The first object in a reference relationship is something that acts as a reference to the second object. The second object referred to by the first object is called the referent of the first object. The name of the first object is usually a phrase or expression. Or some other symbolic representation. Its referent can be anything - a material object, a person, an event, an activity or an abstract concept. Small group referentiality is an example of how a term can successfully migrate from linguistics to sociology. Nowadays, such incidents are not uncommon.
Features of the definition
A synonym for reference is reference. References can take many forms: thought, auditory perception (onomatopoeia), visual (text), olfactory or tactile, emotional state, relationship with others, space-time coordinate, symbolic or alphanumeric, physical object or energy projection. In some cases, techniques are used that deliberately hide the link from some observers. Like in cryptography.
References are mentioned in many areas of human activity and knowledge, the term taking on shades of meaning specific to the context in which it is used. Some of them are described in the sections below.
What is referentiality
With the advent of the social structure of society, a person, upon being born, already belongs to various groups. A newborn baby already has social groups (parental family, national and spiritual environment), they are all divided according to social, spiritual and financial status. Further, when a person develops, the number of group affiliations grows, and awareness appears, and not the givenness of joining them.
The definition of reference was introduced by G. Hyman, and he understood reference as a type of relationship in which the opinion that a person develops regarding the characteristics of himself and the world, values and goals, the feeling and definition of life principles are related to which group he belongs to, with whom relates itself. The object of reference relationships can be people or an individual, whether really existing or not.
Referentiality itself has the ability to manifest itself during the interaction of the subject with significant objects in group activity. Objects can be understood as participants in the activity, as well as their emotional reactions, character traits, and emerging difficulties. This type of interaction is mediated and occurs through the individual’s appeal in a situation of orientation of his assessments to a significant reference group. According to the mechanism of action, reference relationships are divided into non-internalized (when behavior is dictated from the outside) and internalized (conditioned not by external influences, but by consciously processed factors that have already become a person’s internal motives).
Referentiality displays the measure of significance of an object or grouping, and this significance exists exclusively in the perception of a specific subject in relation to objects. An individual's belonging to certain groups of people changes his personality through internalization of the norms characteristic of these associations.
Intergroup reference occurs when a person strives to achieve, turns to a certain external reference group, which determines the basic values and socially significant norms that correspond to his worldview. Intergroup reference is determined by the social attitudes of the group, its values, and development vectors.
Referentiality has a broad influence on a person’s reactions and personality, which comes from the demands of society to obey its norms and conform to inherent standards in behavior. A deeper influence is value-oriented, when a person absorbs the moral and ethical rules of a given group; this is an internal process of acceptance that cannot be imposed by demands from the outside. And the last layer of influence is informational, since information emanating from a positively perceived reference group does not undergo the proper level of criticism and is considered a priori by a person as correct, trustworthy and worthy of implementation.
Etymology
Referentiality is a word of foreign origin. The word reference comes from Middle English referren, from Middle French référer, from Latin referre, formed from the prefix re and ferre - “to carry.” There are a number of words that come from the same root - these are reference, referee, referent, referendum.
The verb refers (to) and its derivatives can carry the sense of “referring to” or “connecting with”, as in the meanings of references described in this article. Another meaning is “to consult.” This is reflected in such expressions as “reference work”, “reference service”, “certificate of work”, etc.
In linguistics and philology
Studies of how language interacts with the world are called reference theories. Another name is the theory of reference. Frege was a proponent of the mediated standard theory. Frege divided the semantic content of every expression, including sentences, into two components: meaning and reference (reference). The meaning of a sentence is the thought it expresses. Such thought is abstract, universal and objective. The meaning of any subrepresentational expression lies in its contribution to the idea of what the embedded sentence expresses. Feelings define reference and are also ways of representing the objects that expressions refer to. Links are objects in the world that select words. Feelings of sentences are thoughts. And their references are true values (true or false). References to sentences included in statements about statements and other opaque contexts are their ordinary meanings.
Group reference
The reference group serves as a reference point for a person and a source of behavioral styles, exteriorized or interiorized norms and orders, which are subsequently used by him to directly compare the characteristics of himself, current events, and the behavior of people around him; may be real or conditional.
