Social acceptance

When you are young, social acceptance is important to you; but once you've reached your thirties, you realise that it doesn't matter one iota. So long as you like yourself as a person, besides your family and close friends, who cares what anyone else thinks. People don't live up to your/our expectations, so why should you/we/me be expected to live up to theirs.


Samantha

I don't know who first said it, but this qoute comes to mind:

"The teenage years are nothing but a 365 day a year, 24 hour a day struggle not to be embarrassed"

Mmm, I guess it matters to some teens. Personally, I didn't really care about socializing or social acceptance. But then, psychologists probably say different things about kids with autistic spectrum disorders...

I googled importance social acceptance and got this study

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/esteem.htm

the researchers names didn't mean anything to me, but maybe they're well-known in their field.

Here is another good source of understanding of psycological growth. Social acceptance is right up there self asteem, confidence and achievement.

I'm not quite sure what you're looking for, but you might want to look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs). Commonly discussed in beginning psychology classes.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

Ex social psychologist chiming in: I've never heard of a theory that purports that. Of course, that doesn't mean one doesn't exist. Just that there wasn't one BIG enough to ever get mentioned in my courses. For someone espousing a theory like that, you probably need to read up on Eastern psychology/psychologists, or philosophers. Western (U.S. and Europe) psych has been highly influenced by our belief in the importance of individualism and standing out in a crowd.

I'm not sure how much this relates, but I just started taking an Ethics class and we discussed different moral stances. Forgive me, I don't have my book in front of me and I'm pulling it straight from memory, but I think Aristotle said something to the effect of it isn't you that determines if you are a morally good person, it's your peers.

Again, I'm not entirely sure about that one since I don't have my notes or my book in front of me, but I can double check it later when I get home from work. Does that help any or were you looking for something different?

Emile Durkheim - often regarded as a founding father of sociology - wrote reams on social solidarity. He also discussed the moral communities that grow up around professions which regulate the behaviour of those who are part of them - these are 'good' in the Durkheimian ethical framework. A psychologist - any social scientist - would be familiar with Durkheim's work and theses, which had fairly massive impact on the 21st century until Lyotard midwifed the idea of postmodernism (birthday some time in 1957, apparently). Durkheim is now coming back into fashion.

To bowdlerize in beastly fashion: Durkheim asserted that 'natural' man is unrestricted and dangerous while 'true' man is one in which the social dominates the natural. According to our Dee, individuals are imprinted with the ‘collective conscience’ - i.e. social facts and more particularly moral rules become internalized in the consciousness of the individual while continuing to exist independently. “However, constraint is not a simple imposition of outside controls on individual will - though it is certainly this as well - but rather is a moral obligation to obey rules”. Durkheim coined the term '“collective conscience'” to refer to the systematic acceptance of sets of norms, values, morals, rules and behaviours that are held as sacred and binding by the members of a group or society. Our Dee's picking up in the popularity stakes as the partial result of the work of, for eg. Thomas Putman (Bowling Alone) and his ilk & the concept of 'social capital' which is all about 'bowling in leages' (metaphor, natch) - on the decline, apparently. And a good thing too. IMO.

There are DVD's out on Joseph Campbell and his views on Myths and Mythology. He does a lot of comparison on Eastern vs. Western mythology but he also touches on how mythology touches on psychology, such as how it influenced Jung, etc. I just remembered this because of his take on the differences in culture and how that reflects on the "local" myths and the reverse.

Might be an interesting lead for you?

Mad Queen said:

It doesn't seem directly related to what I want to know and I already have a lot of research to do. But thanks for trying to help me. I appreciate it.

I've just read this:

This is related to my character's ideas, as is Thomas Hobbes's view that humans are inherently evil and have to be controlled by the government. But my character doesn't believe natural is bad and social is good. His is a practical approach, a strategy more than a theory. Here are some of things he tells his psychologist friend:

My characters discuss the example of Jesus Christ. The friend says Jesus Christ was one of the most influential figures in history even though he defied the powerful people of his time. My MC replies: ‘That’s why he was nailed to a cross. Do you want to be nailed to a cross?’

