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This paper has discussed ways in which present methods of test construction may produce tests that are insensitive to the differential changes that educational and guidance practices are supposed to produce, thus foredooming evaluations of these practices to negative findings. It was shown that the goals of predictive efficiency and homogeneity in present-day tests both entail a focusing on gross and relatively unchangeable characteristics of people. An approach to test construction was then described that causes a test to converge on a factor of change rather than a factor of status. Some early but encouraging results of an application of this approach to measurement of personality and attitude change were reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present investigation was concerned with whether or not the conformity of labor newspapers corresponds to a J-curve with respect to the conflict between the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. An analysis of 1,329 issues of 177 labor newspapers, for September, October, and November, 1939, was made in terms of four rather well defined positions on a telic continuum. Position 1 consisted of use of material in the newspaper from the national organization, with the addition of local comment derogatory of the rival organization and/or its leaders. Position 2 consisted simply of use of materials from the press services of the national organization. Position 3 was strict neutrality. Position 4 was represented by recommendations of cooperation between the two groups. Comparisons were also made between: local labor papers and those published by national unions; papers of A.F.L. affiliates and of C.I.O. affiliates; papers of A.F.L. nationals and of C.I.O. nationals; papers of A.F.L. locals and of C.I.O. locals; papers of C.I.O. nationals and of C.I.O. locals; papers of A.F.L. nationals and of A.F.L. locals; and papers of local labor organizations in a "nonconflict" situation and those in a "conflict" situation. In addition, comparisons were made between the labor organizations in terms of the mean value of all issues of each newspaper published by the organization. No J-curves were found in any of the situations studied. This means that there were no curves of institutional conformity to the philosophy of the national group. The fact that Position 3 was the mode in practically all cases would seem to indicate the inertia of large numbers of members in the national federations with respect to the philosophy of the national organization. Although no J curves were obtained, the J-curve analysis was valuable in showing that neither of two outstanding views is correct as to the causes of the division between the two national labor organizations, (a) The theory of institutional conflict between industrial unionism (C.I.O.) and craft unionism (A.F.L.) is not supported by the non-institutional conformity of the labor he papers, (b) Neither is the theory of "power politics" upheld, that the differences between the national organizations are between leaders only, with the rank and file as pawns; this is shown by the size of the percentages on Position 4. This does not mean that these two sets of factors are not important, but simply that neither of them is a complete explanation of the division between the two organizations. As a whole, the distributions indicate that the differences between the A.F.L. and the C.I.O. are so complex in nature as to have prevented them from becoming institutionalized. Institutional conformity might have been demonstrated, of course, had the continuum been in terms of community mores rather than in terms of rivalry with the other labor organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article throws light on the psychology of attitudes and gives insight into one aspect of newspaper behavior. An analysis of the rumors regarding communist leader Joseph Stalin's real or pretended illness in thirty newspapers in Paris, France revealed that the papers tended to publish rumors that arced with their political attitudes. Anti-communist papers published rumors stressing Stalin's illness and a crisis in Russia; communist papers ignored the subject or carried rumors denying the illness and crisis. Studies such as this might be used as a test for listing and grouping papers according to their political attitudes. Studies have been made repeatedly showing that the news content of newspapers is influenced by their editorial political attitudes. Less attention has been paid to the question of susceptibility to editorial manipulation. The collection of all rumor echoes in daily newspapers was undertaken during a period of four months. All news items, which had a particular character of vagueness, lack of authority regarding their source or outright improbability, were included regardless of whether or not rumor as a source was specifically mentioned.

This section of the Quarterly is reserved for brief reports of research in progress, discussions of unsolved problems, methodological studies, and public opinion data not extensively analyzed or interpreted. Succinct case histories are welcomed, as well as hypotheses and insights that may be useful to other students of public opinion. Usually, material in this section will be shorter, more informal, and more tentative than in the preceding pages of the Quarterly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on applying behavioral science procedures to managerial accounting and the paper "The Effect of Frequency of Feedback on Attitudes and Performance" by Doris M. Cook. He discusses the limitations and ambiguities that are contained in the paper by Cook in order to help future researchers. The empirical test of hypotheses relating success or failure to the frequency of feedback of performance is, to the author, not needed.

