When we began to use scientific methods to ask these questions, psychology was born. At about the time I was asking them, the same questions were being examined from another viewpoint, far more sophisticated, but remarkably like my own. It was the viewpoint, growing out of the relatively new academic field of sociology, that persons are to a great measure shaped by their society. And people who are placed on the outside of social life because of circumstances or factors such as race or gender are likely to be acutely aware of social patterns that people inside the society take for granted. He postulated that the loyalties that bind persons together in primitive societies are in direct proportion to the intensity of the fears and hatreds with which they view other societies.
Group solidarity correlates to a great extent with animosity toward an out-group.
With expansion of communication and transportation came the transformation of primitive societies into a wider and more rational social order, what we call civilization . The marginal personality type arises at a time and place where there is a significant merging of cultures and people. Such persons find themselves always on the margins, rather than comfortably integrated. The positive aspect, Park noted, is that marginal persons are by definition the more civilized human beings. They can observe their own and other groups with considerable objectivity.