What Everybody Knows--Or Do They?

Nothing raises eyebrows faster than the idea that science can find "laws" of human behavior. Human differences are too vast for generalizations that apply with any exactitude to individuals. Yet hard and useful evidence about the way most people are most likely to act most of the time is slowly being gathered by the young "behavioral sciences" --anthropology, psychology, sociology and related fields. Unhappily, much of the evidence is shrouded in jargon. Happily, nonscholars may turn this week to Human Behavior: An Inventory of Scientific Findings (Harcourt, Brace & World; $11), the first plain-English compendium of behavioral science's best-tested propositions.

1,045 Findings. Financed by a wide variety of sponsors, including General Electric and the Carnegie Corporation, Human Behavior is the massive work of two highly literate behavioral-scientists, University of Chicago Psychologist Gary Steiner and Sociologist Bernard Berelson, vice president of the Population Council. By sifting hundreds of case studies and experiments, Berelson and Steiner have produced 1,045 concise findings "for which there is some good amount of scientific evidence." Many only give a scientific stamp to "what everybody knows," but others make concrete what is generally only suspected, prove (or disprove) folklore, or substantiate the obvious with interesting evidence. Samples:

> People see what they "need" to see. The pupil of the eye dilates on seeing pleasant things, contracts at distasteful things. The more ambiguous the view, the more it rouses preconceptions--as in the Rorschach test, for example. Seeing is so subjective that coins of the same size look bigger to poor children than to rich children. suggestible subjects: children aged seven to eight, girls and women, people with higher IQs.

> Learning sticks better when the learner gets a fast, meaningful reward (the principle of programmed instruction). Rest periods make learning more effective: six ten-minute periods of hard practice usually get better results than one full hour. The best way to remember something is to go to sleep right after learning it.

> Within families, average intelligence rises from the first-born to the last-born.

Summer and fall babies do better in school, probably because they have a general health advantage. Children taught two languages from the start are handicapped in both. Although IQ scores partly reflect cultural influence, and to that degree can be raised by training, they usually remain quite stable after the age of six or seven. Intelligence is mostly inherited; the problem is spurring a child to use all he has. -- Highly creative work is produced early in life--typically, in the 30s.

>Psychotherapy has not yet been proved more effective than general medical counseling in treating neurosis or psychosis. In general, therapy works best with people who are young, wellborn, well educated and not seriously sick. The more like the therapist, the more curable the patient.

> Premarital sexual relations are al lowed in a clear majority of societies, but extramarital relations are almost universally condemned. Every known human society forbids incest, but nearly all have a recognized procedure for divorce, which in the U.S. reaches a peak around the third year of marriage. A curious cementing factor in societies allowing free mate selection is that partners tend to complement each other's psychological needs--for example, "a highly hostile individual would seek to mate with a highly abasing person."

> Individuals tend not to hold out against unanimous group judgments, even when the group is clearly in error. Conversely, humans are most loyal to small groups of peers. Strikes are more common, for example, in industries that tend to be insulated from the larger community, such as mining and lumbering. Similarly, people prejudiced against one ethnic group tend to be prejudiced against others, and do not even know the depth of their prejudice. >"Tolerance" is only slightly promoted by more information. Communication of facts is generally ineffective against predispositions. Even small social changes, if undesired, cannot be effected without heavy social and personal cost. Opinions, attitudes and beliefs usually change only when people are forced into new group loyalties that overpower their old ones. Even so, group culture sticks: "Whatever was learned early in life tends to resist change, and whatever was learned late in life changes most readily."

Depressing Deceiver. What emerges from their findings, conclude Authors Berelson and Steiner, is a dour view of Western man--not the Greek lover of reason, the Christian believer in redemption, or the Renaissance liberator of human power, but a depressing creature with a vast talent for distorting reality because of psychological needs. "Behavioral-science man" thinks what fits his wishes, says what pleases his peers, avoids conflict and protects his neuroses. He votes with his friends, wants what he has to work for, and thinks that his group or organization ranks higher than it does. If threatened with disillusionment, he simply slides into fantasy --and reality pays the price.

All this he can do with supreme skill because of his unique capacity for language and symbolization. Unlike animals, man adjusts to reality by renaming it on his own terms. For him, the word is the end as well as the beginning. Thus he survives lack of talent, loss of position, the law's delay, unbearable pressure, and compromise of integrity. As Poet T. S. Eliot put it:

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

Yet this image is far from complete, as Berelson and Steiner are the first to point out. A certain "richness," they admit, "has somehow fallen through the present screen of the behavioral sciences"--the joy and pain of life, the variety of men, the central human concerns of love, hate, death, ethics and courage. But the image is bound to change; the behavioral sciences are not yet a century old. In the end, say the confident authors, the new sciences will make "an indispensable contribution to the naturalistic description of human nature--the contribution of hard knowledge tested by the methods of science."

* Hypnotism works. It can demonstrably produce organic effects, such as blisters caused by telling the subject that he has touched something hot. Hypnosis may be the ideal anesthetic since it has no aftereffects. The most

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