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Opinions, Personality, and Political Behavior1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

M. Brewster Smith
M. Brewster Smith
Affiliation:
Research Center for Human Relations, New York University
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Extract

It is gratifying to be able to present to students of political behavior the approach that my colleagues, Jerome Bruner and Robert White, and I worked out for the study of “Opinions and Personality,” since throughout our explorations political scientists had been what the current jargon would call a “salient reference group” for us. As a psychologist and “outsider,” however, I offer these remarks with some trepidation, since the framework that we arrived at in the detailed study of ten men's outlook on Russia was, after all, distinctly psychological; therefore a limited view that embraces but one segment of the processes with which political scientists are properly concerned. Our investigations were long on the description and analysis of opinions, but short on the observation of consequential behavior, political or otherwise. And our study did not even focus on public opinion, in any sense that attemps a close conceptual distinction between the public and the private.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , March 1958 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1958

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References

2 Smith, M. Brewster, Bruner, Jerome S., and White, Robert W., Opinions and Personality (New York, 1956)Google Scholar.

3 For a summary of the literature, see Murphy, Gardner, Murphy, Lois B., and Newcomb, Theodore M., Experimental Social Psychology, rev. ed. (New York, 1937)Google Scholar.

4 See Eysenck, H. J., The Psychology of Politics (London, 1954)Google Scholar. This work has been stringently criticized. See Christie, Richard, “Eysenck's Treatment of the Personality of Communists,” Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 53 (November, 1956), pp. 411–430CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, and the immediately following reply and rejoinder.

5 Lasswell, Harold D., Psychopathology and Politics (Chicago, 1930)Google Scholar.

6 A good account of these developments from a sympathetic standpoint may be found in Monroe, Ruth L., Schools of Psychoanalytic Thought (New York, 1955)Google Scholar.

7 See Sanford, Fillmore H., “The Use of a Protective Technique in Attitude Surveying,” Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 14 (Winter, 1950–1951), pp. 697–709CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 See especially Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Berelson, Bernard, and Gaudet, Hazel, The People's Choice (New York, 1944)Google Scholar; Berelson, Bernard, Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and McFee, William N., Voting (Chicago, 1954)Google Scholar.

9 Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet, op. cit., pp. 25–27.

10 Hyman, Herbert H., “The Psychology of Status,” Archives of Psychology, No. 269 (New York, 1942)Google Scholar.

11 Robert K. Merton with the collaboration of Rossi, Alice S., “Contributions to the Theory of Reference Group Behavior,” in Merton, Robert K., Social Theory and Social Structure, rev. ed. (Glencoe, Ill., 1957), pp. 225–280Google Scholar; also pp. 281–386 in the same volume.

12 Riesman, David, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, 1950)Google Scholar.

13 See his later writings collected in Cartwright, Dorwin O. (ed.), Field Theory in Social Science (New York, 1951)Google Scholar and Resolving Social Conflicts (New York, 1948)Google Scholar.

14 See Cannell, Charles F. and Kahn, Robert L., “The Collection of Data by Interviewing,” in Festinger, Leon and Katz, Daniel (eds.), Research Methods in the Behavioral Sciences (New York, 1953), pp. 327–380Google Scholar.

15 Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, Else, Levinson, Daniel J., and Sanford, R. Nevitt, The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950)Google Scholar.

16 See Christie, Richard and Johoda, Marie (eds.), Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality” (Glencoe, Ill., 1954)Google Scholar, also Titus, H. Edwin and Hollander, E. P., “The California F Scale in Psychological Research: 1950–1955,” Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 54 (January, 1957), pp. 47–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 The view of personality as a system is so widely shared as to need no documentation. Representative of a contemporary formal approach to “general systems theory” is Miller, James G., “Toward a General Theory for the Behavioral Sciences,” American Psychologist, Vol. 10 (September, 1955), pp. 513–531CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Parsons, see Parsons, Talcott and Shils, Edward A. (eds.), Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge, Mass., 1951)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Parsons, T., The Social System (Glencoe, Ill., 1951)Google Scholar. A related view is developed by Levy, Marion, The Structure of Society (Princeton, 1953)Google Scholar.

18 Lippmann, Walter, Public Opinion (New York, 1922)Google Scholar.

19 Cf. Smith, Bruner, and White, op. cit., p. 154–188.

20 Asch, Solomon E., Social Psychology (New York, 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 See Sarnoff, Irving and Katz, Daniel, “The Motivational Bases of Attitude Change,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 49 (January, 1954), pp. 115–124CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Peak, Helen, “Attitude and Motivation,” in Jones, Marshall R. (ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1955 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1955), pp. 149–188Google Scholar; Carlson, Earl R., “Attitude Change Through Modification of Attitude Structure,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 52 (March, 1956), pp. 256–261CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Rosenberg, Milton J., “Cognitive Structure and Attitudinal Affect,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 53 (November, 1956), pp. 367–372CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Katz, Daniel, Sarnoff, Irving, and McClintock, Charles, “Ego-Defense and Attitude Change,” Human Relations, Vol. 9 (January, 1956), pp. 27–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Katz, Daniel, McClintock, Charles, and Sarnoff, Irving, “The Measurement of Ego Defense as Related to Attitude Change,” Journal of Personality, Vol. 25 (June, 1957), pp. 465–474CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

22 Robert K. Merton, op. cit., p. 51.

23 Allport's, views are best found in his classic textbook, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (New York, 1937)Google Scholar, and in a collection of his more recent papers, The Nature of Personality (Cambridge, Mass., 1950)Google Scholar. Some of the basic evidence for the congruence of a person's expressive behavior was collected by Allport, and Vernon, Philip E. in their Studies in Expressive Movement (New York, 1933)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 See Katz, Daniel, Cartwright, Dorwin, Eldersveld, Samuel, and Lee, Alfred McClung (eds.), Public Opinion and Propaganda (New York, 1954), pp. 50–84Google Scholar, for representative approaches to the definition of public opinion.

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