Loneliness

Nicole Baysa
Socio 197
OUTLINE
I.Misconceptions on Loneliness
II. What is Loneliness?
III. Alone in the City by Klinenman
IV.The Lonely Crowd by Riesman
What are the
misconceptions on
loneliness?
 Misconception 1:
WEBSTER’S DICTIONARY
DEFINES LONELINESS AS “…A
STATE OF DEJECTION OR
GRIEF CAUSED BY THE
CONDITION OF BEING
ALONE…”
Loneliness is not grief
 Loneliness is a reaction to the absence of the
cherished figure rather than the experience of
its loss while grief is the syndrome of shock,
protest, anger, and painful, searing sadness
produced by a traumatic loss. Grief subsides as
time goes on while loneliness continues as long
as no new relationship is formed to replace
what has been lost
Loneliness is not depression.
 Loneliness is the drive to rid oneself of one’s
distress by integrating a new relationship or
regain a lost one, once achieved, they are no
longer lonely while depression prevents them
from seeking new or regain old ones because
they are unwilling to impose their unhappiness
on others.
Loneliness is not caused by being alone.
 Loneliness is not caused by being alone but by
being without some definite needed relationship or
set of relationships.
 Random sociability is not an antidote to loneliness,
in some circumstances, in can exacerbate it.
 Ex: Someone who is not married and in
consequence feels outside the society of settled
family life may find that being with married couples
only intensifies his feelings of marginality of having
no valid place
Loneliness is not caused by being alone.
 Loneliness is often uninterrupted by social
activity; the social activity may feel “out there”
in no way engaging the individual’s emotions. It
can even make matters worse.
 Ex: Someone who is not married and in
consequence feels outside the society of
settled family life may find that being with
married couples only intensifies his feelings of
marginality of having no valid place.
“The exceedingly unpleasant
and driving experience
connected with inadequate
discharge of the need for
human intimacy.”
 Misconception 2:

LONELINESS IS CAUSED
BY ONE’S FRAILTIES OR
WEAKNESSES.
Loneliness is not simply caused by one’s
frailties or weaknesses.
1. Our image of the lonely often casts them as
justifiably rejected: unattractive, shy, intentionally
reclusive, undignified in their complaints, self-
absorbed, self-pitying.
2. It is assumed that chronic loneliness is chosen.
It is easy to be acceptable to others. All that is
necessary is to be pleasant, outgoing, and
interested in others rather than in oneself. Why
can’t the lonely change?
Loneliness is not simply caused by one’s
frailties or weaknesses.
 The rejection of the lonely is caused by the
wrong image of lonely as those who move
against others or away from others, they then
feel bad because they are alone so they are
told to simply be pleasant, outgoing, interest in
others, etc. if they can’t then they ought to
enter psychotherapy, change and learn to be
outgoing.
Loneliness is not simply caused by one’s
frailties or weaknesses.
 For those who suffer from loneliness, advice of
this sort seems oddly beside the point.
 No matter how much the lonely would like to
shake it off, they find themselves possessed by
it. No matter how devotedly they may count
their blessings, no matter how determined they
may be to put their minds to other things, the
loneliness remains, an almost eerie affliction of
their spirits.
Loneliness is not simply caused by one’s
frailties or weaknesses.
 Loneliness is not simply a desire for company,
any company, rather it yields only to very
specific forms of relationship.
 The responsiveness of loneliness to just the right
sort of relationship with others is absolutely
remarkable. Given the establishment of these
relationships, loneliness will vanish abruptly and
without trace, as though it never existed. There
is no gradual recovery. When it ends, it ends
suddenly, one was lonely, one is not any more.
What is Loneliness?
Loneliness
 Loneliness is a response to a relational
deficit.
 Response to the absence of the provisions
of a close, indeed intimate, attachment
 Response to the absence of the provisions
of meaningful friendships, collegial
relationships, or other linkages to a
coherent community
What are the types of loneliness?
2 Types of Loneliness

