An interesting effect of the social instinct appears in August Mayer's[21] elaborate study made up on fourteen boys in the fifth and sixth grade of a Würzburg school to determine whether they could work better together or alone. The tests were in dictation, mental and written arithmetic, memory, and Ebbinghaus's combination exercises and all were given with every practicable precaution to make the other conditions uniform. The conclusions demonstrate the advantages of collective over individual instruction. Under the former condition, emulation is stronger and work more rapid and better in quality. From this it is inferred that pupils should not be grouped according to ability, for the dull are most stimulated by the presence of the bright, the bad by the good, etc. Thus work at home is prone to deteriorate, and experimental pedagogy shows that the social impulse is on the whole a stronger spur for boys of eleven or twelve than the absence of distraction which solitude brings.
From the answers of 1,068 boys and 1,268 girls from seven to sixteen on the kind of chum they liked best,[22] it appears that with the teens children are more anxious for chums that can keep secrets and dress neatly, and there is an increased number who are liked for qualities that supplement rather than duplicate those of the chooser. "There is an apparent struggle between the real actual self and the ideal self; a pretty strong desire to have a chum that embodies the traits youth most desire but which they are conscious of lacking." The strong like the weak; those full of fun the serious; the timid the bold; the small the large, etc. Only children[23] illustrate differing effects of isolation, while "mashes" and "crushes" and ultra-crony-ism with "selfishness for two" show the results of abnormal restriction of the irradiation of the social instinct which should now occur.[24]
M. H. Small,[25] after pointing out that communal animals are more intelligent than those with solitary habits, and that even to name all the irradiations of the social instinct would be write a history of the human race, studied nearly five hundred cases of eminent men who developed proclivities to solitude. It is interesting to observe in how many of these cases this was developed in adolescence when, with the horror of mediocrity, comes introspection, apathy, irresolution, and subjectivism. The grounds of repulsion from society at this age may be disappointed hunger for praise, wounded vanity, the reaction from over-assertion, or the nursing of some high ideals, as it is slowly realized that in society the individual cannot be absolute. The motives to self-isolation may be because youth feels its lack of physical or moral force to compete with men, or they may be due to the failure of others to concede to the exactions of inordinate egotism and are directly proportional to the impulse to magnify self, or to the remoteness of common social interests from immediate personal desire or need, and inversely as the number and range of interests seen to be common and the clearness with which social relations are realized. While maturity of character needs some solitude, too much dwarfs it, and more or less of the same paralysis of association follows which is described in the nostalgia of arctic journeys, deserts, being lost in the jungle, solitary confinement, and in the interesting stories of feral men.[26] In some of these cases the mind is saved from entire stultification by pets, imaginary companions, tasks, etc. Normally "the tendency to solitude at adolescence indicates not fulness but want"; and a judicious balance between rest and work, pursuit of favorite lines, genuine sympathy, and wise companionship will generally normalize the social relation.