In this paper we present the capital structure theorem within the framework of the theory of investors' behavior towards return and risk. Such an approach constitutes a first step towards integrating the theory of the firm's finance with the theory of investors' behavior. It may also help to clarify the controversy over the capital structure theorem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this first of a series of four papers on the effects of acculturation on personality and attitudes, students in four Uganda secondary schools, chosen to represent four levels of acculturation, were tested on sentence completion, thematic apperception and figure-drawing tests, in regard to their political awareness and attitudes toward authority figures, especially chiefs and Euro-peans. These 211 Ss in the Buganda province of Uganda were then compared with 144 Ss in the North Nyanza province of Kenya who were assumed to be less acculturated. The findings support the hypothesis that the more acculturated more frequently than the less acculturated feel hostile toward authority figures. The findings suggested further that the more acculturated more frequently than the less acculturated tended to perceive authority figures as punitive, but were mixed in their opinions about authority. In comparison with the less acculturated Kenya sample, the Uganda sample were more aware politically, more actively discontent with the political status quo and more nationalistic in their identification. Non-monotonic relationships with degree of acculturation were found in regard to readiness to identify with the European and covert tendency to view the European as dominant The significance of these findings will be discussed in the fourth paper of this series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analyzes of effectiveness of questionnaire technique of gathering data in behavioral sciences. The reason for the wider use of the paper and pencil technique in any area of the study of human behavior has been its relative simplicity and its wider coverage. The questionnaire technique of gathering data in the behavioral sciences has been subjected to increasing criticism. The criticism has varied from attacks on specific techniques and studies to categoric dismissal of all attitude investigations as useless "verbalizations in response to symbolic abstractions." One of the most serious weaknesses of the paper and pencil approach is that the symbolized responses of a subject in a test situation may not truly indicate one's response in a situation calling for non-verbalized action. It is believed that questionnaires are instruments of doubtful accuracy for measuring even ideological behavior. The conclusion is that more research into the accuracy and consistency of questionnaire responses is needed.

The substantive research on human behavior in disasters which is now in progress is so various that it is difficult to represent within short compass. Three papers in this issue exhibit quite different but typical empirical studies. The first, from the National Opinion Research Center, displays the kind of material which can be developed from interviewing people who have recently undergone the impact of floods, earthquakes, and other adventitious calamities. In this type of research, the conditions of real danger and suffering and of normally complicated community organization offer advantages; the opportunity to design an experiment is, however, minimal. The second paper, from the Human Resources Research Office of the Army, exemplifies the rare opportunity to experiment with attitudinal preparation for a real atomic explosion, however under more orderly conditions than would obtain in an actual attack. The third paper, by Dr. Hudson, is a sample of the laboratory approach to problems in this field, in which the experimenter manipulates simulated conditions as independent variables in order to investigate dependent variables of personal and social behavior under anxiety, ambiguous perception, and apparent threat. A conclusion from the three papers as a group is that all the methods of social science - surveying, participant observation, clinical interview, laboratory experiments, and many others - are applicable to illuminating the human effects of disastrous situations.

Here are three studies in opinion climatology which were presented at an American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) symposium during 1960 conference in Atlantic City. These papers are devoted to expositions of a technique for relating social structural variables to opinion, a technique which has attracted increased attention during the past few years. Opinion is surely not formed in a social vacuum, it cannot be understood without an understanding of its relations to its environment. Attempts to account for either the distribution of opinion on an issue or differences in the distribution observed among various subgroups of a sample of people have been a standard feature of public opinion research for several decades. On the simplest level, cross-tabulations by age, sex, socio-economic status, or place of residence constitute attempts of this kind. In short, quite apart from their substantive contributions, these three papers serve to illustrate some of the methodological procedures which are today on the frontier of opinion and attitude research.

