publications have concerned themselves with the social problems of bilingualism in general, or with second language acquisition (SLA) in particular. This is in contrast to, for example, a good deal of research interest shown in Canada (e.g. Gardner & Kalin 1981; Lambert 1967). Yet, why should SLA concern social psychologists, whether they be Canadian, European or Asian? There are many answers to this question and we shall highlight just a few. The most prominent is the fact that the vast majority of nations in the world are multicultural and most of these are multilingual. Europe itself can arguably be considered a laboratory for the study of bi- and multilingual issues. Furthermore, a large proportion of children are schooled in their second rather than their mother tongues, the language of the curriculum often being that of a former colonial power or of the dominant ethnic elite. For example, most speakers of English have learned the language as their second tongue (Macnamara 1967). It is true that, at the same time, we are witnessing increasing contemporary pressures towards political and economic interdependence, centralization, modernization, and the like, which might nullify multilingualism and relegate it to the status of a phenomenon of the past. However, and in some ways in response to the above forces (Tajfel 1978a), the recent resurgence of interest in ethnic revivals and national identity which many regard as a distinctly modern process (Fishman 1977; Ross 1979), has been reflected world-wide in the resurrection and modernization of ‘old’, as well as in the creation of new, languages.

The most recent, and with any luck the final, great fling in the experimental tradition of small group research was the study of group decision making which started in the United States as the risky shift and was then transformed in Europe into group polarization. Twenty or so years after Stoner's (1961) first investigation seems an appropriate time at which to attempt a critical evaluation of that line of work. Our evaluation will be in two parts: first a brief historical review of research and theories in the area, and then a more sustained organization and analysis of alternative theoretical frameworks for group polarization.

But our critical discussion of the study of group decision making is itself embedded within a more general critique of the experimental study of small groups. First, we shall distinguish between social groups, which social psychologists should study, and nonsense groups, which in general they have studied. That will permit us, in reviewing group decision making research and theory, to see the extent to which that work was constrained by the nonsense group tradition from whence it sprang, while also permitting us to stress the respects in which work on group polarization, in particular, began to move towards the study of social groups. Finally, we shall briefly indicate some of the ways in which an understanding of properly social groups may be achieved.

Introduction

The major theoretical advances in social psychology over the past few decades, according to Cartwright (1978), have all been primarily concerned with cognitive processes. They have significantly advanced our knowledge of how an individual perceives and makes sense of his environment, knowledge which is essential for the understanding of social behaviour. Despite these impressive achievements, Cartwright is left with certain misgivings, for the reason that ‘…our heavy concentration on intra-personal processes has led us to give insufficient attention to other equally important influences on behaviour that are exerted by such things as groups, organizations, institutions, social power, laws, bureaucratic regulations, technology, and the distribution of economic resources’ (p. 175). The result of this is that ‘Social psychology has in recent years, I regret to say, become increasingly less social, and…we do not have the kind of theory that can be used in the construction of programmes of social action that are intended to solve some of our most serious social problems’ (Ibid.).

The present economic gloom in many Western countries will certainly renew an interest in the relationship between social psychology and economics. Some time ago, Davis, Laughlin & Komorita (1976) predicted that economic problems would become a growing concern in social psychology. A special issue of the British Journal of Social Psychology in 1982 was devoted to economics. It is also interesting to note that the American Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues was a result of the response of psychologists to the great Depression (Finison 1979).

In this chapter I describe a series of studies of intergroup bargaining and negotiation performed since the early 1970s by myself and colleagues at the Universities of Nottingham and Kent at Canterbury. Some are experimental, others are field studies, but all bear on the central theme of the balance and conflict between the representatives' interpersonal and intergroup relationships, and the strategies by which the conflict is managed and the balance maintained.

The work will be described in three sections. In the first section the results of a number of experimental studies will be described. These show that when the salience of the interpersonal relationships is decreased, the outcomes of bargaining reflect more the relative strength of case of the respective party positions. In the second section, a number of field studies of wage negotiations are described which indicate that (i) in practice, negotiations pass through stages in which the balance between interpersonal and intergroup orientations varies; and (ii) successfully concluded negotiations are characterized by periods of both intense intergroup competition and interpersonal cooperation. In the third section some recent studies of arbitration are described. These indicate that skilful arbitrators structure the hearing so as to satisfy the stage-by-stage requirements of successful negotiation.

The balance between intergroup and interpersonal exchange: experimental work

Variations in bargaining style. The relationships between industrial wage bargainers representing management and unions have been said to vary from ‘conflict’ and ‘containment-aggression’ at one extreme to ‘cooperation’ and ‘collusion’, and especially ‘collusion’, at the other (Walton & McKersie 1965).

There have been times in the history of social psychology when the pre-eminence of attitude theory and research has seemed almost unchallengeable. In the 1930s, the development by Thurstone and others of a methodology of attitude measurement helped social psychology to claim the status of a quantitative science. The 1950s and 1960s saw the Yale studies on communication and persuasion, followed by the flourishing of cognitive consistency and cognitive dissonance theories.

