PKU4 HUMAN NATURE Psychology as a Discipline
Since Kant’s time, Western civilization has maintained diversity in worldviews. In university terms, this division is between, on the one hand, science trying to know physical reality [link: science] , and, on the other hand, the humanities, which study the world as it appears to human consciousnesses [link: Leo Tolstoy] . In between these two lie the social sciences, aspiring to the cultural authority of the hard sciences, but always falling short because there are no laboratories which can create repeatable conditions for social experiments, hence no empirical basis for defining truths in a scientific sense.
Psychology, one of the new disciplines falling between the hard sciences and the humanities, works to redefine the rational as mere rationalization , the attempt to dress up as reasonable ideas which originate in psychological drives or personal desires. As a result, the value of reason as a source of truth has been diminished, though not demolished. Under Western modernity , all traditional sources of cultural authority have in the long run come under serious questioning [link: post-modern appendix] .
During the 19 th century, as a partial replacement for fading religious credences, psychology emerged as a new discipline focusing individual psyches as distinguished from sociological factors such a class .
Over the last century and a half psychology has become a major source of Western ideas about human nature, with implications for all the many aspects of life that depend for their practice on one’s expectations for, and evaluations of, human nature
[link:
Maslow] . In addition, a confusing variety of professional specializations have emerged with psych- as their root. This document begins by introducing some of this vocabulary and then proceeds to explain how psychotherapy as a medical practice evolved into an academic social-science discipline, how this discipline moved from treating medical pathologies to studying normal social behavior.
Introduction:
As seen earlier [link: Western ideas of human nature], the traditional West developed several overlapping concepts to identify the elusive immaterial part of human beings.
Traditionally, most of these ideas have been thought of as either religious or philosophical. In the middle decades of the 19 th century, however, a new source of understanding emerged under the general label of psychology. Psychology as a new science claimed a non-theological perspective on the inner aspects of human nature. Its discourses tended to occupy the conceptual domain previously dominated by religious ideas based on the soul [link: text] .
This new discipline was initially medical in that it proposed to help people who suffered from diseases which were “mental” rather than physical. In more recent years, psychological terms have gained credibility beyond the various “therapies” proposed by its medical practitioners [link: Abraham Maslow] . The growth of this field has led to a

proliferation of concepts that are now seen in the West as applying broadly to the nature of human beings in general [link: applied social psychology] .
To keep in mind as you read: Why has psychology not been a part of the
Chinese world until very recently? Is it in some way unChinese?
The Psyche
The psyche (Greek: “soul”) is a word commandeered by psychology to refer loosely to all the non-material aspects of a person. It functions as a secular equivalent to religious uses of soul . The psyche is understood to include the conscious mind or consciousness and, still more powerfully, the unconscious mind, commonly referred to as the
Unconscious .
The Unconscious
The Unconscious , as invented or discovered by 19 th -century psychology, is seen as containing drives or impulses or memories that are unavailable to one’s conscious awareness. The Unconscious viewed psychologically does not include the autonomic nervous system that assures the beating of one
’s heart and similar reflex responses, but it includes experiential memories that are not admitted to the consciousness.
The single most influential psychologist, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) [link: text] , sought to explain irrational behavior by reference to this previously undefined component of the self . The Unconscious he saw as a locus for memories, especially of a traumatic nature, which were too painful to be recalled by the conscious mind. Material from forgotten childhood crises ( traumas ) remained undigested in the Unconscious , affecting or even controlling conscious thinking and leading to inappropriate ( neurotic ) behavior.
The Self, Selfhood
Compared to earlier usage [link: Selfhood], modern extensions of the reflexive pronoun oneself have evolved into a substantive: one’s self . That is, through a subjective selfconsciousness a person can think about his or her psyche as a whole as if it belonged to someone else ( objectively )
. One can like one’s self or not, just as one likes certain other people and not others. Hence, one can also seek to modify one’s self through psychotherapy (or other self-improvement schemes) . In Chinese terms, see the short essay
“The Mirror and I”
[lnk: Liu Xin] that shows how consciousness of self begins to emerge as something important.
Personality
This word signifies the complex of characteristics that distinguish a particular individual. It is presumed that one’s personality will be recognizable and that one will defend oneself against undue manipulation by others. Individuals who seem overly bland or submissive may be said to lack individual selfhood . On the other hand, a person could go too far in the opposite direction by always attempting to dominate others. Whether viewed positively or negatively, personality points to an individual identity which is presumed to be stable and ongoing.