Peabody has shown that of authoritarianism items agreed to in the original, twice as many are agreed to as are rejected in their reverse forms. This "double agreement" phenomenon argues for interpreting endorsement of authoritarianism items in terms of response sets rather than on the basis of the content of the item. in a previous paper, the present authors demonstrated that approval-dependent subjects double-agreed more often than less approval- dependent ones. Recently, however, Miklich reported a significant negative correlation between double agreement to Dogmatism items and approval dependence. The present paper presents two subsequent studies in an attempt to resolve the issue. These findings show (a) that a significant positive relationship existed between double agreement and approval dependence and (b) that high approval-need subjects viewed both original and reversed authoritarianism items as more ambiguous. It is suggested that differential perception of item ambiguity by these subjects mediated their tendency toward double agreement, and that certain features of the Miklich design may have minimized the effect of this variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present study was to study selectivity in mass-communication media as a function of one's stand on a controversial social issue: namely, the issue of Arab unity. The sample used in this study consisted of 260 undergraduate Arab students at the American University of Beirut. The subjects were given a questionnaire on Arab unity (1) on the basis of which their stand towards this issue was determined; also, subjects were asked to indicate their preferences for various newspapers and radio stations available in the Arab Middle East area. In general, the results demonstrate that subjects with an extreme stand on the issue of Arab unity (particularly those with an extreme negative stand) show high selectivity in the kinds of mass communication media to which they expose themselves, the selectivity being in the form of preferences for media (i.e., newspapers and radio stations) expressing points of view similar to their own. However, subjects with a moderate stand on the issue of Arab unity also showed behavior similar to that of the extreme anti-Arab unity subjects. This result raises questions as to the adequacy of the attitude- measuring technique that was employed in this and in similar previous studies in the assessment of "moderate" or "neutral" attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to study the implication of the hypothesis that the adoption of new or changed mode of technology depends primarily on the receptivity of the culture and its people rather than on the material and technical resources. Qualitative and quantitative data obtained seem to confirm the hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considerable attention has been given recently to the perplexing problem of the relationship between attitudes and behavior (Ehrlich, 1969; Deutscher, 1969; Warner and DeFleur, 1969; Ajzen et al., 1970; Lastrucci, 1970; Tarter, 1970). Methodological issues have been debated, the lack of congruence between attitudes and behavior has been examined, and a variety of solutions have been offered. We are told, for example, that the continuing poor correlation between measured attitudes and overt behavior requires us to search for the intervening variable or variables which apparently obtain (Ehrlich, 1969); or to employ the "direct observation" of the phenomenon under investigation rather than try to extrapolate from paper-and-pencil tests to behavior (Deutscher, 1969); or to develop theories that, in turn, enable us to find indicators that are more valid than the paper-and-pencil type (Lastrueci, 1970); or to simply admit that attitudes as "presently conceptualized play no real role in behavior" (Tarter, 1970). A number of important aspects of attitude research, however, have been obscured or omitted in these discussions. For the surprising aspect of the situation is not, as has often been implied, the lack of congruence between attitudes and behavior, but the persistent use of research designs that are inappropriate for the complexity of the subject under investigation. Further, it is surprising that researchers have failed to draw out other important implications of their research. That is, the fact that an attitude does not lead directly to a behavior does not justify the assertion that attitudes play no role in behavior, or that attitude research lacks significant implications for social life. The basis for this latter statement will be shown below in a discussion of the values of attitude research. It may be that inadequate research designs, valued for their simplicity rather than their appropriateness, are a manifestation of the "publish or perish" syndrome. In any ease, this paper attempts to outline the problems and the values of attitude research, and to demonstrate thereby that such research is of great significance for the understanding of social phenomena. If that significance seems minimized by those studies that have found poor correlation between attitudes and behavior, the fault lies both in the failure to create research designs that reflect the complexity of the problem and in the tendency to exalt the importance of the proximate causes of overt behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the studies related to personal psychology in France. It mentions that several periodicals in France featured issues related to applied psychology which prove that French psychologists were also concern on developing studies and criterion that would define the intelligence and behavior of French people. It states that French psychologists use several methods in their experimental tests including pencil and paper tests, vocabulary tests and accentuation tests. It says that French also have problems in grammatical rules, which is correlated with knowledge.