There are normative (when the source comes as edification) and comparative (when the source is a standard for assessing and comparing oneself and society) reference groups; positive (whose views, foundations and rules are an example and guideline where the individual wants to join) and negative (the opposition of the values of this group to the values of the individual, causing rejection). There are information, value, utilitarian and self-identification groups.
Information – a group where a person trusts the outgoing information, without particularly subjecting it to criticism and checking the parameters of reliability and reliability.
A value group is a group that promotes the values and ideas that a person adheres to (real or imaginary).
Utilitarian – a group that is capable and has the necessary capabilities and tools for rewarding or punishing.
A self-identification group is a real membership group that forces a person to follow the norms and styles of behavior that it approves.
Reference groups are reference groups, belonging to which is considered and internally assessed by the individual as a favorable development of events. Presence in a reference group means not so much an actual state as a feeling of psychological closeness to one’s ideals. The number of reference groups a person has is not limited to one group (primary - family, friends, colleagues; secondary - public and religious organizations), but the desire to be a member of them is not always possible to realize due to life circumstances, so real and imaginary reference groups are distinguished.
The functions of reference groups in relation to the regulation of human life manifestations are as follows: a source of information and experience, a standard of moral and behavioral norms, a reflection of personality and its manifestations.
A person’s over-orientation towards his chosen grouping can lead to mental disorders and depletion of the body’s physical strength. This happens when a person does not have enough abilities, education, resources, etc., to perform the actions and roles accepted in this group.
When a person chooses standard groupings, conflicts may arise that are caused by the presence of contradictions. The emergence of such conflicts is due to situations in which the norms of the real group in which a person belongs and the ideal reference group do not coincide, or when a person chooses two reference groups with opposing ideas.
Examples
Bertrand Russell, in his later work and for reasons related to his theory of acquaintance in epistemology, argued that the only directly referential expressions are "logically proper names". Logically proper names are terms such as “I”, “now”, “here” and other indexes.
He regarded the proper names described above as “abbreviated definite descriptions.” Therefore, "Donald J. Trump" may be short for "current President of the United States and husband of Melania Trump." Definite descriptions designate phrases that are analyzed by Russell into existentially quantifiable logical constructs. However, such objects are not to be considered meaningful in themselves; they have meaning only in the sentence expressed by the sentences of which they are a part. Hence for Russell they have no direct reference as logically proper names.
Advanced Theory
Despite the fact that reference in psychology is the more well-known meaning of this concept, it also plays a big role in linguistics. On Frege's account, any referring expression has a meaning and a referent. This "indirect reference" has certain theoretical advantages over Mill's point of view. For example, referential names such as Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain create problems for the direct referential view because someone might hear “Mark Twain—Samuel Clemens” and be surprised—thus making their cognitive content appear different.
Despite the differences between the views of Frege and Russell, they are generally regarded as descriptivists. Such descriptivism was criticized in the name and necessity of Saul Kripke.
Kripke advanced what became known as the “modal argument” (or “argument from rigidity”). Consider Aristotle's name and description of "Plato's greatest student," "founder of logic," and "Alexander's teacher." Aristotle obviously fits all the descriptions (and many more that we commonly associate with him), but it is not necessarily true that if Aristotle existed, he would be any or all of these descriptions. Aristotle could well have existed without doing any of the things for which he is known to posterity. He could exist and not become known to posterity at all, or die in infancy. Suppose that Aristotle is associated with Mary with the description "the last great philosopher of antiquity", and the (actual) Aristotle died in infancy. The description of Mary then seems to refer to Plato. But this is deeply illogical. Therefore, according to Kripke, names are rigid designators. That is, they refer to the same person in every possible world in which that person exists. In the same work, Kripke formulated several other arguments against Frege-Russell descriptivism.
The concept of a reference group
Social psychologist G. Haymon introduced the term “reference group” in 1942. By this term he understood a social association that is used by an individual to compare the assessment of his personal situation. The psychologist correlated the group to which the subject belonged with the reference (standard) group, which is the criterion for comparison. Communication with groups is often unstable, vague and fluid. This means that at different moments and events in life a person has various reference groupings. Thus, in choosing a lifestyle, making various purchases, a person needs to be guided by the judgment of reference representatives.
