Psychology 204 #29

it's psychology 204 with dr. Richard W husband and here now is dr. husband we were talking on Wednesday about various personality tests there are others besides the ones that I mentioned that I'm not going into detail on for example we have tests on dominance tests on social intelligence on fair-mindedness and certain other ones by the way I'd like to say that I am sorry that these tests are not available through the college we got quite a response when we spoke about the strong vocational interest test but we can't furnish any service on some of these other others that I have mentioned I would like to make an announcement for the benefit of the people who are taking this course for credit the examination as you know is going to be Thursday evening at 7 o'clock in the same room you had the midterm the assembly room in Marston Hall or quite commonly known as engineering hall that's the same room the campus class at this hour will also be having its examination in the examination will consist of 125 multiple-choice questions will be about 40 general review questions covering the whole book there will be a rather broad nature then the other 85 will be on materials since the midterm 85 on the materials since the midterm and 40 broad ones covering the whole course I'm going to have a general review section Thursday afternoon at 3:30 and that will also be in the Assembly Room of Marston auditorium and if any of you were people wish to come in to Ames a little bit early and hear the book reviewed chapter by chapter opportunity for you to ask questions just come in anytime you want oh you can you can't make it 3:30 drop around at 4:00 or 4:30 you may miss some of the early chapters that come in whenever you want oh and also for those of you who may have missed a class or two I will have my complete notes in the office before 3:30 so if you wanted to come in maybe 2:30 or 3:00 o'clock if you missed one or two probably you can look over my typewritten notes in 10 or 15 minutes for each class you missed just come in anytime after 2:00 let's say for that now all right today we're going to deal with a couple of social problems this parallels chapter 16 in the textbook the two problems which we're going to deal with today are those of marriage and delinquency or criminality from a practical standpoint perhaps neither of these will apply to you I imagine a pretty good share of the listening and viewing audience is already married and when I say some things about picking out a mate may not be very practical for a lot of you and it is a little more practical for most of the students here in the campus of college age and I hope for neither the students here nor the audience outside will you come to close in to close contact with criminality any rate it's very interesting to look some of these things over now we know that there's a very rapidly rising divorce rate somewhere around one marriage in three to one marriage and five ends in a breakup that's much greater than it used to be and let in let's say your father's our grandfather's time now I wonder why oh we may grant that it may be better in some rare instances to get divorced than to spend a whole lifetime of unhappiness just to avoid getting divorced but it seems to me that you could pin down the causes of divorce into two general classes one of them that the person didn't get the right mate and the second that he perhaps was not a right made himself in that he didn't try to make a success of the marriage in fact the author of the text has got a very good statement Roux says this that successful marriage depends both upon finding the right person and being the right person yourself you know the last half I think has got real food for thought I think an awful lot of the divorces that occur nowadays are because a person runs to a divorce lawyer the instant there's a little bit of friction if things don't go right to his or her satisfaction without any effort to make an adjustment he will seek a divorce no your work in your job we try to think how you can do your job better you wonder what your employer or your boss wants you try to please him you think of your job and try to improve yourself constantly if things aren't going well you take stock of yourself well why not in the marriage situation now once in a while somebody might might ask about as as follows well about picking the right mate this is an emotional problem this isn't like choosing a job where I can take tests and find out my aptitudes personality traits and so on I fall in love with some girl even if she's somewhat different from me and their background and so on what am I going to do about it well this is the way I feel about that that if you look into a thing when you're beginning to get pretty interested in somebody and realize that their background or their personality traits are so much different from your own that chances aren't too good at a successful marriage you can stop it and keep it on a level of friendship but just hold yourself back from falling in love no we have an old proverb that opposites attract well of course we know that's true in the field of magnetism gravity and so on but it is not true in the field of personality matching or in marital happiness I'd like to revise that and put it this way that opposites do not attract but opposites may temporarily fascinate you that is let's say a college student is majoring in what we call industrial economics in this canvas or it might be called business administration on another campus well his he's going into business and his primary aim is in a money-making field now suppose he meets some girl who's rather aesthetically inclined or perhaps this girl is going into nursing or into social work