Character
To show character implies consistently applying high moral values in one’s actions.
Consistency in one’s actions implies self-discipline, perhaps even, to an unfriendly observer, undue rigidity. In recent times, the idea sometimes seems old-fashioned, as is one of its associated notions, duty . Everyone knows what these words mean, but many in the younger generations dismiss them as obsolete, as insufficiently modern .
Identity
In general terms, identity is roughly equivalent to essence (Greek: ousia ) as applied to a person, namely the person one essentially is for all of one’s life. Since World War II, starting in the USA, identity has taken on an extended use, as in the expression identity crisis , a phrase brought into currency by Erik Erikson (1902-1994) . He was a Danish-
American psychologist who concentrated on adolescents and their problems of “finding their identity
” or their true self . The implication is that until individuals find in themselves a basic orientation they feel secure about, they are likely to feel trapped in anxiety.
Erikson implied that humans have only one identity , and that they would be better off if they could discover it as young as possible. More recent Western thinking sees a person’s identity as multiple and as open to change as one’s life experience grows.
Commentary
Most of the components introduced above are far from the Chinese traditional orientation that invites people to see themselves as pre-defined by the whole range of social roles into which they are born and which attach them durably to their social surroundings. Westerners also use the concept of roles, but in modern times they tend to see these as relatively superficial compared to the deeper, often involuntary, commitments that define their identity.
Study Questions:
1. In what ways do the new psychological terms differ from the older vocabularies of soul or mind or spirit? What difference would it make to prefer one set of concepts or the other?
2. Do you think of the early 19 th -century psychologists in the West as discovering or inventing the Unconscious as part of human psyches? What difference would it make to prefer one or the other of these verbs?
Psyche a new name as of mid-19 th century for the non-material part of a human being. In Greek, this word had meant soul , standing for that part of the human being that was believed to persist after death. In
English soul continues to be used in spiritual contexts, but the discourses of psyche provide a new and secular replacement for religious discourses. Unlike the soul as seen by Christians or
Westerners in general, there is no implication that psyches may persist after death.

Psychiatry the concern of medical doctors with specialized training for mental diseases . Example: Arthur Kleinman [link: text] . Only
Psychiatrists, because they are licensed by the state as medical doctors, have the right to prescribe psychotropic (mind-altering) or other medications.
Psychosomatic Medicine the practice in which medical doctors treat diseases in which mind and body seem to influence each other. Psychology opened new possibilities for medicine through redefining the line between body and mind as permeable. The dominant tradition of Western medicine, however, continues to treat the human body as if it were a depersonalized machine, quite separate from the psyche.
Psychotherapy any treatment for mental or psychological problems carried out by a therapist who has not earned a medical degree licensed by the state. Example: Sigmund Freud’s
psychoanalysis. A psychoanalyst has been trained by being analyzed by a previously approved psychoanalyst in talk therapy . Non-Freudian psychotherapists, however, may not go through such rigorous training.
Commentary:
The medical status of the above categories of psychotherapeutic treatment in Western countries may often be gauged indirectly by the way health insurance companies respond to requests for reimbursement.
Normally, treatment by a psychiatrist is assimilated to all other treatments by a licensed M.D., hence is reimbursed. Treatment by a psychologist or psychoanalyst or psychotherapist is typically not reimbursed because it is often not formally recognized as belonging to the category medical.
Psychology a general label for the study of psychological aspects of human beings. Example: a psychologist has a university degree in this discipline, studying “normal” human beings in their social context. Psychologists perform many kinds of non-therapeutic work, such as: conducting tests on various segments of the population under the guise of social psychology, or testing a person’s aptitudes as a form of job counseling, or studying how children learn as part of educational psychology or testing how advertising works or fails to work in influencing consumer behavior. The proliferation of such psychological services has been