Loneliness of Loneliness of Social

Emotional Isolation Isolation
What is loneliness of emotional isolation?
 A form of loneliness that
appears in the absence of a
close emotional
attachment.
 It can be remedied through
the integration of another
emotional attachment or the
reintegration of the one that
had been lost.
 It cannot be dissolved by
entrance into other sorts of
relationships.
What is loneliness of emotional isolation?
 Individual is forever appraising others for their
potential as providers of the needed
relationship and forever appraising situations in
terms of their potential for making the needed
relationships available.
 They experience a sense of utter aloneness
whether or not the companionships of others is
in fact accessible to them.
What is loneliness of emotional isolation?
 Individual may describe the immediate
available world as desolate, barren or devoid
of others or the sense of alones may be
phrased in terms of an empty inner world in
which the individual may say that he or she
feels empty, dead or hollow.
 Is oversensitive to minimal cues and a tendency
to misinterpret or to exaggerate the hostile or
affectional intent of others.
What is loneliness of social isolation?
Associated with the absence of
an engaging social network
which can be remedied only
by access to such a network.
Example of loneliness of social isolation
A pilot study of couples who had moved
to the Boston region from at least two
states away.
 The wives in these couples had
“newcomer blues”, they felt out of place
in their new community and were
homesick for their former one.
 The wives in these
couples had
“newcomer blues”,
they felt out of
place in their new
community and
were homesick for
their former one.
 The husbands, on the
other hand, did not
share their wives’
distress since they have
already entered a
ready-made
community at their
workplace, and their
focus was on becoming
established in their new
jobs.
 Despite the company and
sympathy provided by the
husbands, the wives
continued to be lonely for
friends, specifically a
network of women with
whom they share common
interests such as : shopping,
home management,
children, etc.
 Individualseems driven not to find
that one other person with whom he
or she may feel at ease but rather to
find the kinds of activities he or she
can participate in, or group that will
accept him or her as a member.
 Symptoms of loneliness of emotional isolation
include
 Feelings of boredom, exclusion, marginality of
the small child whose friends are all away
 Individual feels impelled to leave the home,
move among people, at least to come into the
vicinity of sociable warmth.
Who are prone to suffer loneliness?
Survey: During the past few weeks did
you ever fell very lonely or remote from
other people?”
 Women were more likely to report
loneliness than men possibly because
women suffered greater loneliness or it is
easier for them to admit to loneliness
 Unmarried people are more lonely than
married couples
 Widowed and divorced are reported to
be lonelier.
Survey: During the past few weeks did
you ever fell very lonely or remote from
other people?”
 The poor were more likely to be lonely
perhaps due to low income leading to
social withdrawal
 Women over age fifty-five were somewhat
more likely than other women to report
loneliness due to widowhood and children
having left home
Alone in the City by Eric Klinenberg
 How have urban
scholars developed the
idea of social isolation?
 What is the role of social
isolation in the study of
urban poverty?
 The Chicago school has played a special part in the
process of constructing and reconstruction social
isolation as a category of experience and analysis
 Sociologists from the
University of Chicago used
the city as the primary
research site to develop an
urban sociology designed to
investigate human behavior
in the urban environment.
 They developed a biotic
vocabulary and organic
conceptual scheme for
understanding the culture
and structure of cities.
 The Chicago school has played a special part in the
process of constructing and reconstruction social
isolation as a category of experience and analysis
 Drew upon the concept of
isolation as they built a new urban
grammar
◦ Employed it as a literal
description of the condition of
individual residents
◦ Reinvented it to describe the
relationship between
neighborhoods, or places,
rather than relations among
people
◦ Assigned two distinct meanings
to create a conceptual scheme
for urban sociology
Park on Isolation
 First Chicago sociologist to
argue that “certain urban
neighborhoods suffer from
isolation”
 Residents of isolated areas
were not socially isolated
themselves but rather “….the
so-called ghettos and areas
of population segregation
tend to preserve and, where
there is racial prejudice, to
intensify the intimacies and
The Ghetto
solidarity of the local and
neighborhood groups"
Park on Isolation
 The modern city, acc to Park,is where there is a
breaking down of local attachments and
weakening of restraints and inhibitions of the
primary group under the influence of the urban
environment thus contributing to the increase
of vice and crime
 Isolation from other neighbourhoods protects
residents from the “disintegrating influences of
city life”
 Harvey Zorbaugh on Isolation
 Residents of bohemian and
impoverished regions cannot
help but recognize and make
contact with the rarified world
of the downtown and Gold
Coast, the elites concentrated
in affluent neighborhoods
represented the truly
isolated.Argued that it was the
elites in affluent neighborhoods
who were truly isolated
Harvey Zorbaugh on Isolation