as an occupation or at least she's taking training along those lines prior to getting married well now if she's going into nursing or social work she's in in a field no we're doing good to other people rather than making money yourself is the important aspect now you may think it's it's real swell when you meet a girl it has this very different personality from yourself and she attracts you very much but in the long run I think you'll find that there are enough fundamental differences so that you wouldn't get along very well for a lifetime now you might ask where can we get data on the proper marriage partner well data that you may use yourself comes from studies of people already married now there's one study which was done by doctor Stanford University he's one I mentioned before when he talked about these very gifted children and what he got was this he got two hundred happily married couples two hundred unhappily married but once which still stayed married and then finally he got two hundred divorced couples and he only used people where he was able to get both partners of that broken marriage if one of them was available but the other was now living in a distant state he didn't get just the one person but he used just payers well now what he did he gave these people thorough interviews questionnaires he didn't use tests but all kinds of things concerning marriage and family and children and finances and education and age at marriage and a whole lot of other things and on the basis of the results he got he built up what was called a happiness scale where you've got certain number of points for certain psychological factors now for example outside of the home and outside of the work working day what does a man and wife do now suppose they say well we we go bowling together once a week we both belong to the same card club certain things like that when I'll suppose they indicate that all their outside interests which in college would call the extracurricular activities that all of them are in common now that couple would get seven points toward his happiness score suppose they said that most interests were in common they'd get five points they did some things together but some things separately some in common three very few one and none whatsoever would give a zero skaar now here's one settlement of disagreements suppose you say that you generally give in that is 0 for marital happiness you make the other person give in that's two points for for you if it's give-and-take you score five points well here a couple more suppose you had the your choice of living your life over again would you marry the same person if you say yes 10 points if you say you'd get married but be a different person that's 0 if you say you'd remain single out is there'll also well all in all oh yes here's one more complaint score how many things about your husband or wife annoy you they can be little trivial things like table manners are dropping ashes on the carpet in the living room and things of that sort and we just total up all these complaints that you mention if you don't mention any there's 13 points if you only mention one or two 11 if you mentioned between 3 and 9 9 points so on down the line until you if you have 30 points 30 complaints there is zero on that particular item well now the power on this course is about 70 in other words all the points added together we find the piece of these happily married couples will score 70 points now what we can do in looking over marital factors is to examine all factors that might contribute to happiness and see people who satisfy some of these points see whether their happiness score is over 70 or under 70 if it's over 70 they're very happy so whatever we're talking about probably contributes to it now just as one sample and our age of marriage now it's commonly thought that you're much happier if you're married when you're real young now actually this survey of these six hundred couples divided into the end of the three classes showed that it didn't matter with one exception those who got married under the age of 21 that is when both were under 21 were inclined to have an unhappy marriage they probably rushed in a little too fast didn't know each other well enough but actually if two people 35 years old got married their happiness score was just as great as people who were 22 or 23 of course age differences is another thing and Turman found in this survey that up to 10 years age difference there wasn't any appreciable lowered happiness if say people aged 30 and 20 got married but if a man 50 married a girl of 20 there was a lowered probability of their getting along well what about children here's one quite commonly they say if a couple is not getting along very happily and they don't have any children they say well you ought to get a little cherub in a home and to spread happiness and you know your marriage troubles will well and now that is not true here's the the case that its agreement about children that counts not whether you've got children or not if you each want six children all right if you got six you'll both be happy each one - you got - you'll be happy if you don't want any you don't have any you'll be happy but it's where let's say them the woman wants five children the man doesn't want to be bothered with any then one of the other is going to be unhappy well of course that's the kind of thing you can talk over before a marriage and a lot of people feel that's kind of a delicate subject to talk over before they're married but that ought to be settled just as you arrange a business partnership before you open up a store whatever kind of enterprise you go into well happiness of the parents marriage is is a good predictor of happiness in