Reference group examples: if a person is an athlete, then in choosing sportswear he will be guided by the choice of a close reference group (team, other athletes), but if he is not a fan, then the advice of sports stars will not be interesting to him or, when choosing toothpaste, a person would rather listen to a dentist than a football player or a machinist.
The reference group guides the subject's behavior in specific situations. Examples here are: political parties, ethnic, racial organizations, religious sects, informal associations, friends.
The concept of “referential” comes from Latin. “referens”, which means “reporter”, “consultant, speaker”. “Abstract” is a statement of the essence of something. “Referendum” is what will be told, what should be reported. This means that a reference group is a group whose advice and opinion an individual is willing to listen to, whose assessments have a significant impact on his sense of self. This includes those individuals to whom he has given the right to judge and evaluate himself, from whom he is ready to accept feedback. It often happens that an individual does not enter into such unions. Their quantitative composition varies, although the trend is that in modern society they are not particularly numerous. They can be limited only by the boundaries of the family or without including it at all: a team of colleagues, classmates, students, tourists, co-workers or a group of old ladies. Sometimes the reference group is incorrectly referred to as “their company.”
Semantics
In semantics, “reference” is the relationship between nouns or pronouns and the objects that are named by them. Therefore, the word "John" refers to the person John. The word "it" refers to some previously specified object. That is? The object referred to is called the referent of the word. Sometimes a word denotes an object. The reverse relation, the relation from an object to a word, is called an example; the object illustrates what the word stands for. In parsing, if a word is related to a previous word, the previous word is called an antecedent.
Gottlob Frege argued that the reference cannot be interpreted as being identical in meaning: "Hesperus" (the ancient Greek name for the "evening star") and "Phosphorus" (the ancient Greek name for the "morning star") refer to Venus, but the astronomical fact is that " Hesperus" is "Phosphorus", that is, it is still the same object, even if the meanings of the words mentioned are known to us. This problem led Frege to distinguish between meaning and reference to a word. Some cases seem too complex to be classified within this framework. Adopting the concept of a secondary link may be necessary to fill the gap.
Concept and examples of reference and non-reference groups
Referentiality in psychology is a property of an individual or a group, which is reflected in their ability to exert a decisive influence on a person.
His own values, principles, attitudes and views are formed under their influence.
Any event or phenomenon is also considered and assessed from the position of approval or possible condemnation of significant subjects.
When planning any activity, a person always focuses not only on his own desires and preferences, but also on the position of his reference group or individual.
This psychological and social phenomenon occupies an important place in the system of interpersonal relations. However, it is often contrasted with emotions
Thus, a person may not feel sympathy for any individual, but recognize his importance. Or, conversely, an absolutely uninteresting social group, whose members are not authorities, evokes a certain emotional response.
It should be noted that the impact can be both positive and negative.
In this case, a significant subject can provide assistance in forming the right attitudes and choosing the right path of personal growth.
If the reference is possessed by a person who has a negative impact on the individual and his life, such dependence leads to negative consequences. A similar principle applies to relationships with social communities.
Characteristics of the reference personality
This is a person of particular importance to the subject of the relationship. Such a person is a role model, a model.
The object to which influence is directed turns out to be in strong psychological dependence on the person of reference for him, who acts as the main provider of values, rules, and principles.
In any of his actions, a person under influence is guided by the opinions and views of his idol. He tries to demonstrate only that behavior and thinking that will cause approval.
Usually the reference personality is a strong, self-confident individual.
His authority is explained by the stability of his life principles and his ability to persuade.
A person under the influence of such a personality may not only not feel sympathy, but even feel hostility. But such emotions will not be of key importance.
Reference group
What is a reference group? From the point of view of significance for the subject, the social groups in which he belongs can be:
- referential. A real, conditional small group that is a standard. In his behavior and even in the perception of his own personality, the individual is guided by those values, views and norms that are established by the group. The community is able to influence self-esteem, control his behavior, determine actions;
- non-referential. This is a small group whose psychology does not cause an emotional reaction. A person may not be a member of it or may be a member, but in any case feel indifference to the values, norms and rules broadcast by its participants.
The reference group performs normative, comparative functions.
Normative regulation of human behavior is expressed in the formation in his mind of certain attitudes and norms that must be met.