This article focuses on the direct influence of newspapers on public opinion on certain specific public issues. The aim is to discover to what extent a person's attitude on public questions, on which the press is assumed to be so influential, correlates with the attitude on these questions of the newspaper to which he is most frequently exposed. For this purpose 940 of the residents of the city of Seattle were selected at random. 590 men and 350 women were interviewed and schedules filled out with their answers. For the purpose of this inquiry, four public questions which had been prominently before the electorate within the last eight months preceding the investigation were selected and each person asked his position on these questions. In a different connection the person was asked what newspaper he read most frequently. The results of this part of the inquiry indicates the degree of relationship, or lack of relationship, between the readers' attitude on a public question and the attitude of the newspaper which each group read most frequently.

The author reflects on the paper "The Effect of Frequency of Feedback on Attitudes and performance" by Doris M. Cook and the application of behavioral science procedures in managerial accounting. He believes that performance report feedback is positively related and necessary for success in a task. He states that the attitude measures used by Cook confound attitude components including interest in the task, satisfaction with the task, and satisfaction with achievement.

The objectives in this paper are to present a rather detailed survey of the literature on asset management and investor portfolio behavior, compare current practice in the real world with the existing state of theory, and then discuss some ideas concerning the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about a paper on professional socialization as a model of the pre-training period applicable to students of physical education. This provides definition of terms for professional socialization, anticipatory socialization, socialization settings, and socialization agents. The pre-training period may be considered as the time of anticipatory socialization preceding the formal professional training. The three types of anticipatory socialization are the acquisition of attitudes and values about adult roles, the acquisition of specific information which cannot be applied directly, and the learning of both general and specific skills that can be practiced in the immediate childhood situation.

The article reports on the progress in an attempt to construct an empirically derived non-cognitive scale that is based upon attitudes and values that students seem to hold for education and educational activities. It is hoped that knowledge about factors other than ability in student attainment will evolve from further refinements in studies of this kind, and that the scales will eventually prove of value in selection, student counseling, institutional-type research, or theoretical research. The data reported in this paper represent a second stage in the development of the Academic Attitude Preference Inventory. Initially, a tryout scale of 275 items was developed and administered to a group of 900 new freshmen entering Michigan State University in fall, 1958. These items consisted of activities or situations to be encountered in school to which preferences on a four-point Like-Dislike Scale were to be checked. Extreme responses were "Definitely Like" or "Definitely Dislike" and intervening points on the scale were "Like More Than Dislike" and "Dislike More Than Like." High achievers and low achievers, defined by students having a high or low first quarter grade-point average, were then identified and the response patterns for these high and low achievers compared for each item.

As the number of experimental studies in primacy-recency has grown, it has become apparent that a variety of independent variables can influence the formation and change of attitudes and opinions. Although some attempts have been made to embrace several variables within the context of a single theoretical scheme, such efforts have not proved totally successful. One purpose of this paper is to introduce the rationale for such a system. The system introduced is based on the assumption that some variables, better than others, are able to induce a primacy or a recency effect. This assumption implies that variables can be classified on an order-effect hierarchy. Variables that exert a greater relative influence are thought to fall toward one end of the hierarchy; weaker variables, toward the other. To determine the placement of several pertinent variables, the effect on attitude formation of complementary variables (Lee, those known to produce the same effect) and competing variables (those known to produce opposite effects) was observed. Results suggest that strength of argument falls toward the "strong" end of an order-effect hierarchy and that variables such as delayed reinforcement, familiarity or unfamiliarity with the topic or content of a communication, and displacement of affect fall toward the "weak" end. Enculturated-response variables fall toward the center. A combination of complementary variables at the "strong" end of the order- effect hierarchy should have greater influence in producing a desired effect than a combination of complementary variables at the "weak" end of the hierarchy. In a combination of competitive variables, when one is from the strong end and the other from the weak end of the hierarchy, the effect should be in the direction implied by the stronger variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a laboratory study in which Ss observed another student either sign or refuse to sign a petition before being requested to sign the petition themselves. For half of the Ss, the other student (an assistant) was Negro, and for the other half, this individual was white. Both assistants signed or refused to sign the petition according to a prearranged sequence. Attitudes toward Negroes did not appear to play a strong role in this situation. In general, the results indicate that situational factors outweighed personal factors in determining S's reaction to the petition employed in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study on boys' attitudes towards participation in the war effort. Boys have been playing a vital role in the World War II. They have collected paper and salvage, distributed leaflets and posters, run messages, spotted planes, worked on farms, and made themselves useful in countless other ways. This study aims to discover what boys and their leaders think of the war service jobs they are asked to do and what they both think of the way the jobs were done. The data were collected in three New York localities and one in New Jersey during September, 1942. These four communities represent different population sizes and densities: rural, urban plus rural, urban, and metropolitan. Many types of war activities were reported by the boys, but the following services listed in order of frequency of participation were most widely rendered. The boys were asked which of these war services they considered most important and why. Analysis has been made of the boys' ratings of the importance and fun of their war jobs and the reasons for these ratings.