your own for example you see a girl and her parents get along fine all right the chances are that she'll make a more stable life the divorce rate among children of divorced parents is high now please understand that I'm not saying that any of these things are necessities I'm not saying you marry a girl whose parents are divorced that she won't stay with you maybe she will maybe you'll have the most wonderful marriage you could imagine but we're dealing in probabilities and if you've got too many probabilities against you you better well control you're falling in love before it gets too late what about emotional stability well as pointed out by quite a number of the authorities on this subject a marriage does not settle problems it may settle one or two but actually having to cooperate with another individual in as close quarters as man and wife problems are accentuated you get more problems married than single maybe you solve three and you've got ten new ones on your hands so you got seven more and you had to begin with so marriage shouldn't be entered into as an escape some people do it well we've already seen one factor agreement and disagreement on interests and activities now education well it's found that the happiest marriages those where they have 70 points or more are where people have roughly about the same educational levels that is both college graduates both high school graduates both went part way through high school or something of that sort naturally don't get too particular as to the total number of years but if there are vast differences such as let's say a doctor with all his years of education marrying somebody who didn't even get beyond junior high school you might run into some trouble but middle level is tied up with education somebody may be pretty bright and now I've gone beyond high school and they may be okay married to a college graduate or a professional person well sex instruction and knowledge of sex prior to marriage came in and has found that those who had some straightforward sex education given by a proper person such as a parent if well informed a doctor maybe a minister there are a number of other sources of straightforward sex information that those individuals in general made a better adjustment to marriage and then you notice I'm talking about a lifetime of marriage not just the first few days after marriage well length of acquaintance is another interesting thing they found that people who'd known each other two years or more before marriage did have happier marriages in general now that doesn't necessarily hold actually I could take some of you fellas in front of me here and just pick out a co-ed at random around the campus and you might have an awfully happy marriage but you might not also the more you know the better you know a person longer you've known him or her naturally the more you realize your interests are either compatible or incompatible well the last thing we might know two more things one is family background now there it's a matter of similarity that is after all we've got around this College great many people from farms and smaller towns and suppose they meet somebody from a city know if a girl has always lived in the city and has moved out to a farm she may be rather lonely and some of the chores bother her here's one case I read in an article by dr. Paula Pocono of Los Angeles who's one of the leading authorities in the country on this subject runs a marriage clinic very bright and well-balanced man I've met him and know that he's a fine authority on this subject well dr. Pocono quotes this case on a college campus a boy and a girl became acquainted the boy came from a farm in Indiana where his mother worked pretty hard in fact his mother milk the cows and did a lot of things like that well the girl he met Kim came from a wealthy southern family where the the women did almost no hard work where she had made she didn't even pick her own stockings up off the floor well after they got back from the honeymoon why he hands his bride a milk pail at 5:00 in the morning you can imagine what happened with that now one last thing and that is income now the wealthy are traditionally all play boys and girls and get a lot of divorces that actually is not true according to their study at least of the six hundred couples studied there the thing that that made the difference was one's expectation of money that is if you've been raised on a modest income you're satisfied with that modest income in your mature life but the friction comes where their differences just as it did in the case with children if one couple wanted law one of the couple want a lot of children the other didn't want any there's friction well if one of a couple wants a lot of money or this is more important is a spendthrift in the other is rather prudent we're in regard to his money that is where the friction comes in if they're both prudent they get along fine I don't know about both being spendthrift they'd be happy going into bankruptcy religion is one other matter and there again we run into similarities especially with some of the religions where it's more than a Sunday morning matter but where it's a matter of conduct through the week and Family Affairs and education of children and so on for example we find a much greater divorce rate where let's say a non churchgoer marries let's make an extreme a very devout Catholic because we get not only the religious matter right in early marriage but later on when the children become a school age there's a problem and that's that's where the rub comes if neither is too serious about the religion differences there of course won't become serious well I think we've taken all the time we should at this and like the rest