Frames of Mind

Ability, Perception and Self-Perception in the Arts and Sciences

Liam Hudson

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315461236
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Psicología
• Sous-sujet: Historia y teoría en psicología

Contrary Imaginations was an original and suggestive study of two types of intelligent schoolboy – the converger with his preference for science and the diverger with his leaning towards the arts. In Frames of Mind, originally published in 1968, Liam Hudson extends and enriches this classification and begins to detect the existence of two subcultures. Within these it is not merely a question of leanings towards science or the arts as a vocation: respect for authority, masculine and feminine tendencies, qualities of perception, and the prevalent myths about various callings are all involved. The result is a very human and well-grounded investigation of the profound forces (whether of social origin or based within their own personalities) which, in varying ways, influence young people in choosing a career.

1
In Introduction

Like its predecessor Contrary Imaginations, this book deals with differences in human intellect - differences, that is, in the ways in which people think, in the frames of mind they characteristically adopt. My first study, eleven years ago, concerned arts specialists and scientists; and this core of interest in the arts and sciences has remained. But the territory encompassed has widened, and is widening still. I now find myself dealing not only with the relation of intellectual development to personality, but also with the academic context in which such development takes place; not only with the reality of the individual’s situation, but also his perception of it.

The work reported in Contrary Imaginations revolved around a distinction of type. Two kinds of clever schoolboy were distinguished: the converger and the diverger. These differed not only in the bias of their mental abilities, but also in their choice between the arts and sciences, in their interests and attitudes, and in their expression of emotion. The converger excelled in the conventional intelligence test; specialized in physical science or classics; held conventional attitudes; pursued technical, mechanical interests in his spare time; and was emotionally inhibited. The diverger, by contrast, excelled at open-ended tests (tests, that is, which do not have a single right answer); specialized in the arts or in biology; held unconventional attitudes; had interests which were connected in one way or another with people; and, emotionally speaking, was uninhibited. Such differences have implications both for the study of career choice and of originality; and much of the second half of Contrary Imaginations was taken up with discussion of these.

Having described the differences between converger and diverger, and drawn out both positive and negative implications, I seemed to occupy something of a bridgehead position. There were a number of directions in which I could explore. This book gives an account of those explorations; and also attempts a synthesis, fitting the various elements of my work into a coherent pattern.

Disregarding local forays, I have five lines of research to describe. First, in Chapters 2 and 3, some work at key points in the correlational groundwork of convergence and divergence: relating these qualities, for instance, to authoritarianism and masculinity. Although less than breathtaking, the results introduce ideas germane to much of what follows. Second, in Chapters 4 and 5, boys’ perceptions of the arts and sciences. This is a track well-trodden; boys’ prejudices and presuppositions are huge and often amusing. Earlier studies fail, however, to relate these to the behaviour of the individuals who profess them. Here, I think, this weakness is overcome; and evidence about such ‘cultural stereotypes’ now dovetails with the rest. They also have ramifications, especially in the field of language, that no one foresaw. Chapter 6 reports a third group of studies that I was led into almost coincidentally. At first I tried to relate boys’ perceptions of themselves to certain external facts about them: their academic speciality, for example, and their success at school. Gradually the theme of self-perception gained momentum, and led on to a fourth set of experiments. These - described in Chapter 7 - were attempts to modify boys’ divergent skills. Here, it seemed, their self-perception, their sense of what behaviour was appropriate, was limiting the amount of mental fluency they were willing to reveal. Finally, in Chapter 8, two pieces of work of a more practical kind: a study of an experimental method of teaching, and an experiment in university selection. These, again, bear on the book’s recurring theme: the influence of the individual’s perception, both of his academic context and of himself, on the intellectual ability he is free to display.

Before getting down to the results, there are two other points. Over the last three years I have grown less alarmed by theory, and have begun to edge out of the role of the ‘simple-minded English empiricist breaking a lance for God, Harry, and the Cult of the Fact’.¹ So although, like Contrary Imaginations, this book is a research report, it moves - as the earlier work did not - towards a more general view of research and of human action.

Also my research has become more sociological, less exclusively psychological, in tone. Although I did not fully realize this at the time, Contrary Imaginations was in effect a comparison between two British sub-cultures. In studying the attraction of convergers towards science and divergers towards the arts, I was watching the crystallization of two contrasting ways of life.¹ Whether or not the present work achieves it, such a fusion of psychological and social modes of explanation is long overdue. Psychologists - especially British psychologists - still tend to take their stance with the biologists and assume that the causes of behaviour lie within the organism; while anthropologists and sociologists take it for granted that the roots of a human’s actions are to be found in the roles and expectations of the social order that surrounds him. Psychologists have relied on the analogy of the billiard ball; social scientists on that of dough or putty.²

The rest of this book represents an effort to live this distinction down; to construct a framework of explanation that leaves one free to draw on both psychological and social forms of information - if not with equal facility, at least without embarrassment. Eventually, this should lay the way open for a study of the human intellect in which the qualities of the individual and those of academic institutions - schools, universities, laboratories - are shown to interlock. The mental abilities and predispositions of the individual will be seen to evolve not in vacuo but in response to the demands that environments place upon him. Conversely, the institutions will be seen not as arbitrary or God-given, but as social mechanisms that individual men develop (and are continually changing) in order to fulfil their potentialities and to quiet their fears.

