Hello, my name is Eric Mercer. I am an industrial and organizational psychology practitioner in the southwest Kansas area.
In News of the World, by Paulette Jiles, Johanna is a 10-year-old girl who has spent the last four years of her life with the Kiowa tribe and who fully identifies with them and shares the general values and beliefs of the tribe.
The concepts of identity, social norms, values, and conformity are present throughout story. We'll look at some of these together in a larger context.
The influence of institutions on individual behavior can have an effect on the way people select, organize, and interpret information. Both formal and informal behavioral institutions and socially shared mental models, regarding individual development, can have a profound influence on how reality is interpreted, and behaviors applied. Mental models can be understood as a system of rules of thought combined with images of desired situations, such as ideologies. Therefore, shared mental models are themselves a type of institution.
Conventions are socially shared systems of rules of thought or behavior (i.e., institutions) involving, among other aspects, conformity with conformity. The meaning of conformity with conformity is simply the alignment of an individual’s values and beliefs with the actual or expected shared values and beliefs of other group members. Therefore, the expectation of individuals to adopt a particular convention plays a pivotal role in leading other members of a group to also adopt it.
We can see some aspects of these conventions in the following quote about Johanna. “She never learned to value those things that white people valued. The greatest pride of the Kiowa was to do without, to make use of anything at hand; they were almost vain of their ability to go without water, food, and shelter.” We see whatever conventions Johanna may have learned in the first six years of her life were, by necessity of living with the Kiowa, replaced with new conventions.
There are many social forces capable of pushing individuals toward what has been previously outlined as conformity with conformity. A couple examples include inevitability, and self-fulfilling prophecy.
Inevitabiliy is such that individuals in the current development convention do not perceive of any possible alternatives to their situation. For example, some aspects of a dominant convention may be quite common to any alternative view and could then be perceived of as inevitable. In some situations people may struggle to imagine alternatives outside of a very limited set of options.
There are times when it may be beneficial for a person to make the choice of working with other people. When choice depends on expectations, there is the potential of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Shared mental models may be too generic to produce precise expectations but would likely still be capable of creating expectations about the direction of change in the kind of structural transformations that may (or may not) potentially occur. In other words, if people believe that the shared majority opinion will, or is likely to, take place (i.e., become a self-fulfilling prophecy), then they may adopt the same system of rules about development others have seemingly accepted, or are likely to accept.
Conventions and social norms, as detailed types of socially shared systems of behavioral or mental rules may have a profound impact when related to development. I hope everyone will take the time to read through Paulette Jiles’ book, News of the World, and when doing so, keep in mind some of the concepts explored here and perhaps relate them to the story that unfolds.