The purpose of this conversation is to convince the friend to stop antagonising his bosses and become a part of the team. It's not a theoretical discussion, but they would certainly remember Western sociologists and philosophers who wrote about similar things.

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You might want to look at Communist philosophers, especially the Bolsheviks. They were famous...or infamous...in emphasizing the collective over the individual.

Of course, they're so thoroughly discredited that quoting a well-known Communist would automatically put your guy in the wrong....

Mad Queen said:

I don't care, my guy is a villain anyway. But wouldn't Communism be too utopian for him, who only wants to get results?

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Well, you pick the quotes you like, and leave the rest.

Check out the Pygmalion effect, which is similar to Robert Merton's self-fulfilling prophecy theory. I wouldn't rely on Wikipedia for this one, the description focuses on the original theory's conception and not its wider applications.

Durkheim is good, he's a good study of deviant behavior and what keeps people confined to social constructions of right and wrong.

I think your best bet might be Erving Goffman, a sociologist who wrote "Presentation of Self in Every Day Life." Not just how or why people act differently in different situations, but why they must, etc. He in turn was influenced by George Herbert Mead.

I'd also see if any of Margaret Mead's anthropological studies match what you're looking for.

Hi,

Definitely Durkheim. Try his term "anomie". His major work, Le Suicide, he puts forth that the suicide rate is influenced by two variables:

a) integration of the individual into society

and

b) regulation of the individual by society.

Extremes tend to favour suicide:

Integration:

- Too much: Altruistic suicide (kamikaze bombers, killing yourself so that your family can profit from your life insurance...)

- Too little: Egoistic suicide (your life is "empty", if your goals don't match with the goals of those around you; you can't do what you want)

Regulation:

- Too little: Anomic suicide (every decision becomes a chore; you don't know how to go on)

- Too much: Fatalistic suicide (here's the kicker: he only mentions that type because of logical necessity, and then only in a footnote. He claims examples are hard to find. - Later sociologists have then gone and looked into that type [slums etc.])

He's also done work on education (stressing "positive authority" - a kind of authority that comes from "leading by example"), and religion (people really worship the community). Durkheim was a major influence on both structuralism and - perhaps more important for you - systemic functionalism (you might check out Talcott Parsons and Robert K Merton, though they're not very much concerned with individual action).

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Erving Goffman is more outlining how people deal with social expectations. His philosophy is hard to make out and experts disagree. His focus is on coping mechanisms.

Presentation of self is a good one, talking about the roleplaying aspects of society. He points out a phenomenon, that's probably of interest to you:

There are core role expectations, e.g. all the things a doctor is supposed to do. But there are also expectations on how to play the role. A key element is "role distance". If you don't display this, people are likely to call you "over-adapted" (I don't remember the proper term). You don't want to be reduced to your position; but neither do your colleagues want to reduce you to your position. So there's some sort of pressure to show yourself beneath the role (you don't have to be honest, but you have to show that there's more to you than just the role).

This can easily be twisted into an argument that apparant "individualism" is really an attempt to fit in (your character's "box within the box" argument could profit from Goffman's concept of "role distance"). [Also check out "Stigma", Goffman's book on how to deal with being obviously different.]

The problem, though, is that Goffman himself was somewhat of an enfant terrible in sociology/social psychology, who did his own thing. He's a very amusing read if you like wry humour with the tendency to get dark at times. Interviewers called him hard to interview; he'd turn the questions around and they'd feel like they're part of his current project. I suspect that Goffman would neither support nor counter your character's opinion, as his real interest was with coping mechanisms.

***

Marxist philosophy runs you into problems with the "being successful" part of the arguments, IMO. If you have a boss, you're being exploited. That's not really what you want to get to get across, I think.

***

You might also want to take a look at Arnold Gehlen, whose idea of man as a "deficient creature" ("Mängelwesen"; I don't know how they translated this) has been influential in pedagogy. Man is deficient (no fur, laughable claws and teeth...) and compensates with society. This idea has been very influential in education, in the sense that education "completes" the person. I'm not too familiar with Gehlen myself, though. It just came to mind.

Mad Queen said:

Which philosophers, psychologists or sociologists have argued that social acceptance is the most important aspect of one's life or the measure of one's success?

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Not Jesus.