The comparative function is expressed in the formation of a certain standard, a sample, which acts as a key criterion for assessing oneself and other people. The same community can simultaneously perform both functions.
A certain problem for a person is the presence of several referent associations of people whose values have the opposite direction.
In this case, a serious intrapersonal conflict occurs, since the individual is forced to make a choice between communities that are significant to him.
For example, family and circle of friends may be of equal importance to a teenager.
Every person living in society is part of a huge number of communities.
This is a family, a friendly company, a professional social circle, a sports section, etc.
Linguistic sign
The very concept of a linguistic sign is a combination of content and expression, the former of which may refer to entities in the world or refer to more abstract concepts such as "thought". Certain parts of speech exist only to express reference, namely anaphors such as pronouns. A subset of reflexives expresses the joint reference of two participants in a sentence. These could be agent (actor) and patient (acted), as in “the man washed himself,” topic and recipient, as in “I showed Mary to myself,” or various other possible combinations. But it is not only the humanities that have absorbed this term. The exact sciences also boast their own versions of this term, such as the dispersion and referentiality of light in physics. But a much more extensive definition of reference is given to us by computer science, which is discussed below.
Principle of reference
Of unique importance to the study of personality is the study not only of individual characteristics, but also of intergroup tendencies and relationships that contribute to the development of human reactions and views.
The definition of reference is used in the construction of experimental psychodiagnostic studies, which are based on certain principles. This is the principle of adequacy (correspondence of the research method to the phenomenon being studied), parallelism (registration of indicators parallel to the process being studied), extremeness (creation of such a critical situation when the studied properties are most clearly manifested), gradient registration (registration of parameters in diverse situations), consistent explanation (use for explanations of only the two closest levels of generalization), psychological expediency (not all processes are of a psychological nature) and the principle of reference.
The principle of reference is used to simplify and rationalize the research process in situations where the entire system under study is displayed in a single location, as if in focus. In this case, there is no need to carry out a huge number of registration data, which speeds up the research process and increases its accuracy and efficiency. This principle applies to other scientific fields where similar mapping laws apply.
When studying a person’s attitude to various groups of people, it is possible to draw up his personal portrait, identify his motivational orientation, and professional orientation. The study of the system of these relationships is not only a multifaceted method of psychodiagnostics, but also a method of formation and development of personality, its leading orientations, and motives.
The principle of reference in matters of pedagogical activity is important. Identifying the child’s standard groupings, significant ideas and people helps to form the necessary personality qualities. With the correct use of this data and through the use of the principle of reference, it is possible to push a person to certain judgments and actions. What nature or direction they will be depends on the significant grouping, since the child will not particularly critically perceive the information provided by the reference group or its representative.
Equipment and computers
In computer science, hardware referentiality is a value that allows a program to indirectly refer to a specific piece of data, such as the value of a variable or an entry in computer memory or some other storage device. A link is said to refer to data, and accessing the data is called link dereferencing. The concept of equipment reference therefore often refers not to the equipment as such, but to the data.
Referentiality is different from the database itself. Typically, for references to data stored in memory on a given system, the reference is implemented as the physical address where the data resides in memory or on a storage device. For this reason, a link is often mistakenly confused with a pointer or address and claimed to "point" to data. However, a reference can also be implemented in other ways, such as an offset (difference) between the address of a data element and some fixed "base" address as an index into an array. Or, more abstractly, as a descriptor. More broadly, on the Web, links can be network addresses, such as URLs. In this context, the term “referentiality of technology” is sometimes used.
Grouping of goods according to the influence of reference groups
When making various purchases, an individual experiences pressure from reference groups of varying strengths. Thus, when buying food, clothing and other essential goods in conditions of dire need, people do not look back at their reference group: hunger and cold dictate these purchases. However, given the choice of a specific type of essential commodity, the individual is already under the influence of his reference group.
Many products bear the imprint of prestige: various kinds of delicacies, expensive alcoholic drinks. Each group has its own table setting standards: if you want to be considered one of your own, set the table no lower than the standards accepted in this group (the influence of the self-identification group). If for the owners the value reference groups are in the West, then imported products of a specifically Western type (“Coca-Cola”, pickled corn, specific seasonings, etc.) prevail on the table. If the owners are guided by the customs of Russian antiquity, then the emphasis will be on domestic, simple products, and national cuisine. Similarly, a clothing brand is associated with a selected reference group. At the same time, essential items that are not to be shown to outsiders are selected with minimal influence from reference groups.
