Review of General Psychology Copyright 2001 by the Educational Publishing Foundation

2001. Vol. 5. No. 4, 406-428 1O89-268O/O1/S5.O0 DOI: 10.1037//1089-2680.5.4.406

Individuals as Social Relationships: 18 Ways That Acting Alone

Can Be Thought of as Social Behavior
Bernard Guerin
University of Waikato

This article argues to replace individualistic explanations of behavior with descriptions

of social and historical context. Eighteen ways are outlined that playing a guitar alone
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

in a room can be thought of as socially controlled rather than dispositionally controlled.

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Despite having a skin containing a body, a "person" for the social sciences is a
conglomerate of social relationships or interactions that spans space and time. Thinking
of people and causes as within a body shapes individualistic biases in our explanations
and interventions. Rather than propose a new philosophy, this article reviews 18
concrete ways to begin thinking about people as social interactions and not agentic
individuals. This changes the interventions we propose, alters how we view cultural
practices, prevents some perennial problems of psychology, and leads the way to
integrate psychology in the social sciences. Moving from dispositional explanations to
study the historical and social context of social relationships also requires that psy-
chology seriously adapt some of the more intensive research methods from other social
sciences.

In analyzing the psychologies in Part I, we witnessed
the frequent intrusion of this "social," and the distur-
bances it produced for psychological observation and
construction. At one extreme we found efforts to ex-
clude it altogether from attention, and at the other,
indications that it might inundate the entire territory,
elsewhere it was tacitly accepted or unwillingly toler-
ated. Whatever its treatment, as fact or aspect of fact it
was never absent from the psychological problem.
(Bentley, 1935, pp. 187-188)
There are several traditions of research in the
social sciences claiming that most of what peo-
ple do is social, meaning that there is social
control over most human behavior, even those
activities called thinking, cognition, self-es-
teem, emotion, self-identity, and feeling (Bent-
ley, 1935, 1910/1954; Berger & Luckmann,
1967; Cast, Stets, & Burke, 1999; Cooley,
1909; M. Gergen, 1995; Guerin, 1994a;
Holquist, 1990; Kantor, 1969; Langford, 1978;
A version of this article was presented at the 25th Annual
Conference of the Association for Behavior Analysis, May
1999. I wish to thank John Kraft for his help, encourage-
ment, and comments. I also wish to thank Donald Baer, who
may or may not recognize his prompting of this article in a
helpful letter he once wrote to me.
Correspondence concerning this article should be ad-
dressed to Bernard Guerin, Department of Psychology, Uni-
versity of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New
Zealand. Electronic mail may be sent to bguerin®
waikato.ac.nz.
Marx, 1961; Mead, 1922, 1924/1925, 1934;
Parker, 1998; Sampson, 1993; Sapir, 1921;
Searle, 1995; Vygotsky, 1978; Wallis, 1925;
Wertsch, 1991; Whorf, 1956; but see Pullum,
1991). These traditions claim that individuality,
as well as existence as an individual, is fictional,
verbal, or secondary and that life as a social
being comes "before" life as an individual
(Bailey, 2000; Bunge, 2000; Rose, 1996).
A common reply to such arguments for com-
plete social determination of human actions is
the following: "But I was sitting all alone in my
room playing my favorite music on a guitar and
enjoying it. That cannot be socially controlled."
I wish to show here that this argument does not
work, that there is social control over all human
action even in the most alone of conditions.
However, rather than defend the general and
philosophical statement that "All human behav-
ior is social," a more useful strategy is to write
about the different concrete ways in which so-
cial transactions, exchanges, or interactions in-
fluence human actions. The general statement
"All human behavior is social" would be im-
possible to prove, but if the many concrete
social influences on human actions and thought
can be shown, it will become obvious that social
variables are powerful and are always with us
from birth.

406
 INDIVIDUALS AS SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS
In this way my goal is not to convince readers
by logic, reasoning, and philosophy; rather, I
am attempting to review for the reader some
concrete ways to observe and think about peo-
ple as social relationships rather than as person-
things. Suggestions and examples are given to
help us think in this way about people, although
research should replace my suggestions in the
long run.
One reason for doing this at all is to add
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
something more substantial to the criticisms of
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individuality that abound in the social sciences,
particularly psychology. Although many au-
thors have proclaimed loudly that individualis-
tic notions are wrong, that everything is socially
constructed, or that "All cognition is social cog-
nition," few have given the details of how we
might begin thinking about a fully socialized
person: how exactly social events and other
people inundate what on the surface appear to
be obviously individual activities. Even John
Dewey (1917), after proclaiming that "All psy-
chology is either biological or social psychol-
ogy" (p. 276), gave few details to help social
scientists think their way through what this
means exactly and concretely, and how it comes
about. As a more recent example, people are
said to be social because of the strong effects of
a "social identity," but the explanatory basis for
this is drawn back into a "need" for identity
within the individual, a "need" to reduce uncer-
tainty in the world (Guerin, 2001b), or a way of
cognizing about other people that exists within
an individual's head and his or her information-
processing system.
Most of these traditions that claim a big role
for sociality are also philosophical in nature,
and the concrete details are just not there. I do
not wish to put forward a new philosophy of
persons as social relationships or social trans-
actions but to review the many details we al-
ready know about the concrete social bases of
"persons." This, I believe, will be more con-
vincing and useful in the long run than adding a
further philosophical system to our theoretical
arsenal. The details provided here are there-
fore mostly consistent with more than one of
the philosophical systems that argue against
individualism.
Before going on to the second reason for this
article, I wish to make some brief comments
about the previous arguments along these lines,
to prepare the reader for cutting across tradi-
407
tional "allies" and "opponents" in psychological
theorizing. This will show a few limitations of
previous theories when dealing with concrete
details of social control of human actions, even
as I take on board some parts of what they say.
While arguing against individualism, these four
positions sometimes fall into hidden individual-
isms. Four examples are briefly discussed.
Behavior analysis is one area of psychology
in which Skinner proclaimed that language, and
hence much of human activity, was under social
control, but he and his followers have given few
details of that control, and then only the most
simplistic cases (Guerin, 1994a; Skinner, 1953,
1957). More recent behavior analysis has placed
this burden onto "rule-governed behavior," but
without explicating or controlling for the social
determinants of either the rules or the rule fol-
lowing (e.g., Catania, 1985; S. C. Hayes, 1989).
For example, how rules are presented and by
whom, and with what authority and social
power, has been left out completely. Until this
task is done, such proclamations will ring hol-
low: "I tend to think that, in the social sciences,
talking in terms of rules is often a way of hiding
your ignorance" (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 72).
Within social psychology there have been
many attempts to bring the social back, but
many authors now argue that this has failed,
although I will not repeat their arguments here
(Cushman, 1990; Edwards, 1997; K. J. Gergen,
1985; Sampson, 1993). Those in social cogni-
tion have been criticized for merely placing
socialness within a metaphor of stored informa-
tion. The use of "representations" in most social
psychological theories has also taken the social
nature away, because most models assume im-
plicitly that people cannot act in the world with-
out representations of what that world is and
that the represented world is kept within a per-
son rather than in concrete transactions between
people. The "world," then, becomes representa-
tions "inside" the person, and having a social
representation stored in a person defeats the
idea that anything is really social.
A good example of this is the thought and
research of Serge Moscovici on social represen-
tations. The original idea was very much about
putting the social back into social psychology,
but the strong use of cognitive processes and
"mental" representations has created ambiguity
for social representation theory (Augoustinos &
Innes, 1990; Fraser, 1994; Guerin, 1995b; Raty
 408 GUERIN
& Snellman, 1992). In a very similar way, Henri
Tajfel's original social identity theory was
meant to put the social back into social psychol-
ogy, but it ended up putting the social into
people's heads and cognitive categorization
processes, theoretically pinned down loosely to
individual "needs" for identity, categories, un-
certainty reduction, and sense making (Guerin,
2001b). I show later how conversational analy-
sis can overcome some of these limitations
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while saving the empirical results of social psy-
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chology on the whole.
Some diverse theories of social construction-
ism and socially constructed knowledge have
also tried to overcome the individualism inher-
ent in Western psychology (K. J. Gergen, 1985).
Although there are some concrete details stem-
ming from these approaches (Hosking, Dachler,
& Gergen, 1995; McNamee & Gergen, 1992),
the two main limitations facing such theorists
are those of relativism—that we cannot know
"reality," so all language use becomes equally
valued and everything said is equally true—and
an overemphasis on language that makes it ap-
pear that language is all there is in the world and
in people's lives (Cranach, 1995; Epston,
White, & Murray, 1992). Some have also
brought individualistic notions in the back door,
by having the "construction" take place within
an individual and by having the socially con-
structed knowledge stored within a person or a
cognitive structure (M. Gergen, 1995). Ways
out of this dilemma are possible, however (M.
