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The Journal of Social
Psychology
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There Is Something New in
the World of Social Science
Conceptualizations: A Review
of Place
H. Joel Jeffrey a
a Northern Illinois University
Accepted author version posted online: 01 Jul
2013.Published online: 26 Jul 2013.
To cite this article: H. Joel Jeffrey (2013) There Is Something New in the World
of Social Science Conceptualizations: A Review of Place , The Journal of Social
Psychology, 153:5, 623-628, DOI: 10.1080/00224545.2013.791790
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2013.791790
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The Journal of Social Psychology, 2013, 153(5), 623–628
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
BOOK REVIEW
There Is Something New in the World of
Social Science Conceptualizations:
A Review of Place
H. JOEL JEFFREY
Northern Illinois University
Place (2nd ed.),by Peter G. Ossorio. Ann Arbor, MI: The Descriptive Psychology
Press, 2012. ix+187 pp. ISBN: 978-1-897700-09-5. $25.00, paperback
PETER G. OSSORIO’S PLACE IS AN EXTRAORDINARILY valuable treat-
ment of the central issues in social psychology: person in society, influence of
community and culture on behavior, cultural relativity of worlds, social con-
struction, identity, social interaction, cross-cultural interaction and the limitations
thereof, identity, choice in the face of conflicting motivations by persons who
simultaneously are members of many distinct cultures (ethnic, religious, national,
work, family, etc.). It is an invaluable resource for researchers and teachers in any
of the social or psychological disciplines. Place is something we have never had
before: A systematic, comprehensive articulation of the core concepts of the social
sciences: person, behavior, and the world, and aspects of those concepts, such as
reasons, motivation, and the interaction of person and community.
For many readers with a background in the social sciences, it can also be
extremely difficult. Not, however, for any of the usual reasons; the exposition is
clear, the writing straightforward, the concepts not unusual, abstruse, or technical.
It is difficult because it is a kind of work that is relatively rare in the field:
conceptual analysis. Specifically, it is a careful, in-depth, precise elucidation of
what we mean by the words that define psychology, including social psychology:
Address correspondence to H. Joel Jeffrey, 606 S. Washington St., Wheaton, IL 60187, USA;
Jeffrey@cs.niu.edu (e-mail).
623
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624 The Journal of Social Psychology
person, behavior, world, and the more specific ones such as “influence” and
“social context.”
Why would a social psychologist want such an analysis? For two primary
reasons. First, to the extent that the concepts involved in a theory or experiment
are unclear or ill-defined, the implications of the experiment—generalizability,
applicability outside the lab or the study boundaries—cannot be identified. For,
example, a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(Moss-Racusina et al., 2012) purports to show that scientists are subject to subtle
sexism, but “subtle sexism” is measured by a scale that conflates four distinct
concepts: sexist attitudes towards women, awareness of gender-related issues
in society, understanding of another’s emotional state, and political attitudes.
In Nobel-prize-winning work, investigators gave subjects a description of person-
ality traits and then asked them how likely it was that the person was one of several
occupations—and then assumed, with no data or justification, that the subjects
interpreted the question as a probability (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974, Kahneman
& Tversky, 2000). The failure to resolve the conceptual ambiguity has resulted in
interesting, intriguing, valuable data, whose meaning is completely unclear. It is
not enough to collect good data and do good statistical analysis of it; the meaning
of the concepts in the theories and the experiments must be clear.
The second reason is the problem of independent variables. Animal behavior-
ists have no accepted definition of animal behavior (Levitis, Lidicker, & Freund,
2009) and it matters. As Levitas et al. point out, one cannot discuss dolphin sen-
tience without a clear specification of the meaning of “sentient.” The same holds
for human behavior, even more dramatically and with greater impact on the value
of the research for human good. Behaviorists equate behavior with physical move-
ment (which is popular but fails to deal with such phenomena a playing chess
on a board and playing chess via email); cognitive psychologists define it as the
physical effects of internal cognitive processes (though they are silent as to the
meaning of “internal”); in social psychology there is little discussion of its mean-
ing at all, taking it as a primitive term and focusing relationships between it and
social context.
What we all do, of course, is the best we can: we use our intuition about
behavior and social context. Since, just as animal behaviorists recognize cases
of behavior even though they cannot define it (Levitis et al., 2009), we recog-
nize human behavior and social context without the need for explicit conceptual
clarity, and some of the time that is sufficient. But not always. When things get
complex, we need that conceptual clarity, because without it we have no way to
identify what could be dependent and independent variables, or what relationships
between them could obtain. As social psychologists we might, for example, study
the influence of group pressure on cheating in college, but we would recognize it
as nonsensical to count scrupulous adherence to all the rules as cheating.
Consider the newest sub-discipline of social psychology, social neuroscience.
A neurological study of compulsive behavior, including compulsive sexual
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Jeffrey 625
behavior (Bostwick, Hecksel, Stevens, Bower, & Ahlskog, 2008) is a clear exam-
ple: the neurology, the behaviors, and the social context are all important factors.