 His words can be interpreted as a call to

rethink the direction of differentiation that
segmented the city, a provocation to
recognize how the affluent buffer themselves
from people and problems they would rather
put out of sight
Louis Wirth on Isolation
 Wirth advanced a general theory of urbanism
that gave special attention to the isolating
influences of city life and the effects of isolation
on city resents
◦ In Wirth’s Urbanism as a Way of Life" he argued that
the structure and culture of cities weaken social
bonds, producing relationships that are "impersonal,
superficial, transitory and segmental," "characterized
by secondary rather than primary contacts
Louis Wirth on Isolation
 Structure and culture of cities form a profane social
universe that "gives rise to loneliness" and
"constitutes essentially the social anomie, or the
social void, to which Durkheim alludes in
attempting to account for the various forms of
social disorganization in technological society“
 City living fosters "a spirit of competition,
aggrandizement, and mutualexploitation" and an
"acceptance of instability and insecurity" that
reduce the possibilities for collective life, dividing
the urban community and individuating the
urbanite.
Louis Wirth on Isolation
 Believed that the city will obliterate folk
traditions, creating a hybrid, secular urban
culture in which the family, the neighborhood,
and other historical bases of social solidarity
lose significance .
However, groups excluded from the city, particulary
those groups that are segregated or ghettoized will be
spared many of the corrosive influences of urban life.
 For Wirth, the ghetto is a prophylactic that protects
the marginalized community from the deleterious
cultural consequences of urbanization and
preserves traditional forms of solidarity
 Wirth shifted his focus away from the social
pathologies of ghetto communities, and instead
delved into how extreme forms of separation
facilitate the survival of social types, cultural
groups, ritual practices and interpersonal relations
that might otherwise have been destroyed in and
by the city.
However, groups excluded from the city, particulary
those groups that are segregated or ghettoized will be
spared many of the corrosive influences of urban life.
Surveying the Jewish experience in modern
Europe, Wirth concludes that "The Jews owe
their survival as a separate and distinct ethnic
group to their social isolation
 According to Wirth, the ghetto walls and
drawbridges that limit physical extend into
social space as well, precluding the possibilities
for social exchange and creating a "closed
community" among the locked-in group.
Isolation implied social saturation in a certain
community
 Isolated groups have a flourishing collective life,
marked by solidarity, resilient families, traditional
institutions, and active street life.
 Ghetto residents refused to leave the ghetto
even when they were no longer legally
restricted to it.
 Ghetto residents who were able to "get a taste
in the freer world outside" found that they were
"torn by the conflicting feeling" that they had
abandoned themselves and their histories
Isolation implied social saturation in a certain
community
 In Gan’s The Urban Villagers, he observed that
Italian Americans in Boston's West End were so
deeply embedded in the social world of their
"urban village" that the "outside world," as they
saw it, appeared antagonistic, cold, and
unappealing.
 The Italians with whom Gans lived did not lack
contacts with outsiders yet the family, the peer
group and community, had not been
destroyed by the mass culture of the city
Claude Fischer on Social Isolation
 Used survey research to show not only that there
was little or inconsistent empirical basis for Wirth's
general theory of urbanism, but also that the social
solidarity that Wirth found primarily in the ghetto
was present throughout the metropolis and not
only in areas of exclusion.
 Although city life may destroy some traditional
forms of solidarityand organization, Fischer
demonstrated that the net effect of urbanism is to
create and strengthen social groups and not to
undermine them
Claude Fischer on Social Isolation
 Cities, unlike rural areas, offer a critical mass of
residents necessary to support subcultural
groups, meaningful social worlds which city
dwellers enter to cultivate bonds of affiliation
with similarly disposed agents
 Subcultural groups are based on common
interests rather than geography or tradition.
Claude Fischer on Social Isolation
 It is the privileged who are truly isolated.
◦ The privileged white community, he argued, "is at
great pains to blind itself to the conditions of the
ghetto, but the residents of the ghetto are not
themselves blind to life as it is outside the ghetto"
◦ Ghetto residents have a deep practical knowledge