Gergen, 1995; Guerin, 2001a; Rorty, 1999), and
some discourse analysts have begun to empha-
size the concrete social power bases that make
language work.
In this article I make language more concrete
than those scholars cited thus far by taking more
seriously than others that language is a way of
doing things to people and influencing them;
language neither constructs, communicates, nor
represents anything at all, let alone reality (Cra-
nach, 1995). Language is just a specialized way
of doing things to people and is no different in
principle from pushing them or taking their car
keys away. When I push someone, I do not
create a representation of pushing; I just move
the person, and this has consequences. When I
tell someone to move, I just affect the person in
a different way (Guerin, 1997b, 2001a). For
example, even Cranach (1995), who argues well
for language use as an action in the world, ends
up with the activity of language being to create
or represent the world rather than anything more
concrete, as I am following here.
Fourth and finally, the more recent group of
conversational and discourse analysis posi-
tions, although also very diverse, have fleshed
out some ways in which human action can be
thought of as social transactions or interactions
(Billig, 1999; Edwards, 1997; Kitzinger, 2000;
Potter & Edwards, 1999; Silverman & Gub-
rium, 1994; Turnbull & Carpendale, 1999; van
Dijk, 1993; Wetherell, 1998; Widdicombe,
1995). They have shown some ways that we can
think of many "cognitive processes" as transac-
tional events between people rather than pro-
cesses within the head (Edwards, 1997). For
example, "representations," whether social or
"mental," can be thought of as social influence
attempts that use categories for the establish-
ment of "facts," rather than as memory storage
in the head. That is, in conversational analysis,
representations and categories are ways of act-
ing that influence people through language, not
stored systems of abstract knowledge that we
build up from interacting with the world
(Guerin, 2000). For example, if the "represen-
tation" happens to be abstract, then this is a
reflection of the differential rhetorical effects
that abstract versus concrete statements have on
people, not a reflection of cognitive or neuro-
logical structures. The structures of cognition
become the influence properties of talking in
different ways.
I believe the weakest point still to be worked
out in the discourse and conversational ap-
proaches is the link to the nonlinguistic bases of
power and social exchange. These are usually
referred to as the "interests" or "stakes" of those
in conversation, but the integration of methods
to establish the basis of these interests and
stakes is lacking. Most often, the examples be-
ing analyzed in the discourse literature have
rather obvious stakes and interests from the very
nature of the participants and the situations they
are in. If there was better integration with the
other social sciences, to cover the identification
and analysis of resource allocations in everyday
life, then this limitation should be easily
overcome.
In summary, the first reason for reviewing the
different concrete ways that human activity is
socially based is to provide criticisms of indi-
vidualism that are based on concrete events
 INDIVIDUALS AS SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS 409

rather than abstract theorizing. Doing this, how- A final reason for this review is to bring
ever, cuts across traditional boundaries of the- psychology closer to the other social sciences
ories in psychology, and some readers might be (Guerin, 2000, 2001b). Psychology above all
looking for traditional opponents and allies. has used theories of individual-controlled ac-
Each of these approaches has something to offer tions, although sociology and social anthropol-
by way of helping us to think beyond people- ogy have often relied on equally slippery no-
as-self-contained-individuals, and each will be tions of "agency" and the like (Farnell, 2000).
used in different ways. My point is that they all Psychology has taken on the analysis of the
still contain elements of individualism at least in "mental" or "mind" as its domain (metaphor) of
how they view a person acting alone. special expertise, and the arguments here will
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The second reason for reviewing what we allow those phenomena to become available to
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know of the concrete ways that human actions others, as they should be. The better we can
are socially controlled is that many of the prac- show the social determinants of "individual"
behavior, the closer psychology can integrate
tical applications of psychology have barely
with social anthropology and sociology and
begun to explore the social basis for human
make a truly interdisciplinary research endeavor
problems and conflict (Hosking et al., 1995).
(Rose, 1996, 1999). By showing the multiple
My view is that until this task is done, practical
social controls over activity even when an indi-
applications will remain shallow or short term vidual is alone, I hope to show readers how a
(cf. Michael, 1997). The interventions will be new psychology can be built with better foun-
targeting the wrong problem because the theo- dations in the other social sciences and how
ries depend on individualistic or dispositional interventions to improve life for people can be
notions. Most interventions target the individ- better developed.
ual, but if there are nonobvious social controls
over individual behavior (as shown later), then
the changes either will not work at all or will not Of What Does Social Control Consist?
be maintained until those social controls are
How social control works depends, of course,
changed. Modern cognitive-behavior therapy,
on your view of psychological and social
for example, targets the "cognitive" thoughts of
events. Here I try to steer a middle ground by
individuals, but if the determination of these
describing the occasions when human actions
thoughts is socially controlled, then the inter- would not have occurred without some action
ventions are not getting at what is important. by another person. Whatever the mechanisms or
When the treatments do work, we still do not processes involved, the clear acts of occasion-
really understand why they worked, and they ing and not occasioning should be sufficient to
are likely to have worked through therapists' make the points I wish to make. For example,
covert social shaping of the "cognitions" or stimuli used by behavior analysts are often
something along those lines. thought to be nonsocial, but the proper question,
A third reason is to emphasize just how social following Bentley and Kantor rather than Skin-
is our "individual" behavior. This is especially ner, is the following: Who or what arranged or
important in discussions of both culture and enabled those stimuli? Bananas are not particu-
cognition, for which control of actions is fre- larly social, but the provision, production, mar-
quently ascribed to individuals and then an at- keting, and even eating of bananas are ex-
tempt is made to build up social control after- tremely social events. Skinner (1957, p. 108)
ward, through culture-as-representations or so- even admitted that the rat or pigeon in an ex-
cial cognitions of culture processed within the perimental chamber is working with contingen-
head. With a better understanding of the social cies arranged by an experimenter, not by the
prerequisites to any behavior, these cultural and "natural" environment, and therefore this con-
cognitive (verbal) phenomena can be better un- stitutes social behavior.
derstood. After examining the 18 ways that "in- An initial puzzling question to tackle is why,
dividual" actions are really social actions, I re- if individuals are made up of social relation-
turn briefly to this question of analyzing culture ships and social control spread over space and
and cultural actions, because the new view en- time, has this not been recognized all along in
tails a new way of viewing "culture." the social sciences? My answer has been that
 410 GUERIN
most social control of human activity is not
obvious (Guerin, 2001b). In fact, it can be ar-
gued much further than this: Social controls
work extremely well precisely because they are
not obvious. If we knew how everything we did
was controlled socially, even when we are
alone, then that control would itself shape some
countercontrol. Instead, talk of individualism
and mental dispositions has been very useful to
Western forms of social control because of their
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conversational properties of social influence.
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Nicholas Rose (1996) has written convincingly
on this, and the point is followed through in this
article.
Elsewhere I have tried to present these ideas
in more concrete detail but in behavior analytic
terms of generalized social contingencies, al-
though "normal" human social behavior in-
volves generalized contingencies much more
complex and with longer histories than behavior
analysts usually conceptualize (cf. Bearman,
1997; Takahashi, 2000; Yamagishi & Cook,
1993; Yamagishi & Kiyonari, 2000). Unfortu-
nately, there is not the space here to write more
about the properties of the hiddenness of most
social controls of individual human behavior in
terms of other theories of psychology (Guerin,
2000). It is because our social contingencies
are so complex, multiple, and embedded that
changing any contingency changes many
others. This control by multiple contingency
effects is very difficult to see, even for those
involved. Acceptance of the behavior analytic
version is not necessary, however, to understand
the points being made in this article.
More generally, for many of these 18 points
there is little direct evidence, and the form of
my arguments therefore seems logically unsat-
isfactory: that another way of viewing things
(people as fully social) is possible, so therefore
that is the way things must be. My real argu-
ment, however, is that the research still needs to
be done to include the wider historical and
social contexts of all topics in psychology, in-
cluding both cognition and social psychology,
and I am merely making some suggestions to
make that goal seem more plausible and worth
pursuing. For example, just because the intrin-
sic motivation area can be re-viewed so that
intrinsically motivated actions are seen instead
as socially determined (as described subse-
quently), this obviously does not prove that it is
that way. Demonstration and "proof will only
come from research and readers' own observa-
tions. My real form of "argument" here is to
make the envisaging of fully social human ac-
tion seem more real for readers so that they will
attempt those demonstrations and researches in
the first place. The research evidence given and
my own suggestions of how analyses might
proceed are not meant as serious demonstrations
of proof.
