Behavioral Sciences: 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.