Issues in Childhood Social Development

Harry McGurk

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138054868
• eBook ISBN: 9781351689625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1978, contemporary theory and research into childhood social development had demonstrated the necessity to re-appraise the notion that socialization is merely a process of shaping the behaviour of the child to fit the mores of society. It was now evident that, from the beginnings of post-partum life, the human infant is an active participant in social encounters, modifying the behaviour of others as well as being influenced by them. Hence, social development must be construed as an interactive process, to which the young organism makes his own dynamic contribution. This book, comprising a collection of original essays by prominent investigators in the field, considers issues arising from this modified perspective. It examines the biological basis of social development, the role of child-caretaker interaction, the significance of sex differences, the influence of peer relations and the perceptual-cognitive factors which contribute to childhood social development and to the developing child's understanding of society.

1 Human social development: an evolutionary-biological perspective

Anthony Ambrose

Orientation

The approach to be described in this chapter, based on evolutionary theory, implies that the relevance of biology for understanding the development of human social behaviour and action is far wider and more fundamental than is generally accepted in psychology. The term ‘biological’, when used in theoretical discussions of human behaviour, is still commonly equated with concepts such as ‘physiological’, ‘maturational’, ‘innate’, and even ‘animal-like’. Contrary to the limited view reflected by such uses of the term, it is argued that a biological approach has major implications for the whole manner of thinking about human social activity and developmental process. In particular, it provides an integrative conceptual framework within which the tremendous diversity and complexity of the phenomena can be ordered, it is a guide in the construction of models that underlie the formulation of research problems, and it indicates a variety of methodological approaches to different kinds of problem within the total framework. Along the way, furthermore, it points strongly towards a position that would view social development, not just as one aspect to be studied among several others such as the cognitive, perceptual, emotional and physiological aspects, but as an area that has profound theoretical significance for all aspects of human functioning.

Sources of resistance to a biological perspective

Before elaborating these themes it is as well to recognize that, historically, there has been intense bias against considering human social activity in any sort of biological terms. Since this bias continues at the present time, it is worth taking note of its various sources, each of which can now be seen to have taken a very partial, if not prejudiced, view of the social significance of biology. The common feature in all the objections that have been raised to ‘biologizing’ in this field is that they regard it as leading to conclusions that are socially unacceptable. The most extreme form of this was Spencer’s (1900) Social Darwinism which attempted to justify the ‘shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many in shallows and miseries’ in terms of an evolutionary theory that explains the emergence of species as the survival of the fittest in an endless struggle between predators and victims. Despite the logical defects of Spencer’s use of Darwin’s theory (Sorokin, 1928), it effectively bolstered opposition to the values on which social reformist and liberal movements were being built. Further depressing implications were drawn from the instinct theories of Freud (1930), McDougall (1908), Lorenz (1966), and others, which attributed to man in-built drives of a socially disruptive nature. The ideas that there is an animal as well as a finer side to human nature, and that social conflict and war are inevitable seemed implicit in these theories.

The understandable objections to these positions drew support from those schools of anthropology and sociology which took the view that, for purposes of studying human society and social development, man is not to be regarded as a biological organism at all. According to this view the differences between man and animals are decisive: not being a creature governed by innate behaviour patterns and with a unique capacity to conceptualize, man has his own special means of adaptation, namely culture. The information pool he has come to rely on is not carried by genes but is transmitted culturally, and the variability and rapid changes that occur in his way of life are due, not to natural evolution, but to cultural or social evolution. Fully compatible with this view was the outlook in psychology. Modelling itself on physics, its prime objective was to arrive by experimental means at generalizations about behaviour that held over wide ranges of the animal kingdom. With the upsurge of learning theory, and in keeping with a mechanistic viewpoint, the central focus of interest became the modifiability of behaviour. While due recognition was given to the biological status of the anatomical and physiological substrate of learning, this was treated in learning models essentially as a constant. There are many psychologists still who take no interest in biological considerations on the grounds that they cannot be altered and that the main aim in psychology is to understand how changes in behaviour take place or can be brought about.

Another more justifiable, reason for a negative attitude towards biological interpretations of human affairs has been a tendency on the part of some writers to draw conclusions that go beyond what the evidence warrants. Many of the recent books that have attempted to popularize ethology, summarized by Reynolds (1976), have taken principles that apply to social behaviour in animals and freely extrapolated them to the human level with little or no regard to whether or not the mechanisms involved are the same.