I now present 18 ways that acting alone can
be concretely thought about as being social.
These are presented in three groupings: social
contexts, language use, and miscellaneous. For
each, I give just a brief description and some
references. The aim is for the reader to appre-
hend how each of these 18 forms of social
controls could be operating even when an "in-
dividual" is alone and then, toward the end,
imagine them all operating simultaneously with
a single individual alone playing a guitar. My
"argument" in this article derives from the com-
bined weight of all 18, which should illustrate
the ubiquity of social control over individual
actions. Just because the skin holds in the phys-
iology of "individuals" who move through the
environment, this does not mean that the skin is
a magical borderline requiring "deep" or "in-
ner" penetration (Bentley, 1941) or that we
must construct "representations" of the world
inside our heads before we are able to do any-
thing (cf. Gibson, 1979). My review will not
prove my case but make it more likely that
readers will observe and research differently in
the future to provide that more substantial
proof.
Social Contexts for
"Individual" Behaviors
Social Contexts for Acting
The first way that acting alone is social be-
gins even in our early history of development
and continues throughout life. What people do
is done in an environment or context almost
completely made by other people. What is pos-
sible is historically constrained by where you
are born, the society you are born in, and the
status of your family. Although there might be
cases of someone born in a peasant society in
Asia or Africa eventually becoming wealthy
and famous in the United States of America,
this is not frequent when looked at over all of
 INDIVIDUALS AS SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS
the world's population. With demographic anal-
ysis and sociological stratification studies, there
are very few surprises.
Even within a particular society, the activities
we do are constrained or provided in the first
place by other people, even activities we do
alone. If I play music alone in my room, then
the instruments are almost always ones invented
or made by another person, the room is pro-
vided by a builder for money, the money is a
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social institution, and the music I play is by
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someone else or based on someone else's mu-
sic. Even the musical scales are provided by the
culture (Ellis, 1885). We tend to ignore these
background conditions or setting events for act-
ing, but they make possible and sustain our
behaviors. There is very little left in this (West-
ern) world that is not provided or marketed by
other people. Even far off places in the wild are
now sites of "ecotourism" for the New Age rich.
The first point, then, is the following:
1. The contexts for acting are almost all
provided by other people, even when one is
alone.
The environments within which we act are
there because of other people and are usually
maintained by other people, and this is one way
that our behavior alone can be called social. As
mentioned earlier, Skinner (1957) even con-
ceded this to the rat and pigeon in an experi-
mental chamber, that they are in social situa-
tions. The exact ways this might affect an indi-
vidual's actions are many and varied, and
specific cases will differ in details. I have pro-
vided some examples for playing music, but
many more are possible for other activities
alone.
Social Scaffolding of Childhood Actions
The second way that acting alone is social
comes through the development of our behav-
ior. All of those behaviors that are eventually
explained as "individual" or "personal" have
enormous social shaping at a young age. With
careful observations over time of the social con-
text, it can usually be found that this social
shaping remains in a different form or, as be-
havior analysts might talk about it, on a much
leaner or intermittent social scheduling.
Developmental psychologists have a nice
term for this that I will slightly enlarge from
their usage: social scaffolding (Connor, Knight,
411
& Cross, 1997; Landry, Garner, Swank, &
Baldwin, 1996; Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976).
To put this just in behavior analytic terms as an
example, the behaviors of children have a scaf-
fold of adult social consequences. That is, chil-
dren's behavior is shaped with parental social
behavior as the consequences rather than the
outcomes of what is done. Even the attentional
focus of young children is guided, that is,
shaped, by parents and caregivers. For example,
children look at things and all the while they are
looking back to their parents to get the effects or
consequences that will maintain looking: The
consequences or effects that maintain looking
do not come from what they are looking at but
from the effects on people (Franco & Butter-
worth, 1996; Hains & Muir, 1996; Smith,
Landry, Miller-Loncar, & Swank, 1997). Social
constructionists might say that patterns of look-
ing are not a physiological given but are socially
constructed.
Although it seems that we grow out of this
"visual checking with a social partner" (Franco
& Butterworth, 1996), I argue against this later,
and I suggest instead that the audience changes
from parents to significant others, but not the
social scaffolding of behavior itself (Mead,
1934), and that the "looking back to the par-
ents" changes into rehearsals of stories to tell
others. Our whole systems of preferences of
looking, even in adulthood, can be viewed as
relying on or being maintained by a history with
other people. For example, what we look at as
adults is for talking about later, and that is
social, as shown in a later section. The social
scaffold equivalents for adults are socially con-
structed stories, excuses, jokes, and accounts.
Another example of this is so-called "intrin-
sic" motivation. An activity based on intrinsic
motivation is one for which there appears to be
no external consequences maintaining the be-
havior. Typically, the tasks in such experiments
involve puzzles and toys that children play with
alone, seemingly without adult intervention or
obvious consequences. Adding "obvious" re-
wards or reinforcement on top seems to weaken
the behavior under some conditions, and this
has been taken as evidence against crude rein-
forcement theories.
But we need to ask what has guided our
doing something that supposedly has no conse-
quences; why do children continue to play with
the puzzles that are used in the intrinsic moti-
 412 GUERIN
vation research in the first place? Cognitive
psychologists might agree that such "intrinsical-
ly interesting" tasks start off with social rein-
forcement, but they believe that this fades to
individualistic or agency control. I would argue
that the social contingencies just get leaner,
more intermittent, and embedded in more gen-
eralized systems of social consequences and
rehearsal of stories to tell for status, and they
follow all of the other paths reviewed in this
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article. In fact, once there are multiple controls
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over the puzzle playing, adding a free reinforce-
ment or reward on top of the other hidden social
controls would also be predicted to disrupt the
performance by behavior analysts, because a
matching law approach with concurrent sched-
uling is the appropriate analysis rather than sim-
ple contingencies (Davison & McCarthy, 1988).
The problem is not one of doubting that the
phenomena associated with "intrinsic motiva-
tion" exist. The problem is one of both sides
refusing to delve more intensively into the his-
torical and social contexts for what seems to be
"intrinsic." Cognitive psychologists must move
beyond acquiescing to talk of "intrinsic" moti-
vations and needs, and behavior analysts must
move beyond the sole use of simple schedules
of reinforcement when analyzing such social
behaviors. If both can carry out analyses and
observations of the full historical and social
contexts, this will get us beyond internecine
disputes, whether or not my specific suggestions
in this article are accurate.
So the real problem that is raised by the
example of "intrinsic motivation" is in the be-
havior and language of the researchers rather
than anything the children do when playing.
The cognitive psychologists and others acqui-
esce to allow an unexplained need or motivation
simply labeled "intrinsic." The behavior ana-
lysts acquiesce to the simple schedules of rein-
forcement and have not begun explicating the
complex and historical shaping of children
playing with toys alone in their room (which
presumably develops into guitar playing alone
when they become teenagers). Merely as one
suggestion, parents have probably put some
considerable effort into shaping their children to
play alone so that they do not need full parental
attention, given that parents have so much else
to do. This social shaping is simply ignored by
both sides of the dispute. Until both sides begin
analyzing what is exactly going on to achieve
the "intrinsic" or seemingly unreinforced per-
formance, we will not get much closer to an
answer. This standoff arises commonly in the
areas dealt with in this article, because both
sides of a dispute are ignoring the full contexts
of what is happening and coming up with ab-
stract words to use in what is really an unknown
situation. In this way, the other social sciences
are often well ahead of psychology, because
they frequently use methods of long and inten-
sive observation. The implication to draw out of
these points is the following:
2. Childhood actions develop with a "social
scaffolding" of consequences that remains in
adulthood but becomes generalized and there-
fore hard to observe.
