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The Theory of the Senergicons Psico-sociological aspects of the Economic Underdevelopment

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Prologue
 

I. The Idea of Reformulating the Psychological Theory

Some time ago we became interested in studying the causes of underdevelopment. With this in mind, we undertook a number of trips to Latin America and visited farms in each country whenever we could. We thought that if the problem of underdevelopment was to be found in productivity, all we had to do was study the means of production and change them to a more productive technology. From this we became interested in studying the means of agricultural production in order to compare these means with those of developed countries with the idea of finding out which was the best technology to be undertaken. Because on each trip we had so little time to dispose of (three months of vacation in the summer) and no financial source at all outside of my salary as professor, we decided to concentrate on the production of chicken and pork. To our surprise, even in such underdeveloped countries as Peru, advanced production technology was in use to a significant degree. For example, the Ponce Frio family in Peru used very advanced technologies in their production of chicken, and the Fucuda family also used the most advanced technologies in their production of pork. Of course, these were not average farms, where the majority of them were using backward production methods.

Logically, we estimated that one way of producing economic development was to use these farms as models for agriculture and spread the information about these technologies throughout the country. We soon found out that this was not feasible. The main obstacle was the attitude of the peasants, who didn't propitiate the diffusion of these techniques. Moreover, it seemed to us almost intuitively that the prosperity of these farms depended, not on the technology they used, but rather on their attitude toward life. That even with a technology not too advanced, the ones who were prosperous were the ones who had good attitudes towards savings, thrift, efficiency, work, etc. From this perspective, we considered that a substantial part of underdevelopment was a problem of attitudes.

These findings led us to focus on the study of underdevelopment from the psychological and the sociological rather than from the economic perspective. It had been some time since we had observed that in underdeveloped countries a great number of the institutions either did not function or they functioned very deficiently. The police did not function; justice and the courts did not function; the means of transportation functioned very deficiently, with no schedule, no departure time, no arrival time, without any responsibility for the service they offered the client. Especially, we noted that while the level of development of one country was greater, greater also was the level of discipline observed in its citizens. That is to say, there was a correlation between the attitudes toward discipline and the level of economic development.

On this basis, we worked out our first draft of the causes of underdevelopment. When we had our ideas more or less finished, we found a book, published by the Center for International Affairs of the Harvard University, on the causes of underdevelopment, which caused us great pain and also great joy. The book was entitled "Underdevelopment is a State of Mind", by Laurence E. Harrison. Although his theory was not exactly like ours, there was certainly a great analogy. Moreover, in this book there was a bibliography on other persons who had already talked on the subject in the past. Our disappointment was great, for we had thought that publication would take away the glory of our being the first to express such ideas. On the other hand, to see that other people had arrived to conclusions similar to ours, filled us with joy, for that meant our ramblings were not in error and that our observations were confirmed by the observations of others.

The appearance of this book led us to an even greater surprise. We remained waiting for the world to bow before so extraordinary discovery, but nobody paid any attention. At least that is the way it has been up to now. When we noticed the publication date (1985) we realized that the book had been some time in circulation without the academic and intellectual community haven given it any importance. We meditate. If this happened to a work that received the support and the financial backing of a university with the prestige of Harvard, had it been our case, no one would have been found to publish it, or even to pay any attention to it. We asked ourselves for what reason would anyone pay attention to something so obvious. Even more, according to the bibliography quoted by Harrison himself, this has been being repeated in similar form by different authors, without anyone noticing it. Such is the case with Carlos Rangel in his book "From the Noble Savage to the Noble Revolutionary". We thought it might be because the specific link or connection had not been made between the values, the attitudes, the culture and the underdevelopment. That is to say, the causality, the cause and effect relation, had not been established between these elements, which had always been considered in its implicit form in the analysis but not in the explicit form, so that the relation had never been explained. In that respect, Harrison himself hurled a challenge in the last paragraph of the introduction of his book:

...I want to repeat my belief that culture, more than any other factor, explains why some countries grow faster and more equitably than others.

...One of my principal hopes is that others will be stimulated by the book to undertake the research that will either verify, expand, or modify the thesis.

We decided to pick up the gauntlet and try to convert the belief into a scientific fact establishing the causality relations.

