The Group Downside-Gift Response - The Social Psychological Response

The Basic Issue

Why is it that some towns and villages rise to the challenge of the pressures of life in rural life today, while others are crushed or immobilized by it? Why is it that some towns look for creative responses to social situations which come upon them from time to time, and others simply seem to give up in despair?

The social psychologists have a variety of explanations, but the most helpful one I've heard came through a friend of mine up North. He said to me one day, "every town has a spirit, a way of relating to each other. When a new person comes into town, he tends t pick up that spirit within about six months, and starts to fit in. He starts to act like everybody else, and treat others in a manner that is in keeping with the rest. We are great imitators of the behavior of others. So if a town has a nasty way of inter-relating, that is what gets picked up. If it is a gentle way, that is what is picked up. I have worked in many towns in this area and have seen many people come and go as workers in these towns. What ever the spirit of the town, that is how they are all behaving within a few months. And I believe it is a spiritual thing, because there is often a language barrier in these towns, and these newcomers don't even realize they are acting just like the long-term residents (for better or worse) because they don't speak the language.

I asked him, What do you do if you land in a town with a bad attitude?"

he replied, "just go out on the top of the hill, so to speak, plant your flag and say "me and Jesus don't live that way". You don't have to live that way, it is just that it is very common. One's lifestyle is a choice."

A few years later I was working in an organization in a town which had quite a bad reputation for being hard on its employees. One day a young man stopped by to chat, and in the course of the conversation commented that I was not very popular in some circles, and asked for my side of the story. Unbeknownst to him, I happened to know that he had been unjustly fired that day. I told him what my friend had told me. I added that when I had came to work for the corporation I knew about their reputation, and that I had decided that in my section of the company , I was not going to work that way. I said I had decided t create an oasis for my staff so they could find freedom from the storm if they wished. I said that perhaps some of them would find they liked that better than the way the town operated and carry it out in their areas of work, but that would have to be their choice. I was only responsible for my area.

When the young man heard that, he sat back with his hands behind his head, and thought a while. Then he said, "just think, when it is all changed, I can say , I was there at the beginning".

It turned out to be far more difficult to fulfil my part of the commitment than I had hoped. It always is in a group setting, but it was better than it might have been by a long way.

Whatever the choice of spirit or attitude that pervades the town you live in, you are going to end up dealing with power issues or power dynamics, your own and that of the other members of your community. How we deal with the power issues in life is one of the biggest challenges we face. A large part of it is a social -psychological response to the actions and pressures that emerge from time to time.

One way of approaching the issue of negative attitude in groups is to use a variation on the "gifts" personality-grouping model. The gifts model describes seven gifts which we al have in varying proportions. We tend to be strong in one or two gifts and not so strong in the others. We tend to know each other by the gifts they are strong in. Each of the gifts has a "downside" which is how a person who is strong in that gift behaves on a bad day.

A group, organization, town or culture can also be described by its "gift of preference". That is, it can be described as a town that defers to one or other gifts, taking on a shading of that gift as an overall "tone" of the group. I have found that the downsides of that gift of preference tend to accompany the upsides and once you know the gift the group defers to, its downside behavior tends to be quite predictable. No doubt, other personality grouping systems could be used in a similar way.

The individual responses, as opposed to the group responses, made by the members of our community are the concern of the next section, changes in people, the individual response.

Rural Development Institute Research Studies