16). Organizational psychology

Industrial psychologists found themselves working closely with engineers to analyze the basic characteristics of work in order to give each individual worker a job. A job maximized his human capabilities, team-work among employees and overall efficiency. Thus “time-and-motion” studies were carried out to determine how competent workers actually perform a given job.

But psychologists recognized that the quality of individual member’s work is related to his image of the organization as a whole. The organization is a complex social system.

The difference between the industrial psychologist and the organizational psychologist is twofold. Traditional questions such as training, job analysis and so on are treated by organizational psychologists as being interrelated.

The organizational psychologist has begun to be concern with a new series of questions. The questions are derived from the recognition of the system characteristics of organizations.

17). Development of attachment

There are three theories of attachment.

Imprinting. It has been suggested that human infants may form their social attachment. The basic social responses of the infant – sucking, clinging and smiling – are elicited by the mother. Experimental verification with humans is obviously unattainable for ethical reasons.

Learning theory. The infant becomes attached to the mother because her face and form have been associated with the alleviation of hunger and thirst. Gradually through this process child learns to love his mother and this love generalized to other.

Harlow experiments with infant monkeys and two surrogate mothers. By the end of 165-day period, the baby monkeys were spending an average of sixteen hours per day on the cloth mother as compared to an average of only one a half hours on the wire mother. Clearly the need for contact comfort produced more of an affiliation response than the need for hunger reduction.

A number of studies show that social deprivation causes severe disturbances.

18). Social comparison.

Festinger believed people to seek out others who are similar to themselves in order to evaluate their reactions. If another person is similar to you, his reactions will provide an accurate basis for your own judgements.

According to Festinger, a person attempts to reduce any discrepancies that exist between himself and the others. There are strong pressures for the group to arrive at a uniform reaction.

Social comparison theory clearly provides one explanation of why subjects who are expecting painful electric shocks would wish to affiliate. Most students can use to test the appropriateness of their reactions. The subjects will tend to refer to the experience of the others.

Once the social comparison process begins to operate, there is a tendency toward persuasion and resultant uniformity of reaction.

19). Interpersonal attraction

Surveys have shown that people do not rank physical attractiveness as very important in their liking of other people. In actual pairing off people tend to end up with partners who closely match them in physical attractiveness.

If we cannot all be beautiful, some of us might be able to get on by our competence. The evidence, however, is mixed. It may be that some people are just too perfect and that when they commit some blunder, they become more human in our eyes and more likable. We tend to like people who like us and reject those who reject us.

If all else fails in our guest to get someone to like us, the simple persistence might be our only recourse. Newcomb’s experiment shows that regardless of whether low or high similarity had been the basis for room assignment, roommates came to be attracted to one another.