Toward modern behavioural biology

In relation to the perspective on human social development to be described, all of the biases just outlined against biological thinking will be seen to be misconceived. The reasons for this are of two kinds. First, over the last thirty years behavioural biology has itself been undergoing major transformation. As a result of the growing interaction of the two ‘classical’ schools of animal behaviour study, ethology and biopsychology, now leading to their integration, conceptual clarifications have taken place with profound implications for both comparative and developmental perspectives. Emphasis on the differences between species, even closely related ones, has shown that the possibilities of arriving at cross-species generalizations about mechanisms of behaviour and development are much more limited than was previously believed. Exposure of the misleading classification of behaviour as either innate or learned, inherited or acquired, has led to new appreciation of the complexities of organism-environment interaction that determines the course of development of social behaviour. Progress in behaviour genetics has further undermined the foundations of extreme positions regarding the causation of development, whether environmentalist or nativist. Dependence of the modifiability of an individual’s behaviour on genetically based potential and limitations which vary both across types of behaviour and across age is now recognized to be ubiquitous. These and other conceptual developments led to new assumptions which now underlie the modern biological outlook on behavioural development. Much of the negative bias towards it, especially in psychology, is based on assumptions that are now outdated.

A second kind of reason for misconceptions in psychology about the value of a biological approach has to do with failure to understand the scope of biology itself as a science. Concerned with all aspects of life in the animal and plant kingdoms from the simplest cellular forms to man and from molecular to ecological levels, it has a very large number of branches of study. Among the various traditional classifications of these, one of the most basic is into the fields of functional and evolutionary biology (Mayr, 1976). The questions asked in the former are of the kind ‘how does the organism and its parts operate?’; those in the latter are of the kind ‘how did it become like it is?’ and ‘what is this or that part for?’ The fields therefore necessarily differ greatly in outlook, basic concepts and method. Because traditional psychology has been so preoccupied with the study of behaviour modifiability through learning, its interest in what biology might have to contribute has been limited almost entirely to functional biology and particularly to neurophysiology. Thus it has looked towards one side of biological science and almost completely ignored the other. It is here proposed that evolutionary biology, far from being irrelevant to psychology in general and to developmental psychology in particular, forms the foundation for a biological approach to the study of human social development that will provide both rationale and direction for its theoretical and methodological progress.

The theory on which evolutionary biology is now based is known as neo-Darwinism, or the modern synthetic theory of evolution. This is really classical Darwinian theory which, since the 1920s, has been refined in the light of findings from population genetics (e.g. Mettler and Gregg, 1969). Darwin’s (1859) theory of the evolution of the form and function of the characters of any species explains it as the outcome of a process of natural selection acting on genetic variation. The outcome, however, is not uniform within a species. Within any population there is a considerable genetic variability. This is now understood as a necessary insurance such that if a major change in the environment were to take place, as has so often happened over geological time, at least some of the variations might be adaptive enough to the new selection pressures to ensure survival of the species.

Among the many branches of evolutionary biology are those that study social behaviour and social organization in animals, namely ethology, biopsychology and sociobiology. It has been demonstrated in these disciplines that characters of behaviour, like those of anatomy and physiology, are subject to the principles of neo-Darwinian theory. Not only can species-typical behaviour be used as a classificatory or taxonomic character (Lorenz, 1950), but it is to be explained as part of an adaptive strategy that enables species members to survive and reproduce in the face of natural selection pressures characteristic of the environment in which the species evolved (Tinbergen, 1965; Hinde, 1970; Wilson, 1976).

Now the important thing to notice about this kind of explanation is that, in order fully to understand how the evolutionary process works out for any particular species, five related but different kinds of knowledge are needed. First, if the behavioural properties of the species have evolved, then they must have an evolutionary history which can, in principle, be described. Second, if they are adaptive, it should be possible to show how they are, that is, what functions they serve. Furthermore, explanation is needed of the unique arrangement of behavioural features that have evolved in the form of that species. For this, knowledge is required, thirdly, of the nature of the natural environment that exerts the selection pressures, and, fourthly, of the nature of the genotypes on which these pressures operate. The operation of these two kinds of factor takes place, of course, during the life-cycle of each individual member of the species. The biological criterion of the adaptive effectiveness of each individual genotype is the reproductive success of the individual, which is necessary in sufficient numbers to ensure continuity of the species. This adaptiveness is tested ultimately in the adulthood of each member. But it is also being tested at all points in ontogeny up to that stage in the ability of the individual to survive, to thrive and to develop towards reproductive success. Complete understanding of the behavioural phylogeny of a species therefore requires knowledge of a fifth kind, namely of how behavioural ontogeny occurs under the influence of both genotype and environment. As Lehrman (1970) points out, to know what is the adult functional arrangement of behaviour towards which development takes place gives no indication of how the development is brought about from the starting point of the previous reproductive success, that is the zygote.

