Definitions in the social sciences

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Definitions in the social sciences

By: Decon_WBB

The Social Sciences: Definitions

The social sciences are the scientific study of the full

range of contemporary human personal and social behaviors and

the uses to which individuals put innate, learned, and

cognitive behaviors in the creation, development, and

maintenance of societies.

History as a social science is the scientific study of all

past human personal and social behaviors, and the uses to

which individuals have put innate, learned, and cognitive

behaviors in their creation, development and maintenance of

societies. Thus history is the scientifically ideographic

study of the causality involved in the development of

civilizations. As a subject, history embraces the totality of

past human sociocultural and cognitive experience.

To function as scientific disciplines, the social sciences

must be able to define the behavioral commonalties of their

subjects. That is, what are the common elements of societies?

What are the common elements of human behavior? This leads us

to the fundamental causality of history and the social

sciences, the causality of human behavior. That behavior is

predicated on two major elements: natural biological instincts

and socially learned behaviors predicated on the existence of

those instincts.

The primary innate elements of human behavior rest upon

but are emergent from the biological nature of man. Foremost

to understanding man is his existence as a thinking being with

open instincts. We are a thinking species; by our own

definition we are Homo Sapiens Sapiens. When we do not learn

or think due to injury, disease, or genetic defect, we are

classified as abnormal. However, what we learn is open to

environmental and social influences. That we must learn is

innate. What we learn is open and is constrained only by the

innate ability of the brain to perceive and abstract an

impression of the world. It is also innate that we are a

social species and . We organize ourselves into social groups.

If we do not socialize into a group, if we do not accept the

behavioral norms of that group, if we are socially

dysfunctional, if we are sociopathic, our behavior is treated

as abnormal. As a social species, it is innate that we must

behave within a social context. That we must learn via

socialization is innate. But as with learning and thinking,

the socialization pattern we learn is open. We learn the

values of the group and learn to aspire to them. Our

socialization can follow any one of many patterns that have

been created in response to environmental, social, or

cognitive causalities. The mean behaviors of humans are

learning, living as social beings within a group and thinking.

But there are abnormalities and extremes to human behavior. A

rule in science is that one cannot determine the true mean

from the extremes.

There is another innate behavior shared by all humans

which is not obvious. Because of our thinking and

socialization, because of the vast variety of things that we

can learn and think about, because of the vast number of

social systems that thinking and environmental pressures can

produce, we are functionally an open-innate behavioral

species. We have no innate instinctive behavior which causes

us to behave in limited and specific ways; our innate drives

are open. We have a set of open-ended behavioral incitements

which force us to learn to behave within the range of norms

which define what it is to be human. It is this range of

norms that we must understand. This capability of open-innate

behavior repudiates as a dead end, the linear logic of either

or thinking about nature versus nurture.

The socialization pattern we learn is the one which

created and maintains our social group. One of the chief

conditioners of the creation of the socialization pattern is

the existence in all social groups of status hierarchies.

Status hierarchies are known by several names. They are

called, class structures, or dominance hierarchies. Social

groups are maintained by status hierarchies. They are innate

to social systems. For every social group, some such status

structure exists. Without it the group would degenerate into a

mass of contending strangers. Within a social group,

individuals strive for a psychologically comfortable level of

status. They do this via the innate mechanism I label status

questing. One of the key elements which allows status

hierarchies to exist is the fact that normal individuals seek

status and grant deference to other members of their social

group. In the majority of societies, the process of status

questing is initiated and controlled by puberty rites.

The central idea of status grows from a group's

judgment of its survival needs. The individuals with skills

that promote that survival are granted status by the group.

And there is an element of deference granted to the status

holders. This deference provides the emotional glue that binds

the group together. It enhances the status holder's place

within the group and gains him privileges and responsibilities

which encourage his behavior. So there is a reciprocal

relationship between status and deference granted and duties

toward the survival of the group. Failure to maintain those

duties loses the individual status. Status deference extends

beyond the deference granted to individuals. The group itself

has status and is granted deference. This is the root cause of

altruistic behavior. The whole of the group is greater than

the sum of the individual parts and individuals grant

deference to the institutional whole.

The most fundamental status is that attained by personal

merit. The idea of merit and attainment is a function of the

group's value system. This merit can be based on many

criteria including experience, intelligence, personal

charisma, leadership experience, or physical prowess. However,

that prowess is not a function of intragroup aggression.

Aggression does not hold social groups together. Aggression

produces stress, and stress cause groups to fragment into

defensive subgroups. The key concept for the maintenance of

social groups is deference. Deference provides a willing

cooperation and acceptance of the leadership of those judged

to be superior.

The only functional definition of aggression is

intraspecies predation. Every society has sanctions in place

to protect itself from aggressive individuals because it

recognizes that aggression is abnormal. Remember, there is a

political myth that man is innately aggressive. There are

about 6 billion peaceful people in the world. A simple test

question: are you personally aggressive? Do you think and

behave like a Klingon? Only a small minority of people are

aggressive and predatory. They are the extreme. You can not

judge the mean by the extreme. As a basic rule, no social

species can exist as social when it is predatory on itself.

We distinguish between aggression and competition.

Competition is a complex aspect of play. Play is cooperative.

Competition teaches the group the capabilities of the members

and is the first step in the ranking process. It teaches the

group what the skills, temperament, and capabilities of each

member are. Physical prowess is a valid status marker only as

a means of affording the group protection from outside

dangers, not as a means of forcing the group to grant status.

Prowess is not aggression it is a display of defensive

capability.

However, as part of a learning species which is socialized

into belief and behavior patterns, most individuals can be

taught some level of aggressive behavior. The existence of

post-traumatic stress syndrome belies the myth of innate

aggression as normal. Far too many soldiers suffer

psychological damage from exposure to combat for it to be a

normal pattern of behavior. Individuals must be trained to see

the enemy as non-human, not of the group. Most warfare is long

range against impersonal objects, to help protect the

psychological stability of the soldier. We can not assume

society exists to block innate aggressive impulses, rather

some aspects of complex social groupings create aggressive

behavior and teach it as a norm.

Definitions in the social sciences

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