These are not such times. In fact, attitude research might be said, relatively speaking, to have been in decline since the beginning of the 1970s. Some of the reasons for this disenchantment are not hard to identify. The excitement of early assaults in the dissonance vs. self-perception contest gave way to the kind of inconclusive arguing which seemed to fail to retain the interest even of the principal champions of the respective theories. The weak or non-existent correlations in a number of empirical studies which had attempted to predict overt behaviour from measures of general social attitudes (e.g. Wicker 1969) left many researchers with the impression that, whatever attitudes were, there was not much point in studying them if one's main interest was in social behaviour. Fishbein & Ajzen (1975) – of whom more will be said later – have contributed significantly towards correcting this impression, but the predictability of behaviour from attitudes is now very much something that needs to be established in any given context rather than assumed.

There are any number of species of social animal; only man is also an historical animal, in that history is both a product and a cause of his social behaviour. My purpose is to explore this most important aspect of social psychology, which has been wholly neglected. I do not count the fleeting controversy over whether social psychology should be regarded as ‘history’ (Gergen 1973) or as ‘science’ (Schlenker 1974). That was fundamentally sterile: it rested on Gergen's misconceptions about the nature of science, which were elegantly corrected by Schlenker. I shall return to this shortly. Neither Gergen nor Schlenker, however, actually looked at, or used, historical material. I shall do so here: not in order to ‘decide’ between social psychology as history or as science, but to make articulate and to demonstrate the relevance of historical evidence as an integral part of basic scientific concerns of social psychology.

It is relevant to consider why social psychologists have ignored historical evidence. The fundamental reason is our identification of social psychology as a science, and our concept of ‘science’ as concerned with the formulation of ‘universal laws’ which underlie particular phenomena: by comparison, the events of history are contingent. At one level of analysis this is quite valid. We are not only ‘social’ and ‘historical’, we are indeed also ‘animal’, and in that respect, objects of scientific enquiry.

A social psychologist sometimes selects as his field of research attitudes and interactions which are invested with powerful personal implications and strong ideological connotations. If at the same time he is determined not to study them in isolation from the complex social systems in which they are produced, he is confronted by a number of difficulties, many of which are by no means merely methodological. Two of these difficulties are particularly important. One of them is that the trends of thought which dominate social psychology tend to conceive of interactions between individuals or between subgroups as if they were enacted outside of the framework of institutional and ideological systems; and yet it is the salience and the regulating power of these systems which determine the fact that we are dealing with ‘interactions’ rather than with something like ‘inter-reactions’. The second difficulty is that, in the course of their historical development and in order to ensure their survival, these systems had to attempt to gain their legitimacy. This has been the case even on the cognitive level in the sense that the institutional and ideological systems constructed models of explanation which would enable them to become socially accredited and long-lived. Consequently, the social psychologist often finds it difficult to resist the temptation to accept uncritically the explanatory models and concepts which these systems use in achieving their self-acceptance and their acceptance by others.

This chapter is concerned with the effects of intergroup similarity on intergroup attitudes and behaviour. Now similarity can, of course, take a number of forms but, for reasons which will become obvious as the chapter progresses, the discussion concentrates mainly on two. These are attitudinal similarity – that is, similarity between the values and ideologies prevalent in the groups in question, and status similarity – the proximity of groups on some dimension of value or prestige. As I shall show, the concept of similarity occupies a central position in several theories of social relations. Broadly speaking, these fall into two main camps. The first, and by far the predominant view, holds that similarity has attractive or convergent properties on intergroup relations. Thus, groups which are like one another are held to enjoy friendlier and more cooperative relations than those which differ. The second camp reaches quite the opposite conclusion and hypothesizes that groups which become too similar may look for ways to discriminate against each other. The purpose of this chapter is to examine these rival claims in the light of the available evidence.

The discussion proceeds more or less historically. It begins with three major theories dating from the beginnings of modern social psychology – frustration–aggression theory, social comparison theory, and balance theory – and goes on to describe some more recent work in the same mould. These theories collectively make up the first of the two camps – what might be called the similarity–attraction position.

Hundreds of studies have been conducted to detect, from a more or less ‘sociographic’ viewpoint, how members of different social groups perceive their own groups and those of others. Undoubtedly, much of this research on discrimination, prejudice and social stereotypes, for which the segregationist ideology of the USA and the nazi regime in Europe formed the dark sociological background, has its origin in a will to understand ‘this inhuman but all too human’ behaviour. Nevertheless, important as this area of research may be in trying to reveal the effect of a given ideology, the work deriving from the problems between groups has, for a long time, only enabled us to describe or construe a dated and localized ‘geo-psychological’ chart of the characteristics attributed by different social groups to each other.

This chapter proposes to analyse certain tendencies of recent research in social psychology in the area of intergroup relations, research in which the aim is not only descriptive but also explanatory in that it tries to clarify certain mechanisms underlying intergroup relations.

Certainly Sherif, in the 1950s, offered a theoretical formulation allowing us to take into account the development of certain types of intergroup relations. However important Sherif's theory may be, he is primarily concerned with competitive and cooperative interaction between groups, and as such his research seems insufficient to explain other forms of relations. One has to wait until the 1960s to find a more general social psychological analysis of intergroup relations.