about the outside world; it is the white city outside
the black that is truly isolated, as its residents refuse
to see the world they have helped to create.
The ghetto, according to Drake and
Cayton, is not totally isolated.
 Isolation of the ghetto "community” was impossible
because ghetto residents were deprived the
means to be self-sufficient. Thus, they support
themselves through relationships with outsiders and
are dominated by them.
 Considering that the ghetto is an urban colony,
Hannerz argued that there could be no power
relations without social relations.
 Relationships between ghetto residents and
outsiders were likely to be impersonal or
professional,
Social Isolation and Poverty
William Julius Wilson single-handedly
resurrected social isolation bymaking it the
theoretical foundation of his influential book,
The Truly Disadvantaged
 In his view, social isolation means
◦ “the lack of contact or of sustained interaction with
individuals and institutions that represent mainstream society
◦ a cultural condition that arises out of structural constraints;” it
"makes it much more difficult for thosewho are looking for jobs
to be tied into the job network), limits the life chances and
work opportunities for social mobility among the truly
disadvantaged, and effects an extreme form of social closure
around ghetto residents.
Social isolation is a crucial element in Wilson’s
explanation of recurring and extreme
poverty.
 The key theoretical concept in his argument because
it is the mechanism that mediates the effects of
neighborhood characteristics on residents and
establishes barriers to economic opportunity.
 For Wilson, writing about social isolation was a way of
challenging the validity of the culture of poverty thesis
that was widely accepted in the political field and
much of the academic field
Social isolation is a crucial element in Wilson’s
explanation of recurring and extreme
poverty.
 Wilson mobilized an array of economic and
demographic evidence to show that black
communities had been the primary victims of industrial
transformation in the Rust Belt and the Northeast and
had also been excluded from the new job growth in
the suburbs and in higher skill labor market
Wilson believed social isolation was the
analytical missing link between the structural
conditions in which they lived and their
exclusion from decent work.
 He rejected arguments that segregation by race and
class, or the discrimination behind it are enough to
explain the nature and extenet of black urbant
poverty.
 ii.He defined social isolation as “the lack of contact of
sustatined interaction with individuals and institutions
that represent mainstream society.”
Wilson believed social isolation was the
analytical missing link between the structural
conditions in which they lived and their
exclusion from decent work.
 He rejected arguments that segregation by race and
class, or the discrimination behind it are enough to
explain the nature and extenet of black urbant
poverty.
 ii.He defined social isolation as “the lack of contact of
sustatined interaction with individuals and institutions
that represent mainstream society.”
Wilson believed social isolation was the
analytical missing link between the structural
conditions in which they lived and their
exclusion from decent work.
 He does not use social isolation to claim that ghetto
residents have limited social ties and supports, but to
say that they have contact with the wrong people
and that they are out of loop when it comes to
accessing information about and informal conection
to jobs
1) What is the relationship
between character
structure and society?
2) What are the different
modes of conformity that
arise from changes in
population growth?
3) What are the types of
character structure that
emerge from different
points in history?
What is the relationship between
character structure and society?
Character Structure
 Character structure is the permanent, socially,
and historically conditioned organization of an
individual’s drives and satisfactions
 It plays a relationship in the maintenance of
social forms---those that are learned in the
lifelong process of socialization.
 Character structure, serves not only to limit
choice but also to channel action by
foreclosing some of the otherwise limitless
behaviour choices of human beings.
Character Structure
 Character structure insures or permits
conformity.
i.Social character can be defined in terms of
the mode of conformity developed in them
ii.The mode of conformity can be used as an
index to characterize a whole society
What are the different modes of
conformity that arise from changes in
population growth?
 The S-shaped curve that appears in
the history of the long-industrialized
countries, as well as the projected
populations of certain other countries
as they are expected to take shape in
the future.
Transition

