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YOUR STORY
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wishes and subsequent decisive actions. Here, conflicting impulses are adjusted as a result of reflective thinking.
As you study people, keep in mind these classes of acts.
A perfect specimen of a noncharacteristic act is a sneeze. Not that all people sneeze exactly alike. But rather that a man’s particular act of sneezing reveals to us nothing about his personality beyond the manner in which his face muscles react when the mucous membrane of the nose is irritated. This situation is so limited that it lacks significance in the larger life pattern; or, if it has any significance, it is exceedingly trivial. As we would ordinarily put it, sneezing means little or nothing as an index of either character or personality.
Nor is this all. Sneezing is highly equivocal. That is, you cannot tell, merely from observing the act, how it relates to the situation in which the man sneezes. Does he sneeze because he is in a draught? Or as a result of dust getting up his nose? Or because it is hay fever time?
Or what? To be sure, you might observe the stimulus; and you would understand the act. In which case, the act would be clear enough. But, as a rule, we rarely see the actual stimuli which touch off simple reflexes.
A simple characteristic act is illustrated by a small boy lying to his mother when she demands how he has wet his clothes. The boy has been in swimming, contrary to his father’s orders; he knows father will chastise him if the truth comes out. So he fibs. Here is an act that expresses a broad human trait of escaping pain by LuL shamming. In the particular boy, it may be an established habit that bobs up over and over in a variety of situations. This frequency of recurrence makes it characteristic of that particular boy. It throws light on his