Such a study must include an identification of the independent variables involved
in the phenomenon. While it is relatively straightforward to gather fMRI data
from a person presented with sexual stimuli, the meaning and value of that data
is almost entirely dependent on the social neuroscientist’s ability to identify, and
specify the values of, the factors related to sexual activity in humans, which are
significantly more complex than among animals (as far as is known): hedonic,
ethical, and prudential reasons to engage or not engage in sex with the particu-
lar partner; existence of relationship that per se provides reason to not engage in
the act, including the obvious case of a monogamous marriage but also including
parent-child, adult-child, priest-parishioner, supervisor-subordinate, etc.; affirma-
tion of one’s status in one’s community as a sexually desirable person; pleasure
of the novelty; and so on.
Without a clear formulation of the concept of human behavior, incorporat-
ing at a minimum a) a formulation of behavior, as contrasted with mere physical
movement, b) reasons for action, c) self-concept and identity, d) relationships, e)
the logical relationship between relationships and behaviors, and f) community,
including status, social practices, and cultural principles, the social neuroscientist
has no way to systematically identify the potential independent variables. We learn
in grammar school that, as scientists, we must control our variables; unarticulated
variables cannot be identified or controlled. Place is the necessary articulation of
the variables of human behavior in a social context.
At first glance, we might expect Ossorio to have proceeded by giving defi-
nitions. The problem is that, as the philosopher John Wilson (1963) points out,
it is almost never possible, outside of narrow technical specialties. Fundamental
concepts cannot be defined—or they would not be fundamental. It is not due to
accident, oversight, laziness, or inability that we have no agreed-on definition of
behavior; it is a fundamental concept, and as such could not have a definition.
There could not be a reduction of “behavior” to something else, such as set of
physical processes or effects of mental causes, because then we could replace
any instance of the word “behavior” with that definition—behavior would not be
fundamental.
Definitions, however are only one way of clarifying concepts. What Ossorio
does in Place is proceed in a manner most of us first encountered in high school
geometry: present the concepts in a set of about 86 sentences, called maxims,
each of which articulates a specific logical relationship between two or more of
the fundamental concepts. High school students, when they first discover that the
“definitions” of point, line, and plane are circular, are distressed. Then, as they use
the concepts, they acquire mastery of them, and see that point, line, and plane are
three inter-related concepts, and the relationships between them are to be used to
elaborate implications, called theorems. The maxims look like axioms, but they
are something different (though related): each is a reminder of some aspect of the
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626 The Journal of Social Psychology
relationship of person, behavior, world, and community. Or, as Ossorio sums it
up, of a person’s place in the scheme of things.
The maxims are divided into nine sections: “Person and World;” “Behavioral
Choice;” “Value and Behavioral Choice;” “Stability and Change;” “Person and
Community;” “Interaction of Persons;” “Person and Self;” “Limits, Constraints,
and Limitations;” and “Norms, Baselines, and Burdens of Proof.” Each is fol-
lowed by commentary explaining and amplifying the relationship. We illustrate
with two maxims that deal with a concept at the heart of social psychology,
inter-personal relationships.
Maxim B9 elaborates the logical connection between relationships and
behavior:
If A has relationship R to C, his behaviors will be an expression of R, unless 1) A is
acting on a different relationship, which takes precedence, 2) A doesn’t recognize R
for what it is, 3) A is unable to do so, 4) A mistakenly believes he is doing so, or 5) A
makes a mistake in how he engages in the behavior. (p. 35)
So for example, one might hear someone say, “It was our anniversary, so we went
out to dinner,” an everyday statement of the logic of B9: “I have the relationship
‘married’ with him/her, and an expression of that is to celebrate our anniversary,
which we did by going out to dinner.” Or, the behavior of celebrating anniversary
is a straightforward expression of the relationship, and no further explanation is
called for; citing the relationship constitutes a full explanation.
This maxim illustrates something else requiring clarification: in form, the
maxims closely resemble factual assertions. Because of this, it is very easy to mis-
take Place for folk psychology—i.e., a collection of crudely or informally stated
assertions about what people actually do. It’s important to clear up this natural
misconception. To do that, recall geometry. The sentence, “The angle bisectors
of an isosceles triangle meet at a point on the bisector of the third angle” is not
a factual assertion; it is not the kind of thing that can be verified by measure-
ment of physical triangles. It is an identification of a relationship between certain
angles, points, and lines. One could of course do measurements on triangles to see
if the statement of the relationship is “right,” but what such measurements show
is whether the actual object is an isosceles triangle. One cannot have an isosceles
triangle without the angle bisectors satisfying the condition identified. Similarly,
Maxim B9 says that it is a logical impossibility for A to have relationship R to
C and for A’s behaviors with respect to C to fail to satisfy the 5-part condition
identified. If A does something with respect to C that is not an expression of R,
then we know, with no further investigation, that one of the 5 clauses will apply.