When purchasing items that are considered luxury in a given country, the influence of the reference group is strong across the board.
We briefly reviewed the definition of the term reference group, grouping of goods according to the influence of reference groups, influence of the reference group, reference group of self-identification, need for export, positive and negative reference groups, typology of reference groups, classification of groups. Leave your comments or additions to the material.
Differences
The concept of reference should not be confused with other values (keys or identifiers) that uniquely identify a data element but provide access to it only through a non-trivial lookup operation in some table data structure.
References are widely used in programming, especially for efficiently passing large or volatile data as arguments to procedures or for exchanging such data among different applications. In particular, a reference can point to a variable or record that contains references to other data. This idea is the basis of indirect addressing and many related data structures such as linked lists. Links can cause significant complexity in a program, partly due to the possibility of dangling and wild links, and partly because the topology of the linked data is a directed graph, the analysis of which can be quite complex.
References increase flexibility in where objects can be stored, how they are distributed, and how they are passed between regions of code.
Important point. As long as the data link can be accessed, the data can be accessed through it, the data itself does not need to be moved. They also make it easier to share data between different areas of code. Everyone keeps a link to it.
Mechanism
The referencing mechanism, while it varies in implementation, is a fundamental feature of a programming language. Common to almost all modern programming languages. Even some languages that don't support explicit use of references have some internal or implicit use. For example, the call-by-reference convention can be implemented using explicit or implicit references.
More generally, a link can be thought of as a piece of data that allows another piece of data to be uniquely retrieved. This includes primary keys in databases and keys in an associative array. If we have a set of keys K and a set of data objects D, any well-defined (unambiguous) function from K to D ∪ {null} defines a reference type, where zero is an image of a key that does not refer to anything meaningful.
An alternative representation of such a function is a directed graph called a reachability graph. Here, each data element is represented by a vertex and there is an edge from u to v if the data element in u refers to the data element in v. The maximum output degree is one. These graphs are valuable in garbage collection, where they can be used to separate accessible from inaccessible objects.
Psychology
In psychology, reference is a very common concept found in several theories. From a mental processing perspective, psychology uses self-reference to establish identification with a mental state during introspection. This allows a person to develop his own guidelines to a greater degree of immediate awareness. However, it can also lead to circular reasoning, preventing thinking from developing.
According to Perceptual Control Theory (PCT), the reference condition is the state in which the output of the control system tends to change the controlled quantity. The basic statement is that “all behavior is oriented at all times to the control of certain quantities in relation to specific reference conditions.”
Reference group theory
The concept of “reference group”, which means a reference, standard group, was introduced by social. Hyman, as mentioned above, he used this term in the study of the subject’s ideas about his property status in comparison with the statuses of others. A person’s assessment of his own status is the result of his correlation with a reference social group.
Reference group theory studies the types, possible factors and potential reasons for their formation. The problem with this is the study of the determinants in individuals' choice of associations. This theory is also used in the study of personality, the regulation of its social behavior, as well as when considering the relationship between the individual’s position in the social structure and her personal judgment about it, when studying the causes of conflicts. Also, the study of this theory is important in optimizing educational work, increasing propaganda materials, and preventing crime.
The theory of reference groups is based on the idea of the sociologist Mead about the “generalized other”, through which the influence of society on a person, his thinking, and behavior is realized.
A little later, sociologist T. Nyuk used this term to designate such an association to which a person psychologically identifies himself. Norms, goals, rules that he shares and by which he orients himself in behavior, developing appropriate attitudes. The formation of attitudes is a function of a positive (negative) attitude towards a group (positive, negative).
Thus, the scientist R. Merton carried out a study in which mobilized soldiers were studied. When they compared their situation with the situation of the soldiers who were not mobilized, they assessed it negatively, poorly. When compared with the situation of the soldiers at the front itself, they assessed it positively, more favorably.
The degree of membership is determined by the important concept of “group boundaries” used by Merton. The main aspects here are:
— self-identification of individuals as participants;
— frequency of interactions between individuals;
— consideration by other subjects of individuals as permanent members of the collective.
