Happily Ever After?

Since the race began, humans have been wondering about humans, but the latest fashion is to wonder about how the wondering should be done. Last week, at universities across the U.S., teams of anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and psychiatrists were developing new techniques of wondering. Whatever else may be said about it, the field called "human relations" has become one of the most rapidly expanding endeavors in the postwar academic world.

The idea behind the new drive for knowledge is to study how humans behave, not only as individuals, but, more importantly, as members of a group or particular social setting. Eventually, the experts hope to find some basic laws about behavior which in turn may lead to the easing of various types of tensions. So far, the scholars admit, their efforts have been fumbling, and a good many of the experts are still hard put to say just exactly what human relations is. Among the centers that have mushroomed across the nation:

P: About the oldest is Yale's Institute of Human Relations, founded in 1929. "Its purpose," says Professor Mark May, "has been to correlate knowledge and coordinate techniques in related fields so that greater progress may be made in the understanding of human life." Though more or less autonomous, the Institute takes under its wing research projects from regular Yale professors. These include everything from an investigation into how people change their attitudes to the curing of some mental disorders by the re-education of emotions. Through such projects, the Institute hopes to collect a backlog of information that will tell man as much about himself as the physical sciences tell him about nature. "There is nothing more important," says Professor May, "than the ties that hold people together and the prejudices that hold them apart. There are always squeaky wheels. Some one has got to oil them."

P: The University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research includes not only human relations but a related field called "group dynamics"--a term first used by the late Psychologist Kurt Lewin, who believed that there are certain "structural properties of groups" that can be "analyzed objectively and measured accurately." Instead of merely observing existing conditions, the group-dynamics enthusiasts go in for controlled experiments, have spent more than a year, for instance, trying to determine what makes some children leaders in a group while others choose to follow. Meanwhile, the surveyors have made studies of various industries, e.g., why one department is inefficient and lazy while another is loyal and conscientious.

P: At the University of Miami.the human-relations department concentrates mostly on "Interrace and interfaith tensions," has some 400 students a year working in the field. After reading in the subject and learning various fact-finding techniques, students go out to examine such problems as the library and recreational facilities for Miami Negroes.

P:New York University's center also concentrates on racial and community problems, e.g., the plight of Manhattan's Puerto Ricans, the reasons for public-school dropouts, the services a church might perform in a changing neighborhood

P: At the University of Pennsylvania, scholars and students have studied such problems as the integration of Negroes into the police force. Like Michigan, it lays its major emphasis on intergroup tensions. Too often, says Director Martin P. Chworowsky, social workers and psychiatrists have stressed only the needs and personalities of individuals. The task for human relations: "Teaching people to see themselves as a member of a group and then as a representative of the whole."

P: At Harvard's Laboratory of Social Relations, says Director Samuel A. Stouffer, "We have worked with dogs, rats, pigeons, myna birds, parakeets, fish, and even people." For one thing, the laboratory has been trying to learn how fish, rats and humans make decisions. It has also observed committees at work, has tried to determine how many members a committee should have (best number: five), and what types of people are likely to dominate. The most ambitious project in the works: a six-year study of various groupings of Navahos, Zunis, Spanish-Americans, Mormons and Texans, who happen to be jumbled together in one small area in New Mexico.

P: One of the youngest centers is at Boston University, but it has already conducted a host of strange, new experiments. It has investigated the relations between the eleven ethnic groups in New Bedford,* the conflicts between the older and younger members of a Wellesley-Newton women's club, the relations between the seeing and the blind. In the course of the last investigation, says Director Kenneth Benne, "We wanted to set up a discussion group which would overcome the barriers between the seeing and the non-seeing. So we suggested that all seeing people put on blindfolds. Before that, they had been the ones who dominated the discussions. But with blindfolds, they were the insecure ones, and the blind people then spoke with authority. This is a whole area that has never been explored. We don't know how much people depend on visual cues for recognition."

Will this sort of thing eventually help man to live more happily ever after? The answer to that question, say the experts, is years away. In the meantime, the field of human relations labors under one disadvantage: "There is," complains Michigan's Robert Kahn, "nothing we can say that somebody does not know already. If we make a study and say that it appears that under certain conditions a certain organization functions better when its leader studies every problem carefully before tackling it, people will say, That's nothing new. I've always said, "Look before you leap." ' But if we say that our studies show that the organization functions better when the leader is a man of immediate action, the same people will say, 'That's nothing new. I've always said, "He who hesitates is lost." ' Every generalization we can make is already in the folklore, but--and this is important--so is its opposite."

* Yankee, French, Portuguese, Irish, Jewish, Italian, Polish, Scandinavian, Greek, English, German.

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