This paper offers the generalizations that habituated attitudes are influential factors in determining the seriousness of the handicaps to successful adjustment, that the obstacles to such adjustment increase in difficulty as the nature of the attitude distributions move from the leptokurtic curve, through the normal, and platykurtic, to the balanced U-curve forms, and that the J-curve form imposes mild or extreme handicaps as one moves through a range of conflict situations from the average of the homogeneous group to opposing groups. The permeability of the barriers to successful adjustment is, also, related to the steepness of the slopes, which may vary within limits, for each of the four characteristic non-normal curves. The supporting argument is largely based upon the generalization that adjustment is relatively easy where the attitudes held conform to the average of the group in which conflicts arise, and that social skills adequate to meet conflict situations with success are most regularly found where these skills cover average situations. These generalizations on curve forms and slopes are applied to an analysis of the seriousness of adjustmental handicaps in the Lehigh sample and in the field of international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The results reported in this paper may be summarized briefly as follows: 1. In attitude toward self-reliance the present groups from the three home situations, the farm, the town, and the city, did not differ significantly from each other. Mothers and fathers also scored, on the average, essentially the same. The town mothers had the most favorable and the town fathers had the least favorable attitudes of any of the sub-groups. The groups, however, were too small for the differences to be statistically reliable. 2. In general, fathers who participated in this study did not differ from the mothers in attitude toward parental control versus freedom for high-school-age children. Definite differences did appear, however, between parents of the different home situations. Farm parents, in general, had the least favorable attitude and city parents had the most favorable attitude. This is explainable in part at least in the case of the mothers, in terms of differences in formal education and training. 3. Correlations between scores of the 50 parent pairs who returned completed sets of test papers were -.73 and -.66 for attitude toward self-reliance and attitude toward parental control respectively. These coefficients are exceptionally high, due, quite probably to the fact that this was not entirely an unselected group. These mothers made somewhat more favorable scores on both tests than the total mothers' group. 4. There was revealed a very slight tendency for attitude toward self-reliance in mothers to be associated with the development in their children of two sorts of self-reliance, i.e., independence of judgment in personal problems and resourcefulness in the group situation. There was also a suggestion of a relationship between this parental attitude in mothers and adequacy of personal adjustment, and also between this attitude in fathers and appreciation of home life in children. 5. Attitude toward adolescent freedom versus parental control in both fathers and mothers was very slightly associated with independence in personal matters in children. When the standard scores of each parent pair were averaged and correlated with "independence," the resulting coefficient was .30±.08. Since farm parents averaged lowest and city parents averaged highest in this attitude it was tentatively concluded that for the development of self-reliance, in the sense of independence in meeting personal problems, the city home situation was the most favorable and the farm home situation the least favorable of the three studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judgments of attitude statements with the method of equal-appearing intervals have been found to vary as a function of the judges' attitudes. In this paper explanations of the relationship between judges' attitudes and judgments of attitude statements in terms of models of psychophysical judgment are discussed. It is argued that psychophysical models such as adaptation-level theory, the range-frequency model, and the 'rubber-band' model and its derivations, cannot account satisfactorily for judges' performance of the attitude rating task in a great number of studies. The reason for this failure, it is argued, is that the stimulus series employed in the psychophysical judgment research on which these models are based typically varied only on the dimension being judged. The sets of statements' judged in attitude rating studies, however, vary not only on the dimension of interest (favourability-unfavourability) but also on a number of other dimensions. It is suggested that this incidental stimulus variation of attitude statements may account for the failure of psychophysical models to predict accurately the performance of judges in the attitude rating task. It is argued that if principles which could account for the effects of this incidental stimulus variation on attitude ratings could be incorporated into psychophysical models, the predictive qualities of these models could be improved considerably. One such model is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings together previous research on the relationship of family size to family relationships and attitudes. It reduces the rather diverse findings to four propositions dealing with affect, interaction and stress. It submits these propositions to additional tests utilizing secondary data from two large surveys. Finally, these data are shown to support some and question other generalizations of group size obtained from research with laboratory groups. Substantively families of three or four children rank lower in all of the analyses than do families with one or two children, even with social class constant. Large families with five or more children rank lower than one or two-child families in all analyses but in some analyses they rank higher than families with three or four children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1965, Warner developed an interviewing procedure designed to eliminate evasive answer bias when questions of a sensitive nature are asked. He called the procedure "randomized response." The authors have been studying the technique for several years and, in this paper, are re- porting some of the estimates of induced abortion in urban North Carolina using randomized response. Estimates of the proportion of women having an abortion during the past year among women 18-44 years of age are reported. For the study population indices were developed relating induced abortion to total conceptions for whites and nonwhites. The illegal abortion rate per 100 conceptions was estimated to be 14.9 for whites and 32.9 for nonwhites. Estimates of the proportion of women having an abortion during their lifetime among women 18 years old or over are also shown, Among ever married women, the proportion having an abortion during their lifetime declined as education increased. Estimates were high for women with 5 or more pregnancies. Most of the respondents stated that they were satisfied that the randomized response approach would not reveal their personal situation. Furthermore, they did not think their friends would truthfully respond to a direct question regarding abortion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists have contended that the primary group is an important determinant of the attitudes of its members. Although this sociological principle has received wide acceptance, it has had little impact upon public opinion research. Indeed, there is reason to doubt that it is applicable to the kinds of attitudes which are studied by the public opinion analyst. The many studies which have confirmed the principle typically have been concerned with attitudes which were immediately relevant to the manifest goals of the primary group. The code of the gang, the shared attitudes of a military unit, the allegiances and loyalties of a family, all constitute sets of attitudes which must be shared by the group members if the group is to achieve its goals. It is not surprising that primary groups exert effective pressures toward conformity with attitudinal norms when the attitudes under investigation are clearly instrumental in determining the group's success or survival. But the attitudes which are studied by public opinion research are ordinarily far less obviously essential for the maintenance of the primary group. Primary groups can and do function smoothly even though the members hold varying views concerning the control of atomic energy, farm price supports, or any of a great number of public issues. In fact, it may be doubted that any large proportion of primary groups have norms concerning such issues or exert overt pressures to gain uniformity of attitude toward such issues. It is the purpose of this paper to present a theory in which primary group pressures will be seen to influence attitudes of the type studied by public opinion research.