To make this more specific, all of the most
important verbal or cognitive functional activi-
ties of adults have been suggested, or shown, to
have their control in social origins. These in-
clude visual attention (Bakeman & Adamson,
1984; Collis & Shaffer, 1975; Corkum &
Moore, 1998; Moore, Angelopoulos, & Ben-
nett, 1997; Saxon, Frick, & Colombo, 1997),
eye contact (Peteez-Nogueras et al., 1996,
1997), "theory of mind" (verbal behavior using
mentalistic concepts; Watson, Nixon, Wilson,
& Capage, 1999), imitation (Uzgiris, 1991),
reciprocity (Brazelton, Koslowski, & Main,
1974; Dunham, Dunham, Tran, & Aktar, 1991;
Papousek, 1995; N. Ratner & Bruner, 1978;
Roe & Drivas, 1997), language (Baldwin, 1993;
Baldwin & Markman, 1989; Bloom, 1975;
Bloom, Russell, & Wassenberg, 1987; Dunham
& Dunham, 1992; Dunham, Dunham, & Cur-
win, 1993; Masur, 1982; Ninio & Bruner, 1977;
Tomasello & Farrar, 1986), referential commu-
nication (Butterworth & Grover, 1988; Franco
& Butterworth, 1996; Leung & Rheingold,
1981; Trevarthen, 1979), meta-cognition (ver-
bal behavior about verbal behavior; Karabenick,
1996), motivation (Wood et al., 1976), explora-
tion (Messer, 1978), self-regulation (Halle &
Shatz, 1994), and other cognitive operations
(Azmitia & Hesser, 1993; Carugati & Gilly,
1993; Doise, Mugny, & Perret-Clermont, 1975;
Monteil & Huguet, 1999). Putting these to-
gether into a firm research suggestion:
3. Developmentally, the major skills of think-
ing and cognition are learned and supported
through social scaffolding or social control.
This idea suggests the first way we will find
that even thinking alone is social, because the
 INDIVIDUALS AS SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS
origins and maintenance for such inapparent
events (L. J. Hayes, 1994) come from others.
Language and its social origins will also be
implicated with thinking next in this article
along with further analyses. But as the list in the
previous paragraph suggests, all of the other
events related to what is commonly called
thinking are also embedded in, or shaped with,
social control.
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The Special Case of Language Use
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The Basis of Language
The first arguments about language relate to
the very foundations of language being social.
All language use depends on other people, be-
cause using language does not do anything to
the world, not even to language itself as part of
the world. Words have an effect on the world
only through other people and can therefore
have consequences only through other people.
When the extent of language use in controlling
human behavior is appreciated in this way, the
scope of social control over "individual" human
behavior is greatly enlarged whether the person
is alone or not. It does not matter that the person
is alone.
To give a specific example of thinking as a
social activity, I have suggested that the use of
prototype forms of categories, a major founda-
tion of the cognitive psychology of thinking,
arises from the social or conversational proper-
ties of the form of category (Guerin, 2000,
2001b; cf. Edwards, 1991). Using a prototypical
exemplar to talk or think about a category, for
example, labradors for the category of dogs, is
socially or conversationally "safe" because any
comments or criticism can be hedged or de-
fended afterward and negative consequences
avoided. Other forms of category presentation,
such as lists, do not have this property and can
be more successfully challenged by other peo-
ple. So even the basic structure of categories,
the very structure of thinking for modern cog-
nitive psychology, I have argued, is shaped
through conversational properties and hence is
socially controlled through shaping by listeners
(Guerin, 2000). This could be observed by train-
ing exemplars under different social conditions
and measuring the discourses produced.
The following are the main strong implica-
tions I would draw out from what has been said
413
so far for trying to think about being alone as a
social activity:
4. Language was developed by, and taught to
us by, other people.
This is really a specific case of Point 1. The
social contexts or environments for speaking are
social ones. The languages we use were there
before we were born; we did not discover them
in the world the first time: They are social
activities.
5. Language is something that only works or
makes things happen with people.
Language has no effect on the environment
except for other people or through other people.
If language is to "work," to have an influence or
effect, other people are required. Saying "Cat"
only has an effect, and therefore consequences,
through other people, not on any cat. This also
applies to the speaker (Lohdi & Greer, 1989;
Skinner, 1957). In this way, words do not refer
to things; they do things to people with an
appropriate history (Guerin, 1997b). The ubiq-
uity of language activities, even when one is
alone, means that this point enlarges the scope
of social control of human activity.
6. Language maintains only because it has
social consequences.
From Point 5, it follows that language would
disappear if there were no listeners. Whereas
many other behaviors can reoccur for long pe-
riods without maintaining consequences—to
put it in behavior analytic terms, extinction can
be slow—language is usually punished rather
than being extinguished if speakers do not re-
spond at all. Not having an effect with language
is a punishing event for most people rather than
just the removal of reinforcement, and therefore
it must maintain only because it has social con-
sequences, even when one is alone. Although
people can write without readers and talk with-
out an audience, it does not help to say that they
do this because they just enjoy talking for talk-
ing's sake. I am not going to make specific
suggestions to analyze what is really going on in
this case, but there are many ways to go beyond
this restatement of the problem if we examine
the historical and social contexts for what is
meant by enjoyment and "talking's sake."
7. Thinking uses the language developed and
maintained by others.
The argument follows that thinking, as the
word is commonly used, is also socially con-
trolled; most of what we think about is to talk
 414 GUERIN
about with other people. This is a difficult point
on which to convince people, but many authors
have made arguments that thinking is a social
event rather than a private event (e.g., Josephs
& Valsiner, 1998; Kennedy, 1998; Mead, 1934;
Wittgenstein, 1953). This means that, in the
long run, thinking when alone is maintained
socially even with no one around. More is said
about this later in connection with rehearsing
stories when alone to tell others. This view also
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gets rid of the idea of thinking as somehow
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being within or inside a person, whereas "doing
things" or physical movements are outside, and
it is similar to the way Gibson (1979) argued
that perception is "done" by the whole body and
the environment, not inside the eyes alone.
As an example to work through, Leslie's
(1987) theory of pretense suggests that lan-
guage at an early age can allow a "decoupling"
of events and words and that this allows many
new phenomena to emerge, pretense being
among them. Although Leslie's metaphors are
of a mechanism and a "capacity," I would argue
that pretense behaviors are based around verbal
activities primarily, and have a social scaffold
supporting them, and that this is what makes
them seem "decoupled" from the world-as-usu-
al: The consequences come from somewhere
else. As shown earlier, the shaping comes from
social scaffolding rather than the world as
talked about. I argue that such decoupling can
occur only if social shaping can replace what-
ever other contingencies were in place before
this. More accurately, the activities are not "de-
coupled" from the world but are shaped (scaf-
folded) by social controls that are well and truly
in the same world: The support in the world has
merely changed source rather than been de-
coupled. So if the word cat can become de-
coupled from an actual cat, this is precisely
because the words are supported socially rather
than by the presence of a cat. The social shaping
is still very real, however, and is really just a
different source of shaping. As argued earlier,
this goes on to suggest that thinking alone can
only occur because social shaping has allowed it
to decouple from what is being talked about.
To give another example in detail, consider a
conversational approach to beliefs and attitudes
(cf. Guerin, 1994b). Beliefs are ways of influ-
encing people, presenting what is said in the
form of a "fact." Stating beliefs by themselves
convinces no one, and so they are backed by
resource games. Consider two people speaking,
with A using a verbal form of the "chicken
game":
A: "Look, all medical science does is tell us
what the drug companies want."
B: "But don't you think that they've learned
a little more than just that?"
A: "Look, if you believe that then you must
be stupid."
B: "I guess you're right, then."
What has happened here? Clearly, in com-
mon terms, A has not "really" convinced B. But
what has definitely changed is the relationship
between A and B. They will certainly behave
differently toward each other in the future after
this episode of a verbal chicken game, espe-
cially if the topic of medicine comes up again.
B will not likely start making pronounce-
ments against medical science to other people
merely because of this one episode; the episode
is only likely to affect the future interactions of
A and B together rather than either party
independently.
What would be needed to convince us that B
has changed his or her "real" beliefs or has
"really" changed a belief? In terms of a social
basis to language, the whole question of real,
true, authentic, or inner beliefs is on the wrong
track. As a suggestion only, B's "real" beliefs,
as we commonly talk about them, are probably
the ones that he or she makes consistently to
different people and across different situations,
ones that have been shaped in a wide variety of
social situations. So social consistency becomes
the important indicator rather than truth or au-
thenticity. Each of a person's beliefs exists only
in relationship interactions, and a person's "be-
liefs" are the sum of all those interactions and
the conditions that make them consistent or not.
Although the conditions that affect consistency
are not simple to observe or understand, they
potentially can be dealt with more easily than
inner truths or authentic truths. The importance
of consistency as a conversational substitute for
"truth" when dealing with abstract or unobserv-
able talk is highlighted again later in this article.
In summary, what is commonly called private
thinking, beliefs, or rumination is also socially
based, even when one is alone. This article
considers it unfruitful to think about thinking as
something occurring in isolation from social
relationships, even sitting alone in a room with
a guitar. It is like trying to find a gravity entity
 INDIVIDUALS AS SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS
inside the earth independently of the other bod-
ies in the solar system.