The human being is not only the being by whom négatités are disclosed in the world; he is also the one who can take negative attitudes with respect to himself. In our Introduction we defined consciousness as ‘a being such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself’. But now that we have examined the meaning of ‘the question’, we can at present also write the formula thus: ‘Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.’ In a prohibition or a veto, for example, the human being denies a future transcendence. But this negation is not explicative. My consciousness is not restricted to envisioning a négatité. It constitutes itself in its own flesh as the nihilation of a possibility which another human reality projects as its possibility. For that reason it must arise in the world as a Not; it is as a Not that the slave first apprehends the master, or that the prisoner who is trying to escape sees the guard who is watching him. There are even men (e.g. caretakers, overseers, gaolers) whose social reality is uniquely that of the Not, who will live and die, having forever been only a Not upon the earth. Others so as to make the Not a part of their very subjectivity, establish their human personality as a perpetual negation.

Freudian theory and the philosophical problem

The kind of motivated irrationality that has attracted most attention from philosophers has been irrationality exhibited in a restrictive context. For example, someone has reasons for judging a particular course of action best and yet he yields to the temptation to do something else. If he yields intentionally and freely, this counts as akrasia (not being in command of oneself). There is also another type of example much discussed recently by philosophers. Someone has reasons for forming a particular belief and yet under the influence of a wish he forms a different belief. That is self-deception or, at least, wishful thinking. Both these types of irrationality, one affecting action and the other belief-formation, occur in restrictive contexts. At one moment the subject stands equipped with certain beliefs about fact or value which put a constraint on the move that he is about to make and at the next moment he goes against them. The interest of such cases is that they are dramatic, unmistakable defeats of reason. The demands of reason are clearly identified and yet they are definitely rejected.

Freud's study of errors overlaps the philosophical investigation of akrasia and self-deception. However, he is more interested in the culprit than in the precise nature of its victim. The culprit is, of course, a wish or desire, but the victim is not always a rational requirement which is dramatically flouted.

Diffused Freudianism Many of us take the fact that we have read, talked about, and reflected on Freud's writings to be a fairly important thing about us. We who have this as our only contact with psychoanalysis are often abashed in the face of real initiated analysed and analysing Freudians by the idea that our allegiance is just playful, just the half-hearted (head-hearted) manipulation of the terminology for the sake of intellectual fashion, without an appreciation of the depth of the responses that the use of the theory can produce, which give it its real meaning and significance. We are abashed in part by the justice of the accusation. There is a whole direction to Freudianism that we do not see, perhaps do not care to see.

There is also a side to things that we are better placed to see. For good or for bad, a diluted influence of Freud has now permeated our age's conception of mind, of motive, action, and morality, as no psychological theory ever before has. It influences our attitudes to ourselves and others in ways that can be separated from our believing any particular theoretical assertions about causes of behaviour or psychological structure. It shapes the styles of explanation and attribution that we are prepared to understand.

Introduction

The concept of the id was formulated by Freud in 1923, in a work entitled The Ego and the Id, and it marked the culmination of almost thirty years of empirical investigation and meta-psychological thought concerning the unconscious part of the mind. It is remarkably similar to concepts found in the nineteenth-century German philosophical movement, most especially to Shopenhauerian Will and the Dionysiac of the early Nietzsche; indeed, we must in some sense accept that those two great explorers of the mind had stumbled upon the truth of the id. But I think we can, in addition, discern significant likenesses between the Freudian id and concepts ranging as far afield as the Lockean material substratum and the Kantian noumenon.

It is important to notice the sharp distinction which Freud drew – though not perhaps in so many words – between a part of and a system within the mind. The id, in Freudian theory, is the mental system that is the repository of the two ultimate instincts, the life and death instincts, Eros and Thanatos. Then while these instinctual contents of the id are in themselves invariably unconscious, so that an entry on their part into consciousness would be possible only in symbolic form, the Freudian concept of the unconscious is not the concept of a particular mental system like the id.

Preface (1973)

This lecture can be attached to a specific text within Freud's works. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety and New Introductory Lectures were two works to which I had been paying special attention while I was writing the Ernest Jones lecture. The lecture purposely avoids any mention of repression; the word nowhere occurs in it. Yet Freud's theory of repression was its starting point. The account that I at that time planned to give of mental dispositions, quite independently of Freud, required a theory of inhibition and of repression. At the same time I found an uncertainty, an apparent hesitation between two distinct views, in Freud's theory of repression. On one view repression of libidinal energies is the universal condition of learning and of conscious, rational planning, and even of the power of normal human thought. On another view repression is represented as the necessary cost of that renunciation of instinctual drives which our civilization demands; the implication is that much of the cost in neurosis may be controllable, and that repression need not be so severe and harmful as it has been. Also, there seemed to be in Freud more than one theory of the relation of anxiety to repression. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety Freud wrote: ‘It was anxiety which produced repression and not, as I formerly believed, repression which produced anxiety.’ I was puzzled by these changes, which have consequences for the philosophy of mind.