Thus the study of behavioural development falls into place as an integral part of the study of how the life of the species is maintained. Its context is the evolutionary process, which gives it ultimate meaning. Furthermore, this context entails a conception of the forces that shape behaviour and cause its development as being both environmental and genetic. Individual development then becomes meaningful in terms of the natural environment in which it occurs and the genotype of the individual. In man, perhaps more than any other organism, both of these kinds of factor vary across individuals. And although his environment is now totally different from that in which he evolved, this makes no difference logically to its status in the study of development. Culture, as part of our species’ adaptive strategy, may have changed that early environment out of all recognition; but its products still exert pressures of natural selection even though they also exert another kind of pressure as well, namely cultural selection.

This, then, is the framework for the biological approach to the study of human social development to be described in this chapter. It focusses attention on five related but different issues, namely, evolutionary history, adaptive function, the natural environment, genotype and developmental process. The methodological approach required to study them is quite different in each case. Space allows consideration only of the bare bones of each, and illustration of the kinds of findings and insights that result from their use will have to be highly selective.

Because the overall approach is in fact an amalgam of different approaches, appreciation of its nature requires a facility that is normally part of the training of biologists. This is a capacity to vary the perspectives or measuring scales of both time and space used in thinking about social development. The time scales range from geological periods through the life-cycle to the matter of seconds it takes to make an adaptive response. The space scales range from the whole world that now comprises the social ecology of man to the intra-uterine and organic environment in which the parts of the foetus emerge. In short, the perspectives needed go far beyond those that stem from the limitations of what it is possible to study in the laboratory. They are of a scope that reflects the real nature of man, from his species origins to his life as a biological and social individual of a very unique kind.

Evolutionary history

Problems and approach

Descriptive study of the evolutionary history of man’s social behavioural development is producing information relevant to questions about the following kinds of issue: (i) the origins and precursors of many of its features; (ii) the nature and extent of its uniqueness; (iii) the kinds of changes and trends that have led to the particular evolutionary outcome seen in man and (iv) the nature of the environments, physical and social, in which these changes took place. The changes concern not just specifically social features, but also structures, capacities and processes on which these depend. Descriptions of these kinds enable man to be seen against an evolutionary background instead of in isolation. They are also an essential preliminary for study of the processes of natural selection by means of which the basic character of his social behaviour and development evolved, to be considered in the following section.

Questions about the above issues refer essentially to the non-human primates that were in direct line with man as his evolutionary ancestors. These, including all the forms of hominid and early man, are of course extinct. Their characteristics have to be inferred, therefore, from indirect evidence. Such evidence comes from sources of two kinds: those living primates that are offshoots from the direct line but whose origin is the same as that of man’s ancestors, and palaeontological and archaeological finds of the fossils of hominids.

Hominid fossils, and the locations and geological levels at which they are found, reveal clear trends in the evolution of morphology and body function; and a surprising amount can also be inferred from this kind of data on broad evolutionary trends in behaviour and in social organization (Campbell, 1971). It is in the attempt to obtain a more detailed picture of these behavioural and social trends that the living primates are proving of such value. Their extensive study (e.g. DeVore, 1965) is now yielding indications of the nature of the ecological parameters within which man’s primate ancestry evolved, first in an arboreal forest environment and later in an open savannah environment. Furthermore, those primates that show some significant resemblance to the hominids, such as the common baboon in respect of its savannah environment, and the chimpanzee in respect to its physical similarities, can be used as animal models for some aspects of the social behaviour and organization of early man (Reynolds, 1976). When modern man is looked at in this perspective various unique features stand out, but in a context of many evolutionary continuities.

The fruitfulness of this approach ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on the contributors
• Editor’s introduction
• 1 Human social development: an evolutionary-biological perspective: Anthony Ambrose
• 2 The role of the mother in early social development: H. Rudolph Schaffer and Charles K . Crook
• 3 Early social knowledge: the development of knowledge about others: Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and Michael Lewis
• 4 The child’s perception of other people: Colin Rogers
• 5 Children and their friends: Willard W. Hartup
• 6 Sex-role differentiation in social development: Corinne Hutt
• 7 The nature of social development: a conceptual discussion of cognition: James Youniss
• 8 Young children’s understanding of society: Hans G. Furth
• Name index
• Subject index