High Different phases on the population

Growth curve appears to be occupied by a
Potential society that enforces conformity and
molds social character in a definably
different way.
Population of High Growth Potential
Characteristics
Population of High Growth Potential
Characteristics
 Societies of high birth rate and equally high
death rate
 Mortality rates are high that any decline in
them permits a very rapid expansion of the
population
 Regions in this stage of growth are sparsely
populated as in the areas occupied by many
primitive tribes and as in parts of central and
South America
 Societies of high growth potential have various
ways of keeping the population in check.
◦ Generation after generation people are born are
weeded out and die to make room for others
◦ Society achieves a Malthusian bargain with limited food
supply by killing off some of the potential surplus of births
over deaths
◦ Without the prevention of childbirth by marriage
postponement or other contraceptive measures, the
population must be limited by taking the life of living
beings through cannibalism, induced abortion,
organized wards, human sacrifice, in fanticide as means
of avoiding periodic famine and epidemics.
Tradition-directed Mode of
conformity in High Growth
Potential Populations
How an individual acts is largely based on his
strong conformity and adherence to culture and
traditions
 Conformity of the individual tends to be
dictated to a very large degree by power
relations among the various age and sex
groups, the clans, castes, professions and so
forth—relations which have endured for
centuries and are modified but slightly if at all
by successive generations.
 Culture provides ritual, routine, and religion to
occupy and orient everyone
How an individual acts is largely based on his
strong conformity and adherence to culture and
traditions
 . Attention is focused on securing strict
conformity in generally observable words and
actions, that is to say, behaviour. While
behaviour is minutely prescribed, individuality of
character need not be highly developed to
meet prescriptions that are objectified in ritual
and etiquette—though to be sure, a social
character capable of such behavioural
attention and obedience is requisite.
The individual has a well-defined functional
relationship to other members of the group.
 The individual is drawn into roles that make a
socially acceptable contribution, while at the
same time they provide the individual with a more
or less approved niche.
 Relative stability is preserved in part by the
infrequent but highly important process of fitting
into institutionalized roles such deviants as there
are. In such societies a person who might have
become at a later historical stage an innovator or
rebel, whose belonging, as such, is marginal and
problematic, is drawn instead into roles like those
of the shaman or sorcerer
There is a small degree of individualism amongst
its members.
 Tradition-directed person, as has been said,
hardly thinks of himself as an individual. Still less
does it occur to him that he might shape his
own destiny in terms of personal, lifelong goals
or that the destiny of his children might be
separate from that of the family group. He is not
sufficiently separated psychologically from
himself,his family, or group to think in these
terms
Change is relatively slow with tradition-directed
people
 Little energy is directed towards finding new
solutions of the age old problems.
 Members deal with life by adaptation not by
innovation