Based on a generalized consistency model, differential attitude toward and perceptions of classroom cheating were hypothesized relative to behaviorally defined cheater/noncheater groups. Analyses of paper-and- pencil attitude and perceptual data provided by 193 college undergraduates (each of whom had been afforded the opportunity to cheat on each of three test-scoring occasions and, as a result of his behavior, classified as a cheater or noncheater) led to the conclusion that attitude, perceptions and behavior were largely consistent. Specifically, theaters (as opposed to noncheaters) were found to: evidence a more positive attitude toward cheating; exaggerate their own number; report a higher average unit of cheating; and evidence less concern about classroom cheating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objectives of this paper are to propose a new concept for use in attitude studies; to explain one way in which this concept has been operationalized; to suggest an hypothesis for use in further studies of this concept; and to present some preliminary research findings concerning this hypothesis. Social scientists have long been interested in differences and similarities between people holding "liberal" and "conservative" attitudes toward various issues and problems of the day. Countless numbers of research studies have been conducted in this area. Perhaps most interesting among these studies have been several attempts to determine whether people tend to have a general liberal-conservative orientation, or whether we must expect their attitudes to vary in different situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the isssue about learning from experience. Description of the two methods of learning; Analysis of the individual countertransferase situations; Recognition of the personal attitudes and limitations specific in countