Human Psychology and Social Development

Human psychology is quite a mirage. It’s such complex and unexpected that normal logical analysis fails to fathom. It’s an interesting phenomenon though. When we think about the complexities of human psychology, we forget that our minds are also somewhat captured in this complex web. So a fairly independent analysis is just not possible. But what we can definitely try is to understand major trends and norms of human interactions, especially in social organizations.

Let’s try to chalk out the history of society. The reasons and factors why it took this path are interesting outcomes of human interactions in different environments. Why had primitive humans wanted to talk to their fellow humans? This is important to understand, as this rooted an important characteristic of human i.e. social animal. Survival seems to be the sole reason why such a desire could have occurred. The survival in hostile natural environment was just not simple without cooperation. Thus could have been laid the seed for first social framework.

The society developed out of sheer need of one human on others for survival. Now that the interactions developed and got facilitated through the development of aids like language, other factors started creeping in. Many psychological factors like fear, anger, love, hatred, jealousy etc. govern our interactions with fellow humans. While for other animals, such factors are quite limited and hence their interactions do not go beyond a certain limit, for humans the development of their relationships take fantastic turns. As the size of community increases, these complexities also rise, however there is a cognitive limit to which humans can sustain their relationships. Hence the nature of relationships categorize dramatically.

As the superiority of humans started to reflect in their ability to sustain in adverse environments and their ability to rule rest of the animal kingdom, different factors started to crop up. Needless to say these were also deeply affected by their interactions with the environment. The understanding of natural phenomenon was quite nascent and hence forced them to adopt a whole different behavior. Such deep rooted was this effect that it took years even after they realized their mistakes to change their attitude. Under such complex web of factors human interactions with each other took uncharted ways to develop. The factors grew slowly and interdependencies of various relations within cognitive limits and beyond them started to show. Social development took complex shapes like village, clan, state, brotherhood, nations and many more. Even these cohesions had overlaps. After a time it became really difficult for some people to control the development of society and the society became self sustaining.

Interesting is the fact that humans created society for their sustenance and slowly society grew to engulf human independence for its sustenance. Today we are largely governed by many norms that society has devised over years. Even when we feel the redundancy of such things, we really find ourselves helpless to cut away.