characteristic of most Western countries for some decades.
The Proliferation of Psychology
Psychology began as a branch of medicine but it expanded its range of applications greatly in the 20 th century. Sigmund Freud [link: text] is no doubt the most influential psychologist of all, but the range of investigations carried out under the auspices of psychology has broadened greatly over time
There follow some examples of this process:
1. A sample psychotherapy involving a college student in the USA: The therapy here was not tied to any particular theory such as Freudian psychoanalysis but aimed to offer the patient increased insight into her personal history in such a way as to relieve her current problems.
2. An example of a “12-Step” self-help group: This document shows the basic commitment that must be made by anyone seeking to join such a self-help group. Such groups have proliferated in recent decades to involve individuals who seek to free themselves from a wide range of dependencies.
3. As a study of human behavior, social psychology also developed applications for economic life, by providing conceptual tools for marketing that we exemplify through a brief report on lifestyles . By dividing the population according to their lifestyle , marketing experts think they can predict a whole range of consumer choices each grouop is likely to make. This approach has proved very influential behind the scenes of American life in recent decades.
Introduction
As a generic sample of how Western psychotherapy proceeds in its attempts to help people toward mental health, here is a summary of a case from the 1990s, as written by the professional psychologist who conducted it. The context is a large state university in the USA, which maintains a consultancy to which students have access either on their own demand or by referral from some responsible person within the administration. The working presumption of psychotherapy is that present difficulties are to be seen as a function of patterns of behavior and thinking (“schemas”) that a person developed in the process of coping with early-life problems.
Text:
Here is the case of a 21 year old Caucasian (white) female junior (third-year undergraduate) majoring in athletics training. Her presenting complaint centered on anxiety she was experiencing related to conflicts with a supervisor. She experienced this supervisor as overly critical, giving as an example recently being “dressed down”
(severely criticized) by the supervisor because she had filled out a referral for physician consultation but failed to put Dr.
in front of the physician’s name. She reported experiencing this criticism as unwarranted, although she also felt that her emotional reaction to this criticism was exaggerated, and thus she was seeking help to better understand why this event was “causing” her so much ongoing distress. She expressed

some awareness that her distress was somehow related to her relationships with their parents, but was not sure exactly how. . . .
In two sessions we did a comprehensive psychosocial history, complete with psych ological testing. Lynn’s parents separated when she was two but had never divorced. The father, 62, held a variety of jobs in the Federal government. He was described by Lynn as “temperamental, but generally I’ve got along with him.” She noted that he emai led her almost daily, and that “he’s always told me to try my best and that when I have a problem, he usually tells me that everything will be all right, which bugs me.” Mother, 51, had worked in various secretarial and receptionist positions. Lynn described a very conflictual relationship with her mother, noting that she had never been good at managing money or her household. She also reported that her mother was emotionally abusive towards her, and had displaced much anger towards Lynn’s father onto her. Lynn added that she had always felt responsible for taking care of her mother, despite her mother’s abusive behavior. Mother’s emotional abuse of her was illustrated by Lynn’s being told as a teenager by her mother: “You should go live with your father, be cause you’ve ruined the last ten years of my life.” Lynn said that she coped with her emotionally deprived upbringing by becoming involved in athletics as a child which led to a residual interest in pursuing a career as an athletic trainer. . . .
Lynn said that in high school she was heavily invested in athletics, including softball, volleyball, and field hockey. She said she was a good student with a B-plus grade point average (GPA) , was fairly popular, and dated throughout high school and college, but ha d never been fully sexually active. She explained, “I usually break up with any boyfriend who wants to get serious because I’m worried that they just want sex and are going to take advantage of me.”. . .
Although generally seeing herself as congenial and cooperative with others, the results of one psychological test did suggest that Lynn prefers to make her own decisions and be her own boss. . . . Another test of psychological schemas (habitual behavior patterns) suggested she was strongly wedded to unrelenting standards
(perfectionism). We talked about how her dominant schemas related to her family of origin: mother was extremely critical of her, and provided almost no emotional support or nurture and; father was more supportive, but was not around consistently, and gave
Lynn the message that “everything will be OK if you work hard enough.” Given these dynamics, it was understandable that Lynn’s surface persona was to appear well adjusted and in control of every aspect of her life. Underneath, however, she was emotionally deprived and had developed defenses to cope with this deprivation. In adolescence, she had been able to defend against mother’s critical nature by withdrawing and investing herself in athletics. Her conflict with hersupervisor could then be understood as touching off major unresolved issues from her past with her parents.
She experienced the criticism from her supervisor as unfair, and, in reality, it was criticism over a relatively trivial matter; but, unlike the situation with mother, she could not withdraw, since she needed to pass the course to achieve her goal of becoming an athletic trainer. The supervisor’s criticism also touched off unresolved issues with Lynn’s father, particularly her introjected (internalized) belief that if you work hard enough, everything will be OK. In the case of conflict of the supervisor, she was trying her best but still encountering criticism. . . .