of the time today to refer to the criminal mr. Wrather abrupt change but we can't ask some questions and dispel a few fallacies about the the criminal to begin with lots of times we hear this term well he's the criminal type or he looks like a criminal is there any such well no actually you get criminals who are as well dressed and a nice and appearance as a city banker or a minister you walk into a post office and see some of these ads wanted particularly where you run into the confidence man and embezzlers and swindlers you will see some pretty well dressed man nice-looking man look as responsible as any leader in a city community on the other hand people perhaps who commit murders of physical violence or other crimes of physical violence may not be quite as good in their general appearance but you certainly can't spot them just by taking photographs why I remember one time when I was taking a course in psychology in college we had put on the board a slide and the here is a group of about 20 people and the instructor said look over those faces and tell me how many of the 20 you think are criminals well I looked him over here this one looked pretty tough and this one if you couldn't trust him and so on now I ended up with about 12 or 14 of that 20 I thought were criminals then after we'd all written our estimate down and he asked us the numbers and then he started to laugh and he said you know what that was that was a picture of a group of United States senators well what about some other factors here say intelligence is a criminal stupid well actually there we get a distinction between one type of crime and another the person who does commit the crimes of violence does have tend to have a low intelligence level but actually swindling and confidence games and things like that call for as much cleverness as succeeding in business in fact it's been pointed out that if a criminal makes one mistake he may fail and get arrested a businessman can get make a lot of mistakes before he goes bankrupt which is failure in his case now the only place where you might say low intelligence and criminality go hand-in-hand is in the instance of the well petty thief particularly because he's got low intelligence he's got low earning power then he can't afford the things he wants if he's got lower earning power he can't afford a car well he wants to take his girl to a dance what does he do well he sees a car sitting somewhere with the keys in the lock so he just borrows it and maybe he drives across the state line suppose he lives somewhere like let's say in Clinton or Council Bluffs he goes across the state line pretty easily then he gets in some real serious trouble and there it it starts it's it's a matter there the criminality being caused by wanting to keep up with other socially but not having the earning power to do it so it's an indirect rather than a contributing factor well environment is another one now here just like in our marriage situation we've got probabilities rather than certainties for instance in slum areas there's more juvenile delinquency in more adult criminality than there is in the nicer suburbs of our cities but we do get delinquents in the nice suburbs and after all there's no slum neighborhood that's so bad that as many as 50% of the kids become delinquents one of the worst areas in Chicago around the steel mill district just 30% of the kids became delinquents now in contrast to that one of the wealthy suburbs 1% became delinquents so you could say living in a slum area versus more or less of a millionaire suburb created a thirty to one ratio for becoming delinquent now broken homes cause delinquency likewise not because I'll buy broken home we mean divorce one parent dead and sometimes they speak of a psychologically broken home for instance where the father may after work come home eat supper and then just leave for the evening night after night where the mother may be one of these bridge fiends that plays all afternoon then again all evening and neglects the children that's a broken home just as much as if she wasn't there well certain other factors such as what about the personality of the criminal now actually you find that the criminal tends to be more neurotic than others he has a low score in self-confidence in a test sometimes his criminality or delinquency is one case I mentioned a couple of weeks ago showed came to prove he was a man may be senseless petty thievery on the part of somebody with low talents just to boost his own ego well as you might expect the ethical evaluation of the individual is relatively low another thing is that they don't face squarely their own capacities and capabilities the the typical criminal will not admit it's his own fault he fell in with a bad gang or his parents drove them out of the home or he got railroaded or something rather rarely will he say it is my fault now one trouble there too about reforming the reforming the individual is that he gets in with a bad gang in prison maybe previously he's made a lot of money by this thievery and it's it's pretty routine to work hard for a dollar an hour so and earn is living honestly well I'm afraid our time is up on Monday what I want to deal with is a kind of a broad topic of the well adjusted personality and getting along with people in general then Wednesday's you probably recall we're having an additional session for just kind of questions and answers so any letters that have come in I've got in twenty or thirty we'll do our best to answer good afternoon this has been another lecture in the College teleclass there is psychology 204 with dr. Richard W husband presented by woi TV in association with the Iowa State College Department of Psychology and the division of science