8. Even the uses of rational and logical think-
ing are socially controlled.
Highly rational or logical thinking is usually
given as a prime example of the privacy of
thought. But following as a more general prin-
ciple from the case of "pretense" just given, it
can be argued that if people are doing some-
thing against what seems to be the rational,
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logical, or obvious outcome, then most com-
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monly there will be a powerful alternative
source of social shaping that is controlling their
actions. Examining the historical and social
contexts will show what other sources of control
are operating, and there is no need to "explain"
irrational or illogical actions by something dis-
positional about the person, even when she or
he is alone. Such contextual information is un-
likely to be picked up in the immediate situa-
tion, however.
So what is perhaps considered to be the most
individualistic of activities, thinking rationally
and logically, can be shown to occur under
social contextual control. In social anthropol-
ogy, for example, this point has long been ap-
preciated. Evans-Pritchard (1937), for example,
showed how "irrational" beliefs and thinking
about witches were socially maintained. The
explanations, ritual talk, expressed supernatural
beliefs, emotive talk, and accusations involved
in witchcraft were not a sort of "prelogical" or
illogical thinking but fully rational behavior that
made sense in the wider political, social, and
historical contexts. Far from the witchcraft
events showing that the Azande were lacking in
logic and rationality, Evans-Pritchard's detailed
fieldwork showed how subtle and sophisticated
they were in thinking through social influence
events or "social logic" (Guerin, 1998). When a
person is observed to do something that seems
irrational with respect to the immediate envi-
rons, it is usually the best analysis to start look-
ing at social events in the wider and historical
context. There will be social pressures or con-
siderations that the person is quite rationally
taking into account, because the person would
lose out if he or she ignored those pressures.
It has also been argued that even purely log-
ical thinking is shaped by social conversational
strategies, although more space would be
needed to make this argument (Bentley, 1932,
1945; Dewey, 1938; Guerin, 2000). If the reader
415
can think about consistency as a social phenom-
enon (Guerin, 1994b, 2000, 2001b; Lin, 2001),
that if we are consistent (in our talk) it is be-
cause this is shaped by other people and not by
the rest of the world, then he or she can begin to
appreciate that even the use of logical calculus
is socially controlled. There is nothing that con-
strains us to be consistent in our talk, and in
some ways consistency can even be thought of
as a negative thing: The environment is always
changing, so to be consistent in all contexts
might be maladaptive. But, as suggested earlier,
consistency is about the stories and explana-
tions we give and is the only real alternative to
monitoring people when we cannot see what
they are talking about. If someone says she or
he has a headache, we cannot check on that;
however, we can check the consistency of what
the person says over time to find out if she or he
is saying it just to avoid something rather than
having a "real" headache. Point 18 has more
about this in connection with using mentalistic
languages as rhetorical methods of secrecy and
avoiding consequences.
Logical thinking, therefore, can be seen as a
special conversational strategy in which a con-
text is set up for getting agreement from listen-
ers about assumptions (the logical premises)
that will then constrain future talking about
behavior if the person is to show consistency.
But getting the agreement of those assumptions
in the first place is the most critical part of
winning with logic, and this is clearly about
social influence, social control, and establishing
"facts" (Dewey, 1938; Edwards, 1997). Making
the person want to show consistency is already
built into most social situations, for reasons
given earlier. There is even evidence that some
people consider using logical arguments with
friends to be rude (Guerin, 1995a), meaning that
there are social contexts for being "logical" or
not. So the most "rational" of all individualistic
language use, logic itself, is controlled within
social contexts and is not a social-neutral struc-
ture given to us by the world (Bentley, 1932;
Dewey, 1938).
The Uses of Language
The second group of arguments about lan-
guage concerns the uses of language: What do
we do with language? What do we get done
with language? How is that social?
 416 GUERIN
I have suggested elsewhere, as have others,
that a large part of what we think and what we
say are stories or reasons; in particular, they are
rehearsals or preemptive accounting for what
we will say after doing what we are doing. The
functioning of these is shaped by preventing
social punishment or through social reinforce-
ment, and thinking is therefore typically about
people: ourselves or others (Cooley, 1909; Mead,
1924/1925, 1934; Sampson, 1993). Whatever
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we do people will ask us about it, potentially with
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punishing consequences such as being laughed at.
Therefore, something we learn to do very early in
life is to have constant self-dialogues that rehearse
what will be said to others (Josephs & Valsiner,
1998; Mead, 1934; Sampson, 1993; Yngvesson &
Mahoney, 2000). This might partly be what Skin-
ner (1957) meant by self-editing, but I think it
goes beyond that, and the social constructionists
and conversational analysts are probably closest to
working through these ideas (Edwards, 1997). We
might think of excuses, justifications, reasons for
why we did so well, or ways to turn what hap-
pened into a joke. Having a good story about what
you do, or the logic or consistency of what you do,
increases your status or reputation—that is, gen-
eralized social consequences—or at least prevents
criticisms and other generalized social punish-
ments (Guerin, 2000; Guerin & Miyazaki, in
press).
To give some examples, even when you are
alone playing your music, you might be alone
so as to tell others that you were alone, that you
were quietly thinking or were meditating. Being
thought of by others as reflective or contempla-
tive helps influence other people in some social
situations and, in some groups, can provide
extra status, reputation, or power. Doing things
alone also has an important (socially conse-
quential) social and conversational property in
that no one can verify your stories about what
you do or how well you do things, so your
stories can be improved that way as well. If
someone were with you instead of you being
alone, your stories would be constrained by
their monitoring. You could not make up a story
that your music was the greatest ever played or
contained a hundred new riffs if someone was
there checking on you. Being alone allows sto-
ries to be told later that escape monitoring,
although I suggested earlier that consistency
replaces observational monitoring or surveil-
lance in these cases as other people's measures
of believability.
In other areas of life, we have analyzed how
the different types of social stories, such as
rumors, social representations or "serious
knowledge," urban legends, folk legends, gos-
sip, and some newly identified hybrid forms,
can be predicted from their conversational prop-
erties (Guerin & Miyazaki, in press). For exam-
ple, rumors use anxiety (rather than catharsize
it) to get and keep the listener's attention, but
they need to be short unless a story format is
used; it is difficult, however, to use a story
format for an anxiety story (Guerin, 2001b).
Unlike gossip, the stories involved in rumors
cannot hold attention just because of the persons
being discussed, so the subject matter needs to
be relevant (consequential) to the listener in
other ways. The conclusion from these analyses
was that there are no separate forms of stories
given to us from the world; rather, what we
label different forms of stories depends on the
conversational properties they use to engage a
listener (Guerin & Miyazaki, in press). The
main implications from the uses of language put
as strong research statements are as follows:
9. Thinking is usually about people and so-
cial relationships.
10. Most thinking is rehearsal of stories, at-
tributions, or actions for afterward, even when
alone, and listeners shape these stories, attri-
butions, or actions.
Other Reasons That Being Alone Can Be
a Social Event
Finally, the following are some other reasons
to help appreciate the viewpoint that being
alone is social. I explain these only briefly using
the example of playing a guitar alone in a room.
For other situations in life the details will vary
greatly, but the emphasis is for readers to make
their own analyses of historical and social con-
texts rather than try to guess as I am doing here
in a generic way.
11. Making music alone to earn money later
is social.
Most things that we use now have money as
a precondition, enabling event, or setting event.
In the same way as was argued for language,
money also is completely social and has no
consequences outside of a social context (Sim-
mel, 1907/1978). Without a stable economic
 INDIVIDUALS AS SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS
system and other people, money would have no
effects in the world. From this it follows that
making music alone in our example, or doing
almost anything else alone, can be done to earn
money later and is therefore socially controlled
in this way as well: change the economics, and
the behavior would also change in some ways;
change to barter, and the whole organization of
social relationships changes (Gorlich, 1998;
Hart, 1986; Thomas, 1992).
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12. Contingency control functions over time
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and space.
It is well known by behavior analysts that
contingency control can function over time and
space, or is transdermal (Bentley, 1935, 1941;
Lee, 1992). Therefore, there is not the problem
that most psychology has about acting alone
being social when no one else happens to be
there (cf. Guerin, 1993). Avoidance still works
even when the punisher is not there, providing
that the social context has been arranged prop-
erly. In fact, the opposite argument can be
made. If I am sitting alone in my room but still
socially controlled, this must involve powerful
forms of social control to be effective with no
one there to monitor. All control can be inter-
mittent and work over long time periods, espe-
cially if generalized social contingencies are
doing the shaping.
Bentley (1935) put this well when describing
how most science treats observations as the
observation of things, as in "I saw a bird."
