Question?:
Did you do any cross culture work?
Dr.
Graves:
I have not but you are probably aware of what happened in this
time period. I found that I was not alone. If you go back in the
literature, you will find that in 1961, a whole slew of us were coming
out with essentially the same ideas. There was Lawrence Kohlberg at
Harvard with his stages of moral development which is well documented
across cultures. Kohlberg has done a lot of this. Blake and Mouton in
the field of industrial psychology with their different systems of
behavior and they have been all over the world. Mason Hair (sp?) in
using the basic idea of the Maslow hierarchy of needs has some very
interesting data comparing Italian bank mangers with Swedish managers,
English managers compared to Chilean, Brazilin managers, Panamanian
managers and the like on the Maslow hierarchy of needs. There is
Comanero (sp?) who worked with Maslow in St. Kits in the
Caribbean
and Harvey,
Hunt and Schroder who worked with very different groups at the
University
of
Colorado
and elsewhere.
I
was working with adult human behavior and Dr. Jack Calhoun was working
with rats at NIH and came up with the same conceptions. It is extremely
interesting that all these people came up with the same basic conceptual
point of view at the same time. Now, if you go over this point of view,
what you are going to find at the present moment is, that Jack Calhoun
and I, at least at the present, differ from the others in having the
most extensive systems conception of personality. Harvey, Hunt and
Schroder cut it in the middle. They don’t have the systems we have
above and they don’t have the systems we have below. This is also true
of Blake and Mouton. We found that we had to revise the Maslovian
hierarchy of needs. There were some problems with it. The answer to your
question is: I haven’t studied cross culturally, but the systems point
of view came to be and has been tested out in almost every kind of
situation you can conceive of.
The single most important thing, in my mind, in the field of
behavioral problems at the present time and I would say this genuinely,
I believe for the welfare of mankind, is for this government to wake up
and get all of this information together in one place.
You would be amazed at the papers I have where a man buried in a
university up in
Canada
reads an article
of mine and he says; “I hid this thing away ten years ago because
everyone thought that I was crazy.” Now, there is an incredible amount
of
tremendous
information along this line, in the literature, in the files that is
ready to be used in approaching human problems and there is no effort
being put forth to bring this information together. If there is anything
we need, it is this sort of thing, to bring it all
together.
There is John Pare’ (sp?) in
Montreal
, for instance.
Who is paying any attention to what this man has to say? Good God, he is
one of the most important men in
Canada
. No one pays much
attention to him.
We appear to have arrived at a point in time when an idea can
come up that can help people in whatever field they work. Somehow, I
don’t care if they are system engineers, rat psychologists or human
psychologists or moralists or physicists or whatever. It all seems to be
pointing in the same direction.
(Lunch
Break)
-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
(Afternoon
session)