Essay on Importance of Social Groups – The study of human society is essentially the study of human groups. Society consists of groups of innumerable kinds and variety. No man exists without a society and no society exists without groups. Groups have become a part and parcel of our life.
Out of necessity and inevitability human beings are made to live in groups. Knowingly or unknowingly or unwillingly, with pleasure or contempt, people live in groups and societies. Man’s life is to an enormous extent lived and controlled by groups of different kinds.
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Survival Becomes Problematic without Groups:
Groups have become so necessary that our very survival becomes problematic and doubtful in their absence. Groups are complementary to the development of human faculties, traits and human nature. Man by birth itself has the biological potentiality of becoming man – the social being.
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Man Becomes Man Only Among Men:
Man becomes man only among men. Various studies have convincingly proved that man fails to develop human qualities in the absence of human environment. The famous case of Kasper Hauser, a youth who was bereft of human contacts because of political mechanisation, the most interesting feral case of the two Hindu female children Kamala and her sister found in an wolfs den and the pitiable case of Anna, an illegitimate American child which was kept away from human contacts for more than five years and several other instances have proved beyond doubts that only a human environment makes a man; a biological animal, a human being.
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The biological potentiality of man to become a ‘person’ does not happen on its own automatically, even in the absence of a human environment. The biological potentiality blossoms only in social situation, to be more precise, only in the context of groups. Added to this, the prolonged human infancy and the helplessness of new born baby have almost made it a prisoner of the most elementary social group that is family.
Groups Help Social Survival Also:
Not only from the point of view of survival but also from the viewpoint of leading a successful life has man depended on groves. By engaging himself in constant relations with others he learns things and mends his ways.
He keeps his eyes wide open, lends his ears to what others say, and tries to keep his memory ever fresh to remember the good things of the past and to refrain from repeating the blunders of the past. In brief, from birth to death, man is engaged in the process of socialisation. Socialisation or the process of humanisation helps man to develop a personality of his own.
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Groups Contribute to the Development of Personality:
Personality is the product of the group life. The ‘self that every individual develops, though’. Unique, is it a product of the group? No ‘self arises in isolation. Groups provide scope for the individuals to express their real nature, their talents and abilities.
Hidden potentialities can find their expression only in the context of social groups. What is latent in man becomes manifest only in groups. The groups shape man’s attributes, his beliefs, his morals and his ideals.
Emotional developments, intellectual maturity, satisfaction of physical and social needs are unthinkable without groups. Group is a part of our mental equipment and we are a part of group.