Instead, Bentley urged that in science we need
also to take seriously the form "I saw a bird fly
right across the lake," in which the "thing" seen
is spread across time and space and is not a
simple object. Both forms are acceptable, but
the concentration has been on the former. Once
the second form of observing statements is al-
lowed, someone alone in a room can more eas-
ily be "seen" as a conglomerate of social inter-
actions, and it makes little difference whether
others happen to be there or not. In this way, we
can truly say that we observe individuals in their
social relationships and that our "self is spread
over our relationships even if the others are not
present.
13. Doing things to yourself is itself learned
as a social behavior.
There are many references in the literature
that doing things to yourself is also learned as a
social behavior, activities such as talking to
yourself and developing ideas (stories) about
417
your "self (Cast et al., 1999; Mead, 1934;
Miller, Potts, Fung, Hoogstra, & Mintz, 1990;
Skinner, 1957). Lodhi and Greer (1989) gave
some evidence for this, with children's talking
to themselves shown as a variant form of talking
to others. It also takes time for children to learn
to work alone. As another example, Manne
(1999) found that the intrusive negative
thoughts of cancer patients, usually considered
to be highly individual and internal, were con-
trolled and perhaps initiated by actions of their
spouses. For example, some patients had
learned to avoid their spouse's criticism with
intrusive thoughts.
14. You can even act as if alone while in the
presence of others.
Being alone is so socially controlled that you
can even act as if alone while in the presence of
others. This shows that "aloneness" is an ar-
rangement of social contingencies, not a state of
mind. It is socially controlled. This also makes
it easier to view being alone as a social activity,
in that the social control of either being alone or
being with others is made more obvious.
15. Acting alone may in some cases be so-
cially controlled by avoidance or escape.
Avoidance of others is a ubiquitous social
contingency, and acting alone may in some
cases be socially controlled by avoidance. What
this means, as explained elsewhere (Guerin,
2000), is that what is actually done when one is
alone is irrelevant to the "socialness" of the
contingencies. The problem is that when avoid-
ance is successful, we do not see whatever is
being avoided, and so the activity that is actu-
ally being engaged in can be overinterpreted.
We see someone playing a guitar alone in a
room and attribute this behavior to reasons in-
volving that person, whereas the person may
actually be avoiding someone in the next room
she or he dislikes, and what we see the person
doing can be irrelevant. We also need to be
careful in analyzing human social behavior to
take such events into account, and this is an-
other way that acting alone can be social. It is
also another reason for carrying out longer his-
torical observations of people before claiming
that their activities are understood.
Acting alone could also function from a type
of negative reinforcement because in the past
someone has sought you out when you stayed
by yourself. This might encourage playing mu-
sic alone in some instances. In variations of this
 418 GUERIN
involving language once more, being alone
could maintain someone coming to find you and
asking you to explain yourself or talk about
what you were doing, thus allowing an oppor-
tunity for reputation-enhancing activities or im-
pression management strategies of telling sto-
ries. There are probably many variations along
these lines.
16. It is in people's best interest to disguise
the social control of their own behavior.
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A large amount of the sociological and social
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anthropological research on secrecy and ano-
nymity, of which being alone is one example
and wearing a veil is another, suggests that it is
in people's best interest to be able to disguise
the social control of their own behavior (Bailey,
1991; Cohen, 1971; El Guindi, 1999; Erickson,
1981; Herdt, 1990; Keen, 1994; Merten, 1999;
Murphy, 1964; Read & Bartkowski, 2000;
Richardson, 1988; Simmel, 1950; Tetlock &
Manstead, 1985). There are systematic and stra-
tegic uses of secrecy and withdrawal in social
life, mapped out carefully by social anthropol-
ogists, emphasizing that being alone is a social
event when considered in terms of the local and
historical social contexts. It is not somehow
"natural" to be alone, so aloneness does not
need explanation or the explanation resides sim-
ply within the person, whereas being with oth-
ers demands an explanation. Indeed, for most
groups around the world other than Westernized
groups, being alone can be considered rude or
odd. Whatever the details of any particular
group and social context, changing from open to
secretive, or from sociable to aloof, strategically
helps negotiate our group resources and con-
firms the idea that any acting alone is socially
controlled and can be changed by changing the
social contexts.
17. Being able to be alone is indicative of
certain lifestyle, cultural, socioeconomic, and
class circumstances.
If someone is able to spend time alone in a
room playing a guitar, this by itself is enough to
give a clue about the cultural and socioeco-
nomic circumstances of that person. In many
parts of the world, such activities might be
considered a luxury available only to the
wealthy. In many parts of the world, the social
organization is such that people would not wish
to be alone but with others of their kin or
community; as already mentioned, being alone
would be considered rude or deviant in many
communities around the world. In many parts of
the world, being alone might even be consid-
ered aversive and might be used more as a
punishment than a luxury of the wealthy.
Whichever of these apply or not, the point is
that being alone is not an automatic or "natural"
right for any person, a sort of baseline condition
determined by some individualistic or psycho-
logical makeup; rather, it is a strategic part of
social life. If people can play their guitar alone,
then this depends on all of the cultural, socio-
economic, and class circumstances available to
them. This makes any form of being alone,
anywhere in the world, socially controlled; it
cannot happen just anywhere but needs partic-
ular social settings.
18. The notions of a private life, aloneness,
and agency are themselves useful conversa-
tional rhetoric or strategies that pervade West-
ern society and Western social science.
The final point brings together some ideas
offered in different ways throughout this article,
that talking, explaining, making stories, and in-
structing people in terms of a "mental" domain
or a private, "inner" self are in themselves con-
versational strategies with considerable power
to influence others, and the social sciences have
uncritically taken these on board. Psychology,
especially, has taken these strategies as its very
domain of expertise without recognizing that
their social and conversational basis is really in
the talk of psychologists trying to convince peo-
ple of facts (Guerin, 2001b; Rose, 1996). This is
why psychology, unlike most sciences, has been
able to go through huge changes (fads) in the-
ories and perspectives without being embar-
rassed by such shifts (Innes, 1980).
The conversational properties of talking in
terms of a hidden, inner domain are very influ-
ential if used strategically, and some sugges-
tions of these are now given. Positive strategies
for speakers talking in terms of their own inner
world include the following: Such talk cannot
be monitored or verified, it can be changed by
claiming that an inner change has occurred, it is
abstract talk that allows for easy hedging, and it
allows full explanations to be avoided, which is
especially important if the "real" causes are
unknown even to the speaker. Negative coun-
terstrategies for such speakers include that con-
sistency in what is said becomes emphasized as
the way to monitor the "truth" of what is going
on (although this can be easily hedged by most
 INDIVIDUALS AS SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS
speakers), that people might not take what is
said seriously (such as the early behaviorists
did), that people might avoid talking to some-
one who uses this strategy constantly, and that
the real world might catch up with the stories.
When making explanations or stories about
other people that use an inner domain, the strat-
egies for a speaker include the following:
Others can be made responsible or be blamed,
and there are no verifiable checks they can
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provide to counter this; a label can be attached
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within this "inner" world that can then be talked
about as if real (e.g., dispositional attributions);
and, finally, because there are no verifiable
checks on what is said by either speaker or
someone else about this "inner" domain, an
authoritative power can appoint people to be
socially responsible for adjudicating what really
goes on "inside" people. This can have both
good and bad outcomes, of course, and adjudi-
cators have historically included shamans, psy-
chiatrists, and psychologists (Foucault, 1978,
1988; Riches, 1994; Rose, 1996; Taussig, 1987).
Relating this back to Point 8, it is interesting
that social consistency becomes the substitute
method for monitoring "truth" when people's
talk (metaphors) turns abstract and refers to
inner worlds and mental domains, even though
consistency can be maladaptive in a changing
environment and consistency is no guide to
correctness anyway. This no doubt strengthens
the conversational use of identity stories as
causes and also increases caution in saying and
doing too much that is concrete, because others
might find inconsistencies (Yngvesson & Ma-
honey, 2000). It also emphasizes that verbal
ability becomes a powerful social tool or social
capital.
In summary, the very individualistic and
mentalistic way of talking that has been adopted
by psychology can itself be looked at as a con-
versational strategy, and so the reader's reti-
cence to think about someone's being alone as
social behavior might be further assuaged. Such
individualistic or mentalistic talk has many use-
ful properties for gaining resources through
convincing people of "facts" and being able to
resist counterarguments. This has been made
worse in that the "facts" being talked about (the
true causes or contexts for human actions) are
not easily amenable because of their generalized
nature, even to those performing the actions.
