Sociometry is the measurement of degrees of attraction or its opposite\u2014un-attraction?\u2014among people. It is part of the complex of creations of Jacob L. Moreno, a born-Viennese physician who immigrated to the United States and developed psychodrama. (This is one of my interests!) Sociometry was one of this genius\u2019 major creations, but it has been largely subsumed under his other creation, psychodrama. However, I think sociometry really merits being taught in middle school. It would have saved me a LOT of aggravation, trying to be liked by people with whom I had \u201cnegative tele\u201d\u2014that is, we just clashed, they wouldn\u2019t and probably couldn\u2019t like me. Here are some principles:<\/p>\n
1. Some folks you click with, some folks you just don\u2019t click with, and some folks you have a natural antipathy with. Corollary: It\u2019s best not to try to be friendly with the last group. Correct, polite, but not friendly. Any effort to be friendly will be taken wrongly. <\/p>\n
2. It\u2019s good to know a method for diagnosing your interpersonal network. Sociometry is the basis for such a diagnosis.<\/p>\n
3. It\u2019s tricky because you have to be honest with yourself; and it\u2019s difficult also because we are saturated in illusion. But it\u2019s best in the long range. It\u2019ll save you lots of grief. Sociometry offers you tools to assess your social position.<\/p>\n
4. People don\u2019t like the truth. But then again, people didn\u2019t like the truths embedded in studies of prejudice, or sexuality, etc. However, it\u2019s one thing to decry something from a higher moral plane and another thing to deny it exists.<\/p>\n
5. For all our trumpeting about how things ought to be, let us not deny the way things are, and very probably remain so for the foreseeable future: Some folks don\u2019t like each other! Other folks like each other. Some folks who shouldn\u2019t like each other do! (That\u2019s what Romeo and Juliet \u2014or West Side Story\u2014are about!) We should not blind ourselves to what is by remaining stubbornly fixated on what \u201cshould\u201d be.<\/p>\n
6. It\u2019s therefore good to know what\u2019s what. This is very deep, because folks might like each other for one or two things but not for a third or a fourth. In-between grades happen all the time!<\/p>\n
What other principles of sociometry should be taught in middle school?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sociometry is the measurement of degrees of attraction or its opposite\u2014un-attraction?\u2014among people. It is part of the complex of creations of Jacob L. Moreno, a born-Viennese physician who immigrated to the United States and developed psychodrama. (This is one of my interests!) Sociometry was one of this genius\u2019 major creations, but it has been largely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,35,11,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-follies","category-mind-spectrums","category-literacy","category-social-depth-psychology-sociometry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2877"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2877"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2878,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2877\/revisions\/2878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}