Our next step consisted of examining psychological and sociological literature to determine what these disciplines had to say about the formation of attitudes, values, motivation, etc. in individuals, and in this manner to formulate a cause and effect relation between the formation of attitudes and the level of economic development. Although it seems simple, this was a very difficult task, for as economists, we were not so familiar with the psychological theory. After having revised the literature we found that this task could not be carried out given the present development reached by the psychological and sociological theory. The most relevant to our interest was the first. Much to our regret, we found deplorable the state of development of these sciences. The concepts developed about values, attitudes, emotions, motivations, etc. seemed incorrect. Our personal experience and our intuition told us that the true relations were not what the theory set forth. Furthermore, there did not appear to be integration between the different aspects of the psychological theory. The themes or areas of psychology seemed to be islands of knowledge that are not interrelated one with another, or are interrelated in a very weak way. In this way the interrelation between attitudes, emotions, motivation, etc., do not appear to be clearly established and, in many cases, simply are not established. Even more, in occasions it is affirmed that the relationship doesn't exist. For example, in the case of emotion and motivation, according to the theory these are independent processes.

For us, all these things were intimately related. Especially, it seemed to us that the emotions played a fundamental role in the motivation of the individual, which as we saw it, did not seem to be treated adequately in theory. It also did not seem to us to adequately treat the relation between values and the attitudes with the emotions and the motivation in the individual. For that reason, we soon arrived at the conclusion that if we wanted to work out a theory about economic development, we should reformulate the whole psychological theory developed until the present. The present work is the result of that task and it is on this base which we are going to have to continue in the future our original work about the causes of the economic underdevelopment, which in the meantime has remained in suspense.

What meaning does this theory have for psychologists and sociologists? Because of the importance improving the standard of living of the society has for those who govern, economics has a greater prestige over the other sciences. To the degree that in order to make decisions, for all practical purposes there are no governments that can do without economic advisors. The principal advisors to the governments in this day are economists. Psychologists and sociologists shine in their absence. If this theory is correct, and if our appreciation is correct that a substantial part of economic development depends on attitudes, then in the future the principal advisors of the governing class will be social psychologists or psychological sociologists instead of economists. That is to say, a model of psychological and sociological theory would be being established with a functionality that would be converting it into the most practical and efficient tool for forming public policy in the society.

II The Discovery of the Senergicon as a Key Element in Our Theory

It has taken us approximately one year and a half to produce this theory in its essence. The key element for its development came about accidentally. We had dedicated long hours, for several months, to deciphering how attitudes were formed. In a trip we made to Europe, our attention was attracted by a particular occurrence that took place on a train that was going from Germany to Holland. As we had on more than one occasion the bitter experience of missing the stop where we were to get off, we firmly resolved that this would never happen again. Our deficiency in English made it often happen that we did not clearly understand the answer we received when we asked what the next stop was. Our preventive measure consisted of asking as many times as seemed necessary, until we dispelled all doubt.

We do not remember in which town it was where we had to get off, but we stopped a porter in the passageway and asked him what the next stop was. He told us and we clearly understood what he said. Soon we recalled that on the other occasions we thought we had correctly understood and yet it was not that way, so we decided to ask the porter again. When he passed by, we felt a great shame to ask him the same silly question that he had already answered with great clarity, and so we could not make it. We began to think about it, for after all it was related to what we were studying about the formation of attitudes and the activation of emotions. Then, we said to ourselves: "It shames us to ask the same person the same question twice because he is going to think we are foolish." So we decided to wait until another porter passed by to ask the same question. Curiously, to our surprise, we could not stop him either, for the emotion of shame invaded us again. We asked ourselves: How is it possible that we are ashamed when this time we are asking a different person who has no reason for thinking we are foolish? After a little reflection, we reached the conclusion that it was the person sitting behind us who made us feel ashamed and not the porter at all. Our subconscious had realized that this person had seen us question the first porter. Consequently, we felt shame because at a totally unconscious level our brain had registered the presence of an object that was activating the emotion of shame.

We reflected upon our finding for a long time and we discovered the central idea upon which we began to structure our new theory. This was the idea of an energized sensation of the conduct (senergicon) activated by the presence of an object. We thought that in some part of our brain something had contrasted the action alternative that we had worked out, with the constellation of values. To repeat the same question twice, we thought, was dissonant, as action alternative, with the value "to act like a fool or like a dumb person is bad"; as a result one senergicon is activated. This is what happened with the first bellboy/bellhop. Later, the experience with the second boy suggested that certain aspects of this process could be unconscious. The speed with which this contrasting process takes place is so great that, for the individual, things appear to be taking place instantaneously

We also discovered that the installation of one value was something rather stable and difficult to change. We conducted various experiments in this regard in the cities we were visiting. For example, we had observed that when we asked a passer-by for a direction and he would give us an incorrect one, indicating for us to go, in our judgement, in the wrong direction, our tendency was to continue in the wrong direction so that the person who try to help us would not feel bad. If we go in a direction contrary to the one we were given, we feel ashamed and sorry, for we are calling the person who tried to help us silly. When we were in Paris, we resolved, as an experiment, to begin to ask people for directions, and then to go in the direction contrary to the one they gave us. The idea was to unlearn the value that activated the emotion of shame and to install a new one in its place. The value that produced shame in us was "To call a person foolish or ignorant with gestures or actions is bad". The value, with which we wanted to exchange this one, was "To have perfect control over what we wish to do is good."

We threw ourselves into the task, while we silently repeated this last value, and once the directions with the explanations were given to us, we went in the opposite direction. After many repetitions of this experiment, it continued to produce in us a great shame and pain at acting this way, above all, when the person was amiable and anxious to help us. This led us to conclude that the formation of values, once installed, had great stability.

These experiments, product of the personal reflection, led us to a third finding. Introspection, as investigative methodology, so discredited by contemporary psychology, should be the only available way to get out of the mire that science has found itself in these days, and to be able to move somewhat ahead. Upon returning to Puerto Rico, we employed this methodology in order to develop our theory.

III Corruption, Inefficiency and Low Productivity, and Their Relation to Attitudes

Something that notably impressed us on our trips to European and Latin American countries was the dramatic differences in attitudes. If in Latin America the police are easy to bribe, in Europe this is not so possible. At least it is not commonplace. If in Latin America justice in the courts cannot be exercised because of the high degree of vulnerability in the criminal justice system, in Europe and the United States it is the opposite. So much so, that the greatest threat that can be made to a drug dealer is to tell him that he will be deported to the United States to be prosecuted. They place bombs and declare an utterly ruthless terrorist war. Some have offered to pay their country's national debt provided they will not deport them. All that because they know that in that country they have few possibilities to influence, to bribe, to extort or to manipulate the system of criminal justice. In their own country they feel secure in this sense.

Although in Europe there is government corruption, in Latin America this is so institutionalized that it has become the norm and not the exception. When a politician is caught in the act of stealing, instead of resign, he refuses to abandon his post and his bitter complaint seems to indicate the strange idea that his sacred right to rob his part of what justly corresponds to him of the national sacking is being violated. That is to say, the attitude is not one that produces shame for being caught stealing, but rather it is one that "denounces the persecution of which he is the victim" of those who would not allow him to get what he wants and whom he identifies as his enemies. Rob the member of the assembly, the legislator, the mayor, the governor, the minister of state, the cabinet secretary, the president. In short, to rob is considered part of the norm not the exception.

The regularity of theft takes in all the social spheres outside of government, which is in contrast to what is observable in the developed countries. For example, although in Europe one can find isolated cases of pirated copyright, nevertheless these practices are strongly pursued and punished by the government; on the other hand, in Latin America the copies of cassettes of music of any singer or musical group are sold publicly, as much by street peddlers, as by commercial establishments. Computer program piracy is the order of the day. Book piracy is practiced without any restraint, with the indifference, and in some countries, even with the consent and participation of corrupt government officials who benefit from it. Punctuality and responsibility are, like attitudes, markedly different in developed and underdeveloped countries. If in Latin America the rule is that a bus that ought to leave at 8 on the dot leaves at 9, 10 or 11, in Europe if you arrive at the bus station at one minute past 8, the probability that you miss the bus is almost certain. If in Latin America the public responsibility of businesses companies is poor or non-existent, in Europe and the United States if an airline or a bus company leaves a passenger in the terminal by the fault of the company, the passengers knows that far from lamenting the situation he can rejoice because not only will the price of his fare be returned but the next day he will travel free. In the meantime, for that night room and board will be paid by the company. I remember one of many experiences in this to this effect while traveling through Latin America. One bus that traveled from Santiago to Antofagasta broke down in the middle of the desert. The driver got us off the bus and then told us in the middle of a desert that was suffocatingly hot that we had to arrange for our own transportation out of there. When I asked for my money back he put on the face of a victim and asked me if I thought he had damaged the bus on purpose. He said that it was not his fault that the bus had broken down and there was no way that he returned me the money. In other words, within his constellation of attitudes he had charged me not for taking me to Antofagasta, but for his intention to take me there.

So we see that the social institutions, public as well as private, in the developed countries are efficient and they work, unlike those in the underdeveloped countries. As a result, productivity is high in the former.

Leaving to one side the workings of the social institutions to examine the workings of the individuals in the society, a high level of discipline is observable in the developed countries, contrary to the case in the underdeveloped ones. Also observable is a high correlation between the level of economic development reached by a country and the level of discipline that its citizens reveal in their attitudes. For example, Switzerland has the highest per capita income in the world, after Kuwait. In the case of Kuwait this high income is due to the exploitation of petroleum, but in the case of Switzerland it is a matter of enormous productivity. The per capita income for Switzerland in 1989 was $29,880 wish is approximately $10,000 higher than that of the United States. But Switzerland, unlike the United States, is a very small country. The level of observable discipline in Switzerland is impressive. Upon arriving at Geneva we noticed that to take the bus one does not have to pay the conductor. The system is based on the trust and the honesty of the citizen. At the stop there is a coin box with a list of the stops that the bus makes, the exact time it gets to each stop and the money that should be deposited in the box to pay for the stop you are getting off. The box gives you a receipt for the amount of money you deposited in it, but neither the conductor of the bus nor anyone else asks you for that receipt to confirm your pay.

In our country a system like that, if it were established, would immediately go broke, since the percentage of evaders would not allow it to function. As a matter of fact, we were so drawn by this example of self-discipline that we decided to try an experiment to verify up to what point this system would be vulnerable if it had to function with persons that did not respond to that constellation of attitudes. By asking passengers we found out that at certain points in the center of the city it was likely that an inspector would get on a bus and verify the receipt of payment of each passenger. Whoever did not have a receipt had to pay a fine equivalent to approximately fifty American dollars. Swiftly we moved to that point and patiently waited for an inspector to get on the bus. The experiment, we thought, would be worth the trouble of sacrificing fifty dollars. After several attempts we finally achieved our purpose. A man of retirement age got on the bus and immediately began to ask for receipts. The first thing we noted was how easy it is for the evader to determine at what point the inspectors were likely to be. In the second place, it was easy to identify the inspectors so that the person could get off the bus the back way when an inspector got on. For this alone this system could not function in our country. In consequence, the functioning and the effectiveness of the system would depend on the self-discipline of the citizen, and therefore of their attitudes. When the inspector reached me, I told him I did not have a receipt. We cannot describe the look of surprise on that man's face. He seemed to say with that expression that he expected to retire without ever bumping into an evader. His face become somewhat contorted and with a gesture that seemed to be more of joy and of nervousness than of anger, he began to fill out a ticket while he gestured affirming with the head with his head, at the same time that he told me the amount of the fine to pay. I told him that I did not have money to pay fines and then he seemed to lose his bearings. It was as though he could not believe what he was seeing. This time, in a visibly nervous way, he ordered the conductor to stop the bus while he told me to get off and using his radiocommunicator sent a message to the central station requesting that a vehicle be sent to the site in order to pick him up and an arrested person. As he got off the bus he began to walk in front ordering me to follow him. I turned around and began to walk in the opposite direction. I expected that he would try to detain me, by grabbing me. But it was not that way. With a face each time more contorted he went behind me saying that I could not do what I was doing. Meanwhile, with great courtesy I indicated that I was not going in that direction and apologizing for my lack of control of the language I walked faster and lost myself in the city. In other words, that man not only expected in terms of his attitudes and expectations over mine, that I was honest and pay the bus, but that when I was surprised in my lack, I was willing to pay a fine. Plus still, he waited, in terms of their attitudes and their expectations on mine that in the event of not paying the fine, I would go and voluntarily shut myself up in jail. It is this constellation of attitudes that generate the efficiency in the system so that the institutions work. It is this constellation of attitudes that allows its income per capita to be $10,000 more than that of the United States even though it is a much smaller country and with many less natural resources.

Another characteristic of the developed countries that can be observed in attitudes is that the people queue up automatically for everything. For example, to get on the buses they stand in line without anyone asking them to do so. In our country this would be a little less than impossible. Here when a bus approaches, people at the stops prepare their elbows in anticipation of the struggle that is about to take place, to see who gets in first. If it is at the time of heavy traffic, the struggle becomes really bloody. As a curious item, it is noteworthy that in Latin American countries of greater economic development, such as, for example, Mexico and Argentina, people tend to stand in line to get into buses and the level of self-discipline is greater. This corroborates the asseveration made previously, in the sense that there is a high correlation between these two variables.

In the south of Germany, in the region of Bavaria, we could observe that in department stores, valuable objects remained exposed, accessible to anyone who wanted to steal. For example, 10 to 15 dollars ballpoint pens could be found on unprotected counters, so that it was easy to take one, put it in your shirt pocket and continue walking without being noticed. We searched the place for concave mirrors or video cameras, and discovered there was no protection of this kind. We investigated about this among the passers-by and found out that the police in this region were very strict. When they got a hold of someone stealing, they gave him a hard time. We don't know if this were true or not, but just in case we decided not to conduct any experiment in this respect in Germany.

A characteristic of European countries in terms of attitudes that attracted our attention was that of not throwing paper on the floor. In our country, is frequently that a person will eat something and throw the wrapper on the floor, or if he is in a car he will throw it out the window. In Europe, the typical conduct is not only different, but everyone feels free to reprehend the person who does it. In our country, those who do not throw a paper on the floor, do not feel, that they have the right to call the attention to the ones that do it. Nor do they dare. Apparently another attitude exists that says that each person can do whatever he wants, and it is disapproved of for someone to interfere. That person is called meddlesome, and is considered offensive and not minding his own business.

In relation to this we undertook an experiment in London. We wanted to see if it were feasible to generate a statistic that would permit us to estimate what proportion of the population had a determinable attitude. Later, we would do the same in other European capitals, with the object of finding the correlation between this variable and the level of economic development, measured in terms of income per capita. The experiment consisted of stopping at the end of the sidewalk in front of Hyde Park with a McDonalds bag that had leftovers in it. When someone approached I threw the bag to the ground and furtively looked to see the expression on the person's face. Later, I determined the proportion of persons that reacted negatively as an estimate of the proportion of persons in the population who had a strong attitude against that conduct. To my surprise I was arrested by a policeman who had been surreptitiously watching my behavior, before the expressions of sheer joy shown on the faces of the people who had been observing my investigation. It was hard work trying to convince the policeman that I was a professor at the University of Puerto Rico and that I was working on a scientific experiment of a sociological nature. Finally, I managed to get him to release me, but not without first warning me that he did not want to see me doing those supposed experiments in any place in London.

The experiences in European and Latin American countries left me with the strong impression that the attitudes in these countries were not merely secondary consequences of the economic development reached, but rather, conversely, they played a fundamental role in the level of development reached. That is to say, the economic wellbeing does not bring, are not the cause of the correct attitude, as some believe, but rather that these are the cause of the economic wellbeing.

These were the impressions that led us, in the first place, to formulate ideas about the causes of underdevelopment as a problem of attitudes and, in the second place, to reformulate the psychological theory about attitudes. Finally, the reformulation of the theory of attitudes led us to reformulate all the rest of the psychological theory, which is the material that we present in this work.

Once a theory is developed, the next step within that methodology consists of verifying--by means of laboratory experimentation and field observation--to see if the theory is confirmed by reality. This is a task that requires the concurrence of many people and many resources. We hope that at the universities they will be developing experiments that will lead to confirmation or rejection.

It is worth pointing out that throughout our research, we found many terms and concepts that we developed and for which there were no words in literature, nor in popular talk. As a result, we found ourselves, as in a Garcia Marquez story, in a place like that of Macondo in which, in order to refer to certain things, they had to be marked out. For this reason it became necessary to baptize them. The term "senergicon" is an example of this. There are many more concepts like this one, which comes from having walked through territory never before stepped on.

We are grateful to Dr. Rosario Núñez de Ortega for having read the document in its entirety and having made many corrections in style and orthography. The ones that still remain are the responsibility of the author.

We wish to end with a last observation. During the first revisions that we made about the theory of the emotions, one of the best known persons in this field, Robert Plutchik--by chance also from the University of Harvard--in the introduction to his book "Las Emociones", works out a list of questions which a theory about the emotions should answer. We picked up the challenge and endeavored to answer it. Throughout the entire study it has always been our intention to answer as many of the questions as were posed by Plutchik.

Plutchik emphasizes the function which, according to the philosophers of science, every theory must have:

1. The theories should act as integrators of the facts that are already known.

2. They show the connection between areas apparently separated.

3. They should be stimulating to new investigation.

4. They should forecast new relations.

Apart from the challenge that we picked up from Harrison, we have always been very resolved to satisfy these four demands of Plutchik. We have specially tried to formulate a general theory that would be capable of integrating the theories, not only within the field of emotions and motivation, but also of the different fields within psychology. We believe we have obtained the first truly general and integral theory of psychology. Naturally, the reader will judge the correctness of our claim.



W.H.B.
Cayey, Puerto Rico
February, 1991





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