This has allowed a century of easy theorizing
419
based on cross-sectional measurements. The
hard work is still to come.
Toward Analysis of Linguistic and
Cultural Practices
The reevaluation of "individual" behavior to
be viewed as fully determined by social con-
texts and constraints is especially important in
thinking about cultural phenomena, because
culture has variously been posited as inside the
person (culture is thought) or in "individual"
practices that look the same within a group. The
first treats culture too individualistically,
whereas the latter treats culture too much as
simple, overt, socially compliant actions that
are learned and produced routinely or ritually
(Wrong, 1961). All of the evidence suggests
that what is called "culture" is nothing as simple
as either of these. Ritual practices, for example,
are complex, involve secular activities, and are
as much to do with events that have taken place
elsewhere in people's lives as they are about the
events happening during the ritual practices
themselves (Barth, 1987; Bloch, 1992; Evans-
Pritchard, 1956; Firth, 1960; Guerin, 1998; Har-
rison, 1992; Leach, 1954; Strecker, 1988).
Once these simple positions are dispensed
with (cf. Sahlins, 1999), it can be seen that the
analysis of culture and cultural practices is
really the analysis of social relationships and
communities. That is, the only thing that holds
"cultural practices" together as a useful label is
the community exchanges that determine and
control those practices. When we have under-
stood the social control of these "individual"
actions, as has been suggested throughout this
article, we can see better that there is nothing
else to "culture" than the particular ways that
social relationships are organized (Guerin,
1998). Culture is not about the clothes and
dances and unusual ways of people. Culture is
about a social network of interacting people that
makes lives possible, people interacting coop-
eratively in at least one sense—that they do not
exit and break off relations easily—but also
interacting with negotiation, competition, fight-
ing, arguing, persuading, and joking. The cus-
toms and folkways are only there because of
their functionality with respect to organizing
and monitoring relationship networks.
The customs and folkways of culture (social
relationships), the clothes and dances and un-
 420 GUERIN
usual ways of people, are thus in one sense
irrelevant and "merely" help keep those people
interacting together; theoretically, many other
customs and rituals could be substituted with no
other changes in the community networking.
For this reason, anthropologists find within-
group customs that everyone holds to in some
ways and that no one individual in the group can
change easily. Between groups, however, there
is an amazing variety of customs, and almost
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any variation can be found somewhere in the
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world.
The case made above that the customs of
social groups are irrelevant or substitutable was
made in one sense only. In another major sense,
those customs or cultural practices are the very
real substance of what makes these communi-
ties work; they are not something trivial or
optional. The customs might not just be differ-
ent from the customs of other groups, but they
might actually be made different so as to be
different, to help preserve or encourage the
sense of a unified networking community. The
special network consequences of kinship also
help in this regard. Each of those customs also
has a long and network-related history, and
members of the group cannot just walk in one
day and demand that their group stop their ritual
X and now substitute ritual Y instead. In the real
terms of historical and social contexts, they are
not at all substitutable or irrelevant. They only
appear so in cross-sectional or individualistic
thinking.
In all of this, we have to remember that what
is most important are relationships and commu-
nity networking. Rituals, vocal accents, and vil-
lage costumes all change gradually even in the
(fictitious) pristine, untouched-by-Western-
hands world (Wolf, 1982). A good way to see
this is to imagine yourself dressing up in some
village clothes, faking the village accent, and
walking into the village and doing the songs and
rituals perfectly, perhaps even more perfectly
than any of the villagers themselves can do.
Would you be accepted as a villager? Or per-
haps a better question would be: What else
would you have to do besides donning the trap-
pings to become an "authentic" villager? The
answer clearly involves belonging to the com-
munity networking and having a history of so-
cial relationships. Being "authentic" does not
involve doing those "cultural" practices that
nonanthropologists take to be the most impor-
tant findings made by anthropologists. Even an-
thropologists who have lived with a group of
people for 2 or 3 years, and can do the "cultural
practices" better than any individual member of
the group, are not accepted as "one of them."
My bigger argument here, relating this view
to the arguments of this article, is that the anal-
ysis of culture has been seen as the analysis of
"cultural cognitions," customary beliefs, or in-
dividual customary practices because, in fact,
the social relationship basis for these behaviors
has not been appreciated and analyzed. When
we observe cultural practices, we must think of
the many social bases of all of those individual
actions, at least 18 of them, and search for the
community and its relationships in all of this,
rather than the individual motivations or causes
of performing such practices. This applies to
strange cultural practices from far-off (anthro-
pological) places as well as those "trappings" of
Western "culture" (Bourdieu, 1984; DeNora,
1995). My argument is that the analysis of cul-
tural practices is the analysis of social relation-
ships within a community or group, and so this
article has been about how to recognize the
major determinants of such social and cultural
influences. When we view "cultural" practices
in action, we must "see" the historical and so-
cial contexts that extend beyond just those in-
dividuals and their current behavior. The per-
sons most controlling a cultural performance
might not even be present, and cross-sectional
methods would miss this.
How Would Psychology Be Changed?
There are several different ways that psychol-
ogy could proceed from these arguments if they
were accepted in general or in part. The clearest
change would occur in the removal of disposi-
tional and other abstract words from the re-
search vocabulary, because these words are a
way of covering up what we do not actually
know. It would be better to admit we do not
know than pretend we do by claiming "person-
ality" factors, "needs" for identity, and the like.
Even behavior analysts fall prey to this when
"analyzing" everything back to the words
"shaping" and "reinforcement" without study-
ing the social relationships in detail. A well-
respected behavior analyst once wrote that peo-
ple perform religious behaviors because those
behaviors are reinforced, a statement that by
 INDIVIDUALS AS SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS
itself is no better or worse than appealing to
"needs" or "instincts." To give another exam-
ple, instead of acquiescing to an individual
"need for consistency," as occurs in social psy-
chology, the analyses suggested in this article
show that "consistency" is a very rich part of
our everyday social lives that depends on other
people, the society in which we live, the types
of things we do, the politics and kin relation-
ships available, and our history of social
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relationships.
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A second major change would be the wide-
spread or even mandatory introduction of lon-
gitudinal and contextual research, not just
longer studies over time but research that puts
the behaviors into their full context. This is
certainly not easy, and I do not want to give the
impression that it is, but the arguments here and
elsewhere (Guerin, 2001b) suggest that it is
imperative. Whereas problems in other sciences
can sometimes be studied in isolation from their
contexts, I have argued here that all our behav-
ior is learned and maintained in social contexts,
and so it cannot be studied in isolation. If play-
ing a guitar alone in a room cannot be isolated
from at least 18 social contexts, then very little
else that humans do can be.
The problem for psychologists is not that
they have studied some of the human "soft-
ware" or "cognitive architecture" in social iso-
lation and that now there needs to be a new
concerted effort to put the social back in. Like-
wise, in another area of research, it is not that
the research on rule-governed behavior has
cleverly found out some properties of rules in
experimental isolation and that we now need to
add back the social context. The real problem
for all of these areas I am suggesting is that the
research has, in fact, been done in a social
context, several in fact, but that we have no
observations or measurements of those contexts
to help us. The "social" never left social cogni-
tion; it was hidden in generalized social rela-
tionships (Guerin, 2001b).
In the laboratory case, for example, we have
no real idea why people do the experiments,
why they obey instructions, whether they would
perform differently in another context, whether
they do things the same way at home if family
or friends are there, what surreptitious social
influences have gone on, or whether their status
as Westerners who have a high standard of
living has affected what they do and how they
421
do it. This point is not just revisiting the exper-
imenter bias literature but also really suggesting
that, with a slight twist of social context or a
slight variation in historical context, very dif-
ferent results would have emerged. For exam-
ple, if the suggestions about the conversational
basis to the prototype form of category talk
were true in general, then talking to different
friends and family could lead to very different
category uses; this is hardly a solid basis for the
foundational assumption of cognitive psychol-
ogy that we must simplify the world by using
categories (Guerin, 2001b). In fact, the very
"architecture" of category use would be socially
fluid, and there would not really be the idea at
all that there are cognitive structures of
categories.
To give two other examples from very dif-
ferent areas that have the same problem, the
rule-governed behavior literature in behavior
analysis has ignored the social control over rule
following, but the experiments that have been
run have used very specific but not very com-
mon forms of social control to get the rule
following to occur in the first place. Also, it has
been argued elsewhere that the cognitive disso-
nance experiments on forced compliance pro-
duced the results they did only because the
experimenters could both persuade their partic-
ipants to lie and disguise this social control
sufficiently well that the participants would not
know it and would therefore not use it as an
excuse for their behavior (Guerin, 2001b).
Thus, the phenomena studied are only there in
the first place because of the types of hidden
social control; however, this is being ignored in
the theorizing about those phenomena, and I
have already suggested that the hidden nature of
such social control is what has allowed such
free theorizing to take place for more than a
hundred years.
So the changes in thinking I am suggesting
will trickle down into all areas of psychology,
and although they do not "refute" or "disprove"
previous systems of psychology, they should
change the way things are done in most areas of
psychology. The study of "cognition," for ex-
ample, would become the study of using words
as social influence and would include social
control of category use, social control over the
very "architecture" of remembering (White,
1991), identity and self as conversational strat-
egies, and the conversational import or rhetoric
 422 GUERIN
of attention and building stories for others (Ed-
wards, 1997; Guerin, 1997a). It would look
much more closely at how people talk to others
over time, as sociolinguists have been doing
(Guerin, 1997a).
Let me give one more example that was sug-
gested by a reviewer of this article. The exam-
ple was to imagine that we found "a computer
that spoke English" and we wanted to know
how it had been engineered to do this. The
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question was whether it matters that language is
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socially controlled when we come to do this.
Would it really affect our research in recon-
structing, or reverse engineering, this com-
puter? Is not the reverse engineering about this
individual machine and its constituents, and not
anything social?
There are a few historical and social contexts
we need to examine in this example, so already
we are doing a wider analysis. First, the best
way would be to find the programmers and talk
to them about what they did and how they
affected this machine, but the example has al-
ready excluded this social option somehow.
Second, computer analogies to humans fail in
several respects that are only sometimes impor-
tant, and this is one such time: Computers are
built to have unchanging architecture, they have
architecture that can be removed and examined,
and they are usually built in the first place to act
independently once given instructions (so long
as someone plugs them into the power socket
and the program works correctly). Each of these
points means that the social construction of
English is certainly irrelevant to the computer,
as the author of the example anticipated. But I
would argue that these assumptions never apply
for humans and their actions.
Finally, the example really illustrates nicely
how we all acquiesce to statements that already
contain individualistic answers, because the
wording of this example is already assuming
that it is possible for the computer to function
and to "speak English" independently of people.
What we know of computer construction is that,
more and more, the interaction with people has
to be made part of the computer if we want it to
do things like humans at all. It is like saying that
we could find a computer that could carry on a
conversation but without interacting or talking
to anyone. But that would not really be a con-
versation at all. So my point here is that there is
a surreptitious blur with the words "speak En-
glish" in the very setting up of this example; the
example is already assuming an individualistic
metaphor that we or a computer can "speak
English" without there being huge social inter-
active control happening from people. This is
the very thing I doubt can happen, even with a
computer.
Even more pertinently, most views about the
social nature of language revolve around lan-
guage doing something to people, so we must
also ask whether we would do what a computer
asked. If this computer told me to stand on my
head, would I do it? Clearly, the answer de-
pends on who is running the machine and what
resources and power they have. I argue that
getting people to do and say things is the very
essence of all language use, and it is not about
learning a list of syntax and grammar rules. So
if I did not do what the computer "said," or
stopped paying attention to the computer, then
we really should not be saying that the computer
can "speak English" at all. From a conversa-
tional or discourse analysis view, learning syn-
tax and grammar is more like the art of learning
war strategies than feeding in a list of rules as
input. And to pursue this still more, even if we
could reverse engineer and read off a list of
syntax rules, we would still not know how they
are used to get people to do things without
knowing the social strategies of speaking En-
glish that go on with people.
To conclude, this example is useful in show-
ing how social bases are hidden even by the
very way that we talk (that the computer can
"speak English"). If one pays this amount of
attention to the minutiae of other psychological
theorizing, similar surreptitious moves can be
found (Guerin, 2001b). The shift from rules to
strategies means that the mechanisms taking
part are not going to be very helpful for our
understanding of what is going on in social
behavior; only studying the social relationships
in context will. My point is not that I know
better and have these answers, just that it might
be better to say that we do not know (how a
computer could "speak English" at all) than
hide it in our theoretical words.
Conclusion: Individuals Are a
Conglomerate of Social Relationships
My aim here has not been to convince readers
of anything in a philosophical sense. To be
 INDIVIDUALS AS SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS
really convinced requires intense observations
or demonstrations of all of the situations I have
talked about. Instead, I have tried to outline
many concrete ways that being alone might be
recognized or "seen" as a social event so that
the socialness of "individual" human behavior
might become clearer when you watch people.
Even when you are sitting alone, listening to or
playing music, the control over what is going on
is inundated with socialness. Eighteen ways
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have been outlined here, although most show
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multiple forms of the same point. For example,
having parents socially shape (provide a social
scaffold) a child's attentional activities was one
point, but there are countless ways that this can
be carried out in practice. So the 18 ways actu-
ally multiply into many more.
One main point I have tried to get across is to
view any human behavior as fully social and
begin to appreciate that the notion of a self-
contained individual (or computer) is mis-
guided: "The organism, of course, seems in
everyday life and language to stand out strongly
apart from the transactions in which it is en-
gaged. This is a superficial observation. One
reason for it is that the organism is engaged in
so many transactions" (A. F. Bentley, as cited in
S. Ratner, Altman, & Wheeler, 1964, p. 138).
I have also tried to get across another main
point: that if we do not normally think of being
alone as social, this neglect is a function of the
usefulness of talking that way, not of the truth
of the matter. Talking about people as individ-
uals and as having inner determinants is a very
useful conversational strategy that is used by
psychologists and laypeople alike, because it
provides hedging against counterarguments,
ambiguity that allows flexibility, and a lack of
accountability and monitoring (except the use
of consistency). The fact that it is conversation-
ally useful, however, means that as social sci-
entists we have to constantly struggle against
this way of talking and thinking. I hope readers
will be better able to go out into their worlds
now and notice and observe the full socialness
of people, even when a person is alone in a
room playing a guitar. As Deleuze and Guattari
(1981) put it, people are lines rather than points;
they stretch out in time and space like a rhi-
zome. But the point of this article is to begin to
see such fancy statements as these in a concrete
way rather than keep them as abstract talk. That
is what I hope this review can accomplish.
423
Finally, I hope the reader will appreciate that
much the same has been partly said all over the
social sciences and that psychology is perhaps
the odd one out in this regard. Putting the onus
of explanation onto detailed descriptions of so-
cial and cultural contexts, which requires meth-
ods of longitudinal observation or participation,
will be needed if psychology is to break out of
its individualistic bias. An irony is that many
see one 2-hr interview as saving psychology
from decontextualized experimental methods,
whereas social anthropologists and sociologists
would urge us to study the people and topics we
are interested in 24 hr a day for a year or more
before we can really understand what is going
on. A better synthesis of the social sciences will
then be possible (Guerin, 2000, 2001b).
Because Arthur F. Bentley has guided much
of the present article, I close with a statement
from nearly 70 years ago that summarizes much
of this article:
Where we find a man talking-to-himself, or practicing
alone in his room the speech he is to deliver to tomor-
row's audience, do we secure such a fixed and certain
observation that we must take it as primary phenome-
non, and that we must regard that other observation of
man-talking-to-another or man-addressing-audience as
merely a secondary or superficial description? Is this
latter observation to be understood and interpreted only
by the compounding of "separate units" of the former
type?
If observation were confined to what one pair of
eyes can see at one instant, the criticism would hold.
But such a position is absurd. Following it back, one
would be compelled to pass further to elements of
isolated sense determination, and would not "see" any-
thing at all. We never "see" more than one side of the
elephant at once, but we regard him as "wholly" visi-
ble, as observable objectively in a frame of visibility.
We can turn him around, or, more readily, walk around
him, and make our verifications. The elephant that
confronts scientific investigation and practical obser-
vation alike is the full object, and not an instantaneous,
partial sense-report.
Apply this fairly to the case of the man practicing his
"speech" in his study. The audience is not visibly
present, it will not assemble until tomorrow night, it
has fluctuating possibilities of membership. But none
the less the audience is a phase of the event that is
observably before our consideration. We must con-
struct the "speech" forward into its stages of delivery,
and backwards into its preparatory stages, if we are to
have any functional meaning at all, or any other intel-
ligible meaning, in the phenomenon of the orator. We
may envisage the full situation in its adequate spatial
and durational extensions, if it is to our advantage so to
do for the purposes of an inquiry upon which we are
engaged. (Bentley, 1935, pp. 213-214)
 424 GUERIN
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Received October 27, 2000
Revision received April 12, 2001
Accepted April 16, 2001