Like her mother, Linda could be very critical of others whom she perceived as incompetent. In her relationship with her mother, she eventually gave up trying to get from her the emotional support and acceptance that she needed, and withdrew into the world of athletics. In like manner, in most relationships in her current life, Lynn withdrew when she felt the least hint of rejection or criticism. Finally, she introjected her experience of her father by becoming extremely driven and having unrelenting selfstandards for achievement. In this way she treated herself as she saw her father treat himself. . . .
Basically, she had been able to structure her life so that she could avoid having to deal with the more painful and unresolved issues of her past, by getting into an athletics training program, and becoming very skilled, and thus able to develop interpersonal relati onships with others in this category, without the “risks” involved in more intimate relationships. What was causing so much conflict with a supervisor was that she was reexperiencing her relationship with her mother; she was being criticized unfairly. She had managed to cope with this earlier in life by disengaging from her mother, withdrawing
(sublimating?) into the world of athletics. All of a sudden she finds that her world continues to have a “critical mother,” in the form of her supervisor. Her anxiety was so unrelentingly because her usual defense from criticism, withdrawal, was not readily available to her. She could not withdraw, because that would mean loss of her most meaningful objective, athletic training. . . .
Given her history and defensively perfectionist traits, Lynn was particularly sensitive to criticism, and I talked with her about how, if she felt criticized by me at any point, it would be important her for talk about it with me, so that she didn’t simply withdraw from therapy, acting out her feelings rather than talking about them. I also knew that Lynn was sensitive to any one minimizing her problems, as her father had tended to do whenever she expressed concerns to him. . . .
In focusing on the conflict with the supervisor, Lynn was able to quickly see how they were parallels between this relationship and her conflict in relation with her mother. She was able to express some of the underlying despair she had experienced in early life because her mother had been so emotionally unavailable to her. This also led to her talking about another side of a relationship to her mom, feeling that she must take care of mother’s emotional needs. Lynn was relieved to sense that I understood that, even though she had suffered much because of her mother ’s emotional unavailability, she still had positive and caring feelings about her. Given Lynn’s ability to recognize the relationship between her present concerns and early life experiences, we were quickly able then to talk about how she might deal most productively with her relationship with her supervisor. We role-played how Lynn might approach her supervisor in a direct, assertive, but non-hostile manner to talk about her concerns. We talked considerably about how feelings she experienced earlier in life toward her mother would be present when she talked with her supervisor, but how she could recognize them, manage them, and not simply “act out” on them. She was able to approach her supervisor in this way, and to her surprise, she was heard and validated for directness and honesty. Thus, after the first two post-assessment therapy sessions, Lynn had made considerable progress in dealing with her present concerns.
Our remaining sessions focused much on Lynn’s perfectionism or unrelenting standards (perfectionism) in schema -focused terminology. Interestingly, we discovered

that Lynn was often her own worst critic (in the present) and was constantly striving to do everything perfectly. Lynn wanted to avoid criticism from her mother; thus, by doing everything “perfectly,” she was unconsciously trying to avoid any possibility of being criticized. But another link to the past was even more helpful in Lynn’s cognitive and emotional learning about her perfectionism. Even though in one way she felt her father had been the much more supportive of her parents, we discovered that Lynn had the belief that she could only receive approval from her father if she tried her absolute best and, if she tried her absolute best, then she should achieve success. As Lynn talked more about this dynamic in therapy, she was able to understand how her unrelenting standards and perfectionism were hurting her in many areas of her life. I asked her to list some of the ways she saw it as interfering with living life to the fullest. At the next session, she replied, “There are so many ways that my being so hard on myself have hurt me. I think it’s the major cause of why I have had migraine headaches for so many years. I try to take on the whole world, and think I have to be responsible for everything.
It also has affected my relationships with friends, who don’t like it that I don’t have more time for them. . . . I think I beat myself up mentally for making the smallest mistakes.
And I hold others to the same standards; I expect them to be perf ect, and when they’re not, I feel overwhelmed and let down.”
Commentary:
After the seventh session, Lynn decided to stop the therapy. She had been able to handle the immediate problem with her supervisor, but felt reluctant to go further into unveiling her past relationships with her parents. Since therapy, to be effective, must be chosen voluntarily by the person, the choice was hers to make. The therapist felt somewhat frustrated, but concluded that “therapy had helped her begin to understand how her perfectionist qualities were an unconscious attempt to please not only mother, but father as well. This awareness allowed her to begin to consider how her perfectionism was keeping her from developing more intimate relationships with others.”
[Source: adapted from Harry L. Piersma, “Current Conflicts as Mirrors of Unfinished Business with Mom and Dad,” in Case Book of Brief Psychotherapy with College Students , eds. Stewart E. Cooper, James
Archer, Jr., and Leighton C. Whitaker, New York: Haworth Press, 2002, 85-100.]
Study questions:
1. What is more important for psychotherapy, the ability to cope with an immediate troublesome situation or a longterm improvement in one’s ability to cope with whatever comes up?
2. The subtitle of the original published article refers to “unfinished business with
Mom and Dad”; what would constitute “finished business with Mom and Dad”?
3. Why is it a rule that therapy must take place voluntarily?
Introduction
The idea of 12-step programs originated in the USA in the 1930s when two alcoholic men started to work together to help each other overcome their own self-destructive addiction to drinking. Since then, the same pattern of steps have been applied to individuals suffering from dozens of kinds of addiction or out-of-control behavior.

Besides addiction to alcohol, drugs, nicotine or sex, groups also help people cope with negative behavior patterns like suicidal tendencies, or even with terminal illness in themselves or others close to them. There is no inherent limit to the kinds of human problems that might be approached in this way.
The self-help groups that have been formed on this basis are self-financed and selfsustaining. Participants are normally identified only by their first names. There is no sponsorship or guidance from government or churches or any other agency outside themselves. Over the last half century, such self-help groups have expanded greatly in numbers and in geographical distribution as many individuals have been able to use this means to recover or to protect the positive elements in their lives.
In the context of WCwCC, this phenomenon is interesting because it shows how
Western individuals may join together in voluntary self-help groups in the interests of changing their life patterns. The result is a kind of therapy without a therapist.
The original 12-step program incorporated a considerable amount of Christian vocabulary. For example, here is a prayer often used by such groups:
God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can, and
Wisdom to know the difference.
Over the course of time, post-Christian or non-Christian rewordings have been proposed in the interests of broadening the focus beyond sectarian or religious orientations to more widely available ideas of spirituality. The following text gives the original 12-step wording, followed by commentary that reflects such broadening beyond traditional Western theologies. The underlined words in boldface type were identified as keywords by the originators of this self-help system. These 12 steps are designed to be repeated many times, as often as needed, to be reinforced in regular meetings of a selfhelp group made up of individuals suffering from similar problems.
1 We admitted we were powerless over our addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable.
A crucial first step toward freeing oneself from any repetitive pattern of dysfunctional or addictive behavior.
2 Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
This “higher power” may be understood theologically or not, but it must be understood as larger than the individual seeking help.
3 Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.
Abandoning one’s own will as flawed and inadequate is indispensable.
4 Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
This inventory implies a detailed list of faults and occasions of bad behavior.
5 Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Confession to at least one other human being assures that contrite feelings cannot remain private, between one’s higher power and oneself.
6 Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
Preparedness for the “higher power” to take over must be thorough if it is to be effective.
7 Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
Humility is a crucial step in abandoning one’s own willfulness that has led to such dysfunctional behavior.
8 Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Details of times and places and people are essential to the process of apologies and amends insofar as they are humanly possible.
9 Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Direct amends implies making contact with those individuals wherever they may be found and offering such reparations as may be possible and acceptable to them.
10 Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
The process does not stop with retribution for past wrongs but must continue constantly as one monitors one’s behavior.
11 Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out.
The “higher power” must be understood as having taken over one’s life so that there will be no backsliding based on a return to selfish and self-destructive habits.
12 Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
The missionary impulse to help others still mired in addictive and dysfunctional patterns is an essential extension of the self-help process. Individuals continue to contribute to group meetings and also to mentor less experienced members who ask for guidance and help.
[Source for basic definitions: http://www.12step.org/steps/index.php
070607.]
Study questions:
1. How does this kind of self-help group differ from Freudian or other psychotherapies?
What sort of people would probably be susceptible to help by this means?
2. Is it conceivable, given the 12step program’s direct invocation of God or a “higher power,” that this program might also be useful to someone who does not believe in such a transcendent, all-powerful force?
3. If no payments change hands in these self-help groups, how do they survive in a money-oriented capitalist world?

Introduction:
The individualistic emphasis of psychology has in recent decades promoted social psychology as a discipline that describes group behavior as based on individual characteristics. This orientation is quite the opposite of the Chinese tendency to look first at groups and what they ask of each individual.
The following example shows how Abraham Maslow’s view of human nature stimulated latter research that proved useful for advertisers in shaping their marketing strategies. The VALS (Values and Lifestyles) approach divided the US population into several different categories and then presumed that individuals living within each one would respond coherently. If people were interested in a certain kind of clothing, they would be likely to seek a related kind of vacation, buy a related model of automobile, prefer related sorts of restaurants.
Though invisible to most Americans, this kind of thinking has since the 1980s dominated American marketing to a remarkable extent, resulting in media campaigns of all sorts that cater to specific lifestyle groups. Industries cooperated by proliferating models to offer ever wider choices of products that can cater to diverging tastes and preferences. Tracing lifestyle thinking back to its source in social psychology allows us to identify a powerful influence on the shaping of public life in recent decades. Needless to say, there is no comparable phenomenon in China, where consumerism is only beginning and only applies to newly rich entrepreneurs and their cohorts.
What follows is a schematic diagram created by SRI (Stanford Research Institute) to suggest how eight VALS categories relate to each other: the higher categories have access to more resources than the lower categories. The three colored rectangles in the middle section represent three primary sources of motivation: ideals (blue) , achievement
(green) , and self-expression. (pink) . Consumers who are primarily motivated by ideals are guided by knowledge and principles. Consumers who are primarily motivated by achievement look for products and services that demonstrate success to their peers.
Consumers who are primarily motivated by self-expression desire social or physical activity, variety, and risk.
There is of course a measure of arbitrariness in these eight categories. There could have been more categories or fewer. In fact, more than one scheme of categories has been published under the general inspiration of VALS. The present array, as articulated by SRI seems representative. The SRI provides a free on-online survey for individuals interested in seeing where they fit within this scheme: http://www.sricbi.com/VALS/presurvey.shtml
, 080929 .

Here are the SRI definitions of the eight categories:
Innovators
Innovators are successful, sophisticated, take-charge people with high self-esteem.
Because they have such abundant resources, they exhibit all three primary motivations in varying degrees. They are change leaders and are the most receptive to new ideas and technologies. Innovators are very active consumers, and their purchases reflect cultivated tastes for upscale, niche products and services.
Image is important to Innovators , not as evidence of status or power but as an expression of their taste, independence, and personality. Innovators are among the established and emerging leaders in business and government, yet they continue to seek challenges. Their lives are characterized by variety. Their possessions and recreation reflect a cultivated taste for the finer things in life.
Thinkers
Thinkers are motivated by ideals. They are mature, satisfied, comfortable, and reflective people who value order, knowledge, and responsibility. They tend to be well

educated and actively seek out information in the decision-making process. They are well-informed about world and national events and are alert to opportunities to broaden their knowledge.
Thinkers have a moderate respect for the status quo institutions of authority and social decorum, but are open to consider new ideas. Although their incomes allow them many choices, Thinkers are conservative, practical consumers; they look for durability, functionality, and value in the products they buy.
Achievers
Motivated by the desire for achievement, Achievers have goal-oriented lifestyles and a deep commitment to career and family. Their social lives reflect this focus and are structured around family, their place of worship, and work. Achievers live conventional lives, are politically conservative, and respect authority and the status quo. They value consensus, predictability, and stability over risk, intimacy, and self-discovery.
With many wants and needs, Achievers are active in the consumer marketplace.
Image is important to Achievers ; they favor established, prestige products and services that demonstrate success to their peers. Because of their busy lives, they are often interested in a variety of time-saving devices.
Experiencers
Experiencers are motivated by self-expression. As young, enthusiastic, and impulsive consumers, Experiencers quickly become enthusiastic about new possibilities but are equally quick to cool. They seek variety and excitement, savoring the new, the offbeat, and the risky. Their energy finds an outlet in exercise, sports, outdoor recreation, and social activities.
Experiencers are avid consumers and spend a comparatively high proportion of their income on fashion, entertainment, and socializing. Their purchases reflect the emphasis they place on looking good and having "cool" stuff.
Believers
Like Thinkers , Believers are motivated by ideals. They are conservative, conventional people with concrete beliefs based on traditional, established codes: family, religion, community, and the nation. Many Believers express moral codes that are deeply rooted and literally interpreted. They follow established routines, organized in large part around home, family, community, and social or religious organizations to which they belong.
As consumers, Believers are predictable; they choose familiar products and established brands. They favor American products and are generally loyal customers.
Strivers
Strivers are trendy and fun loving. Because they are motivated by achievement,
Strivers are concerned about the opinions and approval of others. Money defines success for Strivers , who don't have enough of it to meet their desires. They favor stylish products that emulate the purchases of people with greater material wealth.
Many see themselves as having a job rather than a career, and a lack of skills and focus often prevents them from moving ahead.

Strivers are active consumers because shopping is both a social activity and an opportunity to demonstrate to peers their ability to buy. As consumers, they are as impulsive as their financial circumstance will allow.
Makers
Like Experiencers , Makers are motivated by self-expression. They express themselves and experience the world by working on it-building a house, raising children, fixing a car, or canning vegetables-and have enough skill and energy to carry out their projects successfully. Makers are practical people who have constructive skills and value self-sufficiency. They live within a traditional context of family, practical work, and physical recreation and have little interest in what lies outside that context.
Makers are suspicious of new ideas and large institutions such as big business.
They are respectful of government authority and organized labor, but resentful of government intrusion on individual rights. They are unimpressed by material possessions other than those with a practical or functional purpose. Because they prefer value to luxury, they buy basic products.
Survivors
Survivors live narrowly focused lives. With few resources with which to cope, they often believe that the world is changing too quickly. They are comfortable with the familiar and are primarily concerned with safety and security. Because they must focus on meeting needs rather than fulfilling desires, Survivors do not show a strong primary motivation.
Survivors are cautious consumers. They represent a very modest market for most products and services. They are loyal to favorite brands, especially if they can purchase them at a discount.
[Source: http://www.sric-bi.com/VALS/types.shtml#resources , 080928]
Applications:
To apply this grid to marketing in any particular locality, SRI offers a “geovalues” service that estimates how the population of a given locality breaks down in terms of these categories. Here is a whimsical sample for Goldfield, NV (population 440 in 2000) :
[Source: http://www.sric-bi.com/VALS/GeoVALS/ , 080928]

The challenge for marketing would be to identify which products might sell well in
Goldfield and to which lifestyle group. Then one could design an advertising campaign to get the attention of the kind of individuals most likely to be receptive.
Commentary:
The marketing analysis summarized here works out of sight of most Americans.
Many of them may think of themselves as individuals who make independent personal decisions about their lives. But once one sees behind the scenes, it becomes clear that what individuals do is to choose among the options made available to them by the system. Hence their “individualism” is not at all absolute but relative.
Study questions:
1. What place does this marketing analysis have in our understanding of modern
Western civilization?
2. What would be different if we thought of groups starting from the point of view of the group and its needs rather than individual members? For example, to be strong a group needs solidarity. What is the likely impact of solidarity on individual members?
Introduction:
During the second half of the 20 th century, academic psychologists began working as university researchers and not as psychotherapists within a clinical or medical framework. When they put their discipline ’ s concepts to work, the result focuses on the normal population in its psychological dimension. Timothy Leary (1920-1996) , in research excerpted here, aimed at determining what kinds of personality were typical in the USA of his day (half a century ago) . The results of his work show a Western mind at work in ways recognizably related to the models Aristotle described more than two millennia ago, though now with a quantitative emphasis that belongs to modern social science.
His empirical work, based on questionnaires or interviews, seeks not only to define what categories are relevant but also what frequency of distribution applies in each case.
To do this work, the social psychologist needs a theory which takes the form of categories that distinguish different types of personality. Because he is generating this theory for the first time, there is no accepted array of definitions available to him. It is not even clear how many categories ought to be distinguished. If there are too few, the research may fail to notice differences that are important within the population being studied. If there are too many, the results will multiply distinctions to no good purpose; users of the research will resist if they perceive notable overlaps between categories. In short, there is a considerable margin of arbitrariness in the fit between the definitions of categories and the data. It would seem excessive to claim definitiveness for such an analytical scheme, despite the earnest attempts of psychology as an academic discipline to be taken as a science parallel to physics rather than a humanities discipline akin to history. It makes better sense to see the following table as resuming one way of dissecting the relevant population.

Sample results of personality assessments for 415 US college students.
In the table given above, researcher Timothy Leary distinguished eight fundamental categories, but, true to earlier concern for adaptive / maladaptive behavior in the discipline of psychology, he describes each type in terms of four variables, represented on the innermost four concentric rings in the diagram.
1. The innermost ring identifies what can be said of this type of person’s behavior when it is clearly adaptive. Example: Type A, Managerial, seems “able to give orders.”
2. The next ring identifies the way this type of person would likely be perceived if others respond favorably. Example, Type A, Managerial, “likes responsibility,” is “a good leader,” seems “forceful.”
3. The next ring identifies the way this type of person risks being criticized if others react negatively. Example, Type A, Managerial, “manages others”
(with a negative implication)
, is “dominating” of others, seems “bossy.”

4. The outermost identifies the way this type of person is likely to be perceived if the behavior is clearly maladaptive. Example, Type A, Managerial, seems “dictatorial.”
The percentages added here reflect the distribution of these personality types among a sample of 415 US college students Leary tested in the early 1950s. The types in the lower half of the circle represented a small percentage of the students as a whole, but a much larger percentage of those who sought psychological counseling or therapy in the course of their studies. Nonetheless some from all categories sought such psychological support services because their habitual strategies for coping with life proved maladaptive .
[Source: Timothy Leary, Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality. New York: Ronald Press , 1957, 135-136.]
The uses of such research should be clear. Those responsible for dealing with groups of students can form some advance ideas about the array of types they are likely to encounter. Psychologists who might be consulted by students in difficulty will be attuned to the kinds of orientation which may prove adaptive or the opposite. Statistics of this kind may serve a wide number of administrative purposes in addition to augmenting scientific knowledge.
Study Questions:
1. Since there were several million college students in the USA at the time of Leary’s study, it seems reasonable to ask whether a sample of 415 individuals is an adequate basis for generalizing to the whole group. How could a researcher in this field be sure of dealing with “a representative sample”?
2. The largest group – Managerial (type A) – Autocratic (type P) – totals 45% of the overall population, but it involves two sectors of the circle and not just one. This research makes no attempt to say how many cases fall into one or the other. Is that a serious flaw?
Excerpt from Western Civilization with Chinese Comparisons, 3 rd ed.
(Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2010), CD-ROM, pp 1148-64.