The sanction for behavior tends to be the fear of

being shamed.
Transition Growth Societies
Transition Growth Societies
Characteristics
 Societies which have passed into the phase of
decreased death rate.
 Population begins increasing nearly in geometric
ratio can be attributed to many factors such as:
◦ Improved sanitation, improved communications (which
permit government to operate over a wider area and
also permit easier transport of food to areas of
shortage from areas of surplus), the decline, forced or
otherwise, of infanticide, cannibalism, and other
tribal kinds of violence
◦ Because of improved methods of agriculture the land is
able to support more people, and these in turn produce
still more people
Transition Growth Societies
Characteristics
 Rapid social changes occurred in this type of society
◦ Men were driven out of the primary ties that bound them to
the western medieval version of tradition-directed society.
◦ There is an increased personal mobility, rapid accumulation of
capital (teamed with devastating technological shifts), and
by an almost constant expansion: intensive expansion in the
production of goods and people, and extensive expansion in
exploration, colonization, and imperialism
◦ "Transition" is likely to be violent, disrupting the stabilized paths
of existence in societies in which tradition-direction has been
the principal mode of insuring conformity.
Inner-directed Mode of
Conformity in Transition
Growth Populations
Society develops in its typical members a social
character whose conformity is insured by their tendency
to acquire early in life an internalized set of goals

◦ The source of direction for the individual is "inner" in

the sense that it is implanted early in life by the elders
and directed toward generalized but nonetheless
inescapably destined goals
◦ The greater choices this society gives—and the
greater initiatives it demands in order to cope with its
novel problems—are handled by character types
who can manage to live socially without strict and
self-evident tradition-direction.
Although they possess more flexibility, they are still
bounded by tradition to a certain degree.

 While any society dependent on inner-direction

seems to present people with a wide choice of
aims—such as money, possessions, power,
knowledge, fame, goodness—these aims are
ideologically interrelated, and the selection
made by any one individual remains relatively
unalterable throughout his life.
Individual no longer act based on established norms but
based on his inner gyrosocope
 As the control of the primary group is loosened—
the group that both socializes the young and
controls the adult in the earlier era—a new
psychological mechanism appropriate to the more
open society is "invented": the psychological
gyroscope.
 ii. This instrument, once it is set by the parents and
other authorities, keeps the inner-directed person,
as we shall see, "on course" even when tradition, as
responded to by his character, no longer dictates
his moves.
Individual no longer act based on established norms but
based on his inner gyrosocope

 The inner-directed person becomes capable of

maintaining a delicate balance between the
demands upon him of his goal in life and the
buffetings of his external environment
 He can receive and utilize certain signals from
outside, provided that they can be reconciled
with the limited maneuverability that his
gyroscope permits him. His pilot is not quite
automatic.
Individuals are characterized by an increased degree of
personal mobility and individualism

 As their self-consciousness and their individuality

developed, they had to make themselves at
home in the world in novel ways.
 People of inner-directed character do gain a
feeling of control over their own lives and see
their children also as individuals with careers to
make
Individuals are characterized by an increased degree of
personal mobility and individualism

 Even if the individual's choice of tradition is

largely determined for him by his family, as it is
in most cases, he cannot help becoming
aware of the existence of competing
traditions—hence of tradition as such. As a
result he possesses a somewhat greater degree
of flexibility in adapting himself to ever
changing requirements and in return requires
more from his environment
Individuals are characterized by an increased degree of
personal mobility and individualism
 His inner psychic gyroscope which is set by his
parents can receive signals later on from other
authorities who resemble his parents, He goes
through life less independent than he seems,
obeying this internal piloting
The sanction for behavior tends to be the fear of
being shamed.
Getting off course, whether in response to inner
impulses or to the fluctuating voices of
contemporaries, may lead to the feeling of guilt.
Population of Incipient Decline
Population of Incipient Decline
 Societies which have passed through both
these earlier phases and are beginning to
move toward a net decrease in population.
 People have material abundance and leisure.
 People find themselves in a centralized and
bureaucratized society and a world shrunken
and agitated by the contact—accelerated by
industrialization—of races, nations, and cultures
Other-directed mode of conformity of
Incipient decline societies
Their contemporaries are the source of direction
for he individual—either those known to him or
those with whom he is indirectly acquainted.

