A particularly interesting investigation was conducted considerably later by Chiang Lin Woo a_nd myself dealing with the J-curve distribution of observed behavioral acts in seven American male custom situations. The J-curve studies, published in a number of papers, have enlisted considerable interest among social psychologists a_nd sociologists a_nd have been quoted in a number of texts.
I will conclude this review with an account of a study which I like to recall It was a little "masterpiece" of strategy a_nd elegance-but with an unfortunate ending. It will be recalled that my Chinese student, Chiang Lin Woo, had, with most careful techniques, completed a dissertation upon J-curve distributions in custom situations (Woo, 1948). He therefore had been able to rank the eleven customs on which he had collected data according to the extent to which tit individuals he observed had conformed to them. These eleven custom behavior included such episodes as that of a man opening the door for a woman companion, the placement of knife a_nd fork on the plate in restaurants, the act expected of participants in a religious service, a_nd the approved behavior when the national anthem is played. The idea occurred to me that the relative steepness of the J-distributions on the scales that Woo used to measure custom conformity might also be predicted by the structural dynamics formula. It was conjectured that in these situations the basic structural variable to which the custom behavior might be predicted to be related would be, in each case, of only one type, namely, that to which it was appropriate, as for example the boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, membership in "polite society," the church to which one belongs, a_nd so on. An average rating of the potency of involvement that is generally obtained in a representative sample of male citizens in each of these classes of structures was obtained, for each structure, by a carefully prepared questionnaire. These self-estimates of involvement were gathered, of course, from an entirely different population from that earlier observed in Woos study of conformity, but the type of population involved was similar. Still another, totally different but again representative set of individuals, filled out forms estimating the probable degree of importance (relevance) of the custom act for the maintenance of the structure concerned or of the individuals place in it. When all these data froth different sources were assembled a_nd computed it was found that for these eleven custom situations the degree of conformity in the particular custom act was definitely related, just as the formula had predicted, to the strength of involvement of individuals typically in the base structure concerned, times the relevance of the custom act to that structure. The Spearman rank difference correlations, obtained by computing the data in two different ways, were 0.68 (significant at the 5 percent level) a_nd 0.82 (significant at the 1 percent level). Upon seeing this finding Woo a_nd I shook ha_nds. This long-armed result seemed to call into question traditional explanations of custom as based largely on social inertia or cultural lag. It appeared from our result that custom conformity was a very dynamic here-a_nd-now phenomenon, under structuronomic influence or control. It was also thought that this finding might have value for the cultural anthropologists.
Woo, who was going back to China, was to take the data with him a_nd work out certain computations in greater detail. He asked me if I did not wish to retain a complete copy. I cannot imagine what possessed me-it is one of those things that is hard to explain; but I said I would leave the whole matter to him a_nd he could send me the results as soon as his computations were completed. Woo went back, first to Hong Kong a_nd a little later to mainla_nd China, which was undergoing an overhauling under the Communist regime. It is now twenty years since he returned to China proper, a_nd in that time I have not heard a word from him. Because of the meagerness of my records I have not published this experiment or its finding until this moment. I must now simply ask the reader to accept my word that it was so. I regard my carelessness in not retaining a complete copy of the data as one of my worst professional errors.
Other Publications Cited
Woo, Chiang Lin. Conformity in custom behavior. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Syracuse Univ., 1948. |
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