What we do not know is which clause, for a particular case, or the statis-
tics of occurrence of each in a given population. That, of course, is why we do
empirical investigation, just as we could do an empirical investigation of the rel-
ative frequencies of isosceles triangles of various sizes among a population of
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Jeffrey 627
physical shapes. Similarly, the maxim tells us nothing about which behaviors are
expressions of which relationships in which cultures. Further, with this logical
connection between relationships and behaviors articulated, we are now in a posi-
tion to devise theories based on the conceptual relationship. One might theorize,
for example, about the frequency of occurrence of the various clauses of Maxim
B9 in some ethnographic group, or that the various clauses occur with different
frequencies in group G than in group H, etc. It is for this reason that one percep-
tive reader commented, “This is not theory or set of facts; it’s a prolegomena to
psychological theories of all kinds.”
One of the most commonly encountered facts about relationships is that they
change. The logic of relationship change is formulated by Maxim D8, which
Ossorio calls the Relationship Change Formula: if A has relationship R1 with
respect to C, and A engages in behavior B with respect to C that is a violation of
R1 but expresses relationship R2, A’s relationship to C will change in the direction
of R2 (that is, will become a new relationship R3 that is more like R2 than is R1).
This maxim articulates the logic of how acquaintances (R1) become friends
(R2), how potential customers (R1) become actual ones (R2), how enemies
(R1) become allies (R2), how graduate students (R1) become colleagues (R2),
and so on. The range of application of this particular maxim is extraordinary. And
as with B9 (and all the others), it is silent on all empirical issues: which behaviors,
which relationships, in which cultures/subcultures, how many behaviors produce
how much change, etc. All of these are what we theorize about and do empirical
studies of.
Drawing on Place and a parametric analysis of the concept of human behav-
ior (Ossorio, 2006), the author and a colleague from psychology have devised
a new conceptual and formal framework for analyzing economic decisions, the
homo communitatis paradigm (Jeffrey & Putman, 2013). The framework is in the
form of seven principles, which collectively articulate the entire range of factors
that affect choice, including all aspects of individual behavior and of the social
context—the communities—the actor is a member of. Traditional economic anal-
ysis is shown to be a special case of homo communitatis analysis in which key
variables are omitted. Using the principles, we show that experimental results
such as loss aversion, framing effects, mental accounting, and judgment biases
(Ariely, 2008; Kahneman & Tversky, 2000) are not irrational, and that the appar-
ent irrationality is in every case an illusion arising from incomplete specification
and control of independent variables elucidated in the principles (see our paper
which goes into these implications in much greater detail than is appropriate here
[Jeffrey & Putman, in press]).
Place is not entirely without flaw. While the maxims themselves are impec-
cable and have been used by a number of psychologists, including social
psychologists, for a number of years, in a few instances the commentary is some-
what argumentative in style. For example, in discussing the problem of universally
insisting on empirical verification of every statement, Ossorio correctly notes that
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628 The Journal of Social Psychology
doing so is a logical impossibility, but characterizes the insistence as “fanatical”
and “irrational.” Addressing discussions by philosophers of intractable foundation
problems in psychology and showing how they have been resolved in Place, he
contemptuously refers to academic philosophers and psychologists as “dolce aca-
demica.” While Ossorio’s logic and his criticisms are well-founded (as is amply
demonstrated in the work), in my judgment his criticism would be more helpful,
and for that matter more powerful, were it not presented in such a style.
However, such flaws are occasional at most, and flaws only of style, not sub-
stance. Ossorio has accomplished something that has long been recognized as a
crucial need, but which has been missing for so long many of us have lost sight of
its central importance: the articulation of the logical foundation of the science of
behavior, in all its aspects. No social psychologist should be without it.
AUTHOR NOTE
H. Joel Jeffrey is affiliated with the Department of Computer Science, Northern
Illinois University. His research interests include artificial intelligence, real world software
engineering, and mathematical models of biological, economic, and social systems. He has
had extensive experience collaborating with psychologists in these areas.
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Bostwick, J. M., Hecksel, K. A., Stevens, S. R., Bower, J. H., & Ahlskog, J. E. (2008).
Frequency of new-onset pathologic compulsive gambling or hypersexuality after drug
treatment of idiopathic Parkinson disease. Mayo Clinic Proceedings,84, 310–316.
Jeffrey, H. J., & Putman, A. O. (in press). The irrationality illusion: A new paradigm for
economics and behavioral economics. Journal of Behavioral Finance.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (2000). Choice, values, and frames.NewYork,NY:
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Levitis, D. W., Lidicker, W., & Freund, G. (2009). Behavioural biologists don’t agree on
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Ossorio, P. G. (2006). The behavior of persons. Ann Arbor, MI: The Descriptive
Psychology Press.
Moss-Racusina, C. A., Dovidio, J F., Brescoll, V. L., Grahama, M. J., & Handelsman,
J. (2012, September 17). Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students.
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Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974, September 27). Judgment under uncertainty:
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Received March 27, 2013
Accepted March 29, 2013
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