 While all people want and need to be liked by

some of the people some of the time, it is only
the modern other-directed types who make this
their chief source of direction and chief area of
sensitivity.
 Members of this society have an insatiable
need for approval.
Their contemporaries are the source of direction
for he individual—either those known to him or
those with whom he is indirectly acquainted.

 Individuals are more capable of and more

interested in maintaining responsive contact
with others both at work and at play.
 Although they keep an eye on the Joneses,
aims to keep up with them not so much in
external details as in the quality of his inner
experience. That is, his great sensitivity keeps
him in touch with others on many more levels
than the externals of appearance and
propriety.
Their contemporaries are the source of direction
for the individual—either those known to him or
those with whom he is indirectly acquainted.

 This mode of keeping in touch with others

permits a close behavioral conformity, not
through drill in behavior itself, as in the tradition-
directed character, but rather through an
exceptional sensitivity to the actions and wishes
of others.
Their “control equipment” instead of being like a
gyroscope, is like a radar.

 Contrasted with such a type as this, the other-

directed person learns to respond to signals
from a far wider circle than is constituted by his
parents. The family is no longer a closely knit
unit to which he belongs but merely part of a
wider social environment to which he early
becomes attentive
Their “control equipment” instead of being like a
gyroscope, is like a radar.
 Contrasted with such a type as this, the other-
directed person learns to respond to signals from a
far wider circle than is constituted by his parents.
The family is no longer a closely knit unit to which
he belongs but merely part of a wider social
environment to which he early becomes attentive
 It is only the process of striving itself and the process
of paying close attention to the signals from others
that remain unaltered throughout life
Their “control equipment” instead of being like a
gyroscope, is like a radar.

 The other-directed person must be able to

receive signals from far and near; the sources
are many, the changes rapid.
 What can be internalized is not a code of
behavior but the elaborate equipment needed
to attend to such messages and occasionally
to participate in their circulation.
Individuals act according to what the
indiviudual’s immediate circle or a "higher" circle
or the anonymous voices of the mass media say.
 The peer-group becomes much more
important to the child, while the parents make
him feel guilty not so much about violation of
inner standards as about failure to be popular
or otherwise to manage his relations with these
other children
Individuals act according to what the
indiviudual’s immediate circle or a "higher" circle
or the anonymous voices of the mass media say.
 Increasingly, relations with the outer world and
with oneself are mediated by the flow of mass
communication. For the other-directed types
political events are likewise experienced
through a screen of words by which the events
are habitually atomized and personalized—or
pseudo-personalized.
Individuals act according to what the
indiviudual’s immediate circle or a "higher" circle
or the anonymous voices of the mass media say.
 Moreover, the pressures of the school and the
peer-group are reinforced and continued by
the mass media: movies, radio, comics, and
popular culture media generally
The other-directed person is cosmopolitan
 For him the border between the familiar and
the strange—a border clearly marked in the
societies depending on tradition-direction —has
broken down. As the family continuously
absorbs the strange and reshapes itself, so the
strange becomes familiar
 The other-directed person is, in a sense, at
home everywhere and nowhere, capable of a
rapid if sometimes superficial intimacy with and
response to everyone.
The other-directed person is cosmopolitan
 For him the border between the familiar and the
strange—a border clearly marked in the societies
depending on tradition-direction —has broken down. As
the family continuously absorbs the strange and
reshapes itself, so the strange becomes familiar
 The other-directed person is, in a sense, at home
everywhere and nowhere, capable of a rapid if
sometimes superficial intimacy with and response to
everyone.

One prime psychological lever of the other-directed

person is a diffuse anxiety.