In direct interaction within a member group, defining boundaries is not difficult because participation is usually formal. For example, whether a person sings in a musical ensemble or not, the leader of the group knows whether the person is a member of the group or not.
The sociologist also talks about practical complexity, which lies in the fact that group boundaries can change under the influence of certain events. These events are not fixed. Thus, former members return to the association, new ones join, or current ones leave. After such changes, it is difficult to say later who exactly is now a member of the union and who is not. After this, the following conclusion suggests itself: the criterion of membership - non-membership is not sufficiently informative when taking into account the composition, which means that the concept of “degree of membership” should be used, which may vary in relation to some individuals, according to the case.
In the theory of reference groups, G. Kelly defined two functions. The first is evaluative, which provides a standard for comparison that helps a person evaluate himself and evaluate the actions of other individuals. The second is normative, it helps to establish assigned standards for behavior, group norms, and forces participants to follow them. This function will be carried out by the group if it can reward the individual for his conformity and teach a lesson for non-conformity. These functions are integrated in nature and can be carried out by a member group and an external one, which a person wishes to join.
The sociologist Merton identified conditions that encourage a subject to choose an “outside” normative reference group rather than a member. When group members are not provided with sufficient prestige in the team, then they again begin to choose an external group, which may have more prestige than their own. And the more isolated a person is in his own circle and the lower his status, the more likely it is that he will stick to an external group, where he will acquire a high status.
If an individual has the opportunity to change his personal social status, and, accordingly, his membership in a specific group, then the higher the social mobility, the more likely it is that he will choose a reference group that has a high social status.
As you can see, there are many factors that can influence a person’s choice of a significant association. Also, a person’s choice depends on his individual characteristics.
Self-reference (self-reference)
Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea, or formula refers to itself. The reference can be expressed either directly (through some intermediate clause or formula) or through some encoding. In philosophy, it also refers to the ability of a subject to talk about or refer to himself: to have a type of thought expressed in the nominative singular case of the first person.
Self-reference has been studied and has applications in mathematics, philosophy, computer programming, and linguistics. Self-referential statements are sometimes counterintuitive and can also be considered recursive.
In classical philosophy, paradoxes were created by self-referential concepts, such as the paradox of omnipotence: to establish whether it was possible for a being so powerful that it could create a stone that it could not lift. Epimenides' paradox "All Cretans are liars", uttered by an ancient Greek Cretan, was one of the first recorded versions. Modern philosophy sometimes uses the same technique to demonstrate that an intended concept is meaningless or ill-defined.
Intergroup referentiality
In sociology there is such a thing as a reference group. It denotes a social group to which a person is accustomed to refer. And with which he identifies himself in one way or another. Intergroup referentiality is the ability of multiple groups to refer to each other.
Reference group theory is regularly used to analyze the current socio-political situation in the country. In recent decades, sociologists have paid close attention to the referentiality of small groups, because this is an important phenomenon from the point of view of microsociology.
Functions of the reference group
The norms and orientations of social associations act as a standard of activity for a person, even when he is not a direct member of it. Thus, a teenager who wants to infiltrate the company of his older brother imitates his behavior, clothes, habits, and manner of speaking. Social psychology calls this phenomenon “anticipatory” socialization, which means certain efforts of the individual that he directs to the formation of behavior, in anticipation of access to a group with a status greater than he currently has.
The reference group has two main functions: comparative and normative.
The comparative function is expressed in the processes of perception, where the reference group appears as a standard, using which a person can evaluate himself and evaluate others.
The normative function is expressed in various motivational processes, and the reference group appears as a source of development of social attitudes, orientations, and rules of behavior. Both functions can be performed by different groups or by the same one.
The number of standard unions in which an individual can be a member is influenced by his direct activities and types of relationships.
It often happens that the entire reference group has no idea how important it is for a person. He then, usually, makes personal assumptions about the probable opinion of the participants of the referent association about his person, formulates what this judgment could be if the standard were some kind of conditional group, for example, unreal characters or personalities of bygone times.
If it nevertheless happens that the subjects of the referent association begin to have contradictions in values, intrapersonal and interpersonal conflicts arise, it is necessary to resort to tactful help from the outside.