Notes

1 Worsley (1967).

1 The reasons for my blindness now seem discreditable. I had assumed that any issue - such as the ‘Two Cultures’ - over which Lord Snow and Dr Leavis had done battle must be specious. Though useful, this rule-of-thumb has its exceptions.

2 These of course are caricatures; few of us would now be caught red-handed with either. None the less, most students of human behaviour originate on one side or other of this divide, and show a marked preference for one of the two analogies. There is no question here of reducing psychology to sociology, or vice versa. I merely wish to ignore a line of academic demarcation, as troublesome as it is arbitrary-to do not biological science, nor social science, but human science.

2
Respect for Authority

In this chapter and the next, I want to explore the relation of convergence and divergence to two other dimensions of psychological relevance: authoritarianism and masculinity. These dimensions were chosen, not at random, but on the strength of certain assumptions about the nature of mental life. The first of these concerns the relation of the individual to intellectual authority. I would argue that in all constructive brainwork, a tension exists between the need to innovate and the weight of established principle and precedent. Kuhn has pointed to this in scientific research:

… only investigations firmly rooted in the contemporary scientific tradition are likely to break that tradition and give rise to a new one. That is why I speak of an ‘essential tension’ implicit in scientific research. To do his job the scientist must undertake a complex set of intellectual and manipulative commitments. Yet his claim to fame, if he has the talent and good, luck to gain one, may finally rest upon his ability to abandon this net of commitments in favor of another of his own invention. Very often the successful scientist must simultaneously display the characteristics of the traditionalist and of the iconoclast.¹

The tension exists, likewise, in the literary and visual arts. One illustration will serve - from sculpture. Many would accept that the foremost sculptural innovator during the first half of this century has been the Rumanian peasant, Brancusi. As so often with great innovators, his early work was brilliant in technique but derivative in style. Particularly he was influenced by Rodin: Sleeping Muse One (1906), for instance, might well be a piece of Rodin’s work. Rodin greatly admired Brancusi, and gave him the chance of working in his Studio. Brancusi reluctantly turned the offer down and continued to work on his own - remarking, tradition has it, that nothing grows under big trees’. His later versions of the Sleeping Muse theme - Sleeping Muse Two (1910), New Born (1915), Sculpture for the Blind (1924) - are works that Rodin could no sooner have produced than flown.

Both at school and at university this confrontation with intellectual authority is especially acute. It is made apparent to each of us, not through the malign motives of our teachers but from the force of our own ignorance, that if we want to succeed, our best course is to do what teachers and examiners expect of us. For this reason there exists a strong temptation not only to accept all authoritative judgements as given, but to accept the horizons of school and university syllabuses as the boundaries of all sensible inquiry. This massive, largely unavoidable insistence on authoritative knowledge faces the student with an unenviable choice: that of knuckling under and being right; or of being individualistic, self-sufficient, and wrong.

The gist of my argument is that convergers and divergers will differ in their reaction to this dilemma. The first will tend to plump for those routes through the academic system - mathematics, physical science, classics - in which the weight of accepted authority is greatest; the second, those in which this pressure is least. What is alluring to the converger (and repugnant to the diverger) about the exact disciplines is their exactitude. They are systems of thought from which both muddle and emotion have largely been removed. This aspect of the difference between convergers and divergers is described in a phrase of Frenkel-Brunswik’s:¹ convergers are ‘intolerant of ambiguity’ in intellectual matters, while divergers seem positively to seek it out. In their choice of a life’s work, convergers are drawn towards careers which hold the promise of crystalline exactitude and the ultimate exclusion of doubt. While for divergers, it is not only the emotional connotations of the arts that render them so attractive, but also their imprecision. V. S. Pritchett in his autobiography:

The only certainty is that I come from a set of storytellers and moralists and that neither party cared much for the precise.²

The Authoritarian

For half a century or more, experimentally minded teachers and teachers’ teachers have explored the influence on their pupils’ judgement of an appeal to authoritative sources.¹ After the Second World War the topic gained a new direction and impetus from the atrocities of Nazi Germany, and research on ‘authoritarianism’ over the last two decades has primarily been concerned with political beliefs. Adorno and his colleagues, for example, sought to demonstrate that anti-Semitism was merely one aspect of a more general illiberality of attitude; that the ‘authoritarian’ also tended to value obedience and respect in children, to dislike introspection or the display of gentleness, to be superstitious, to believe in political toughness and power, to show a preoccupation with other people’s sexual deviations, to spring from backgrounds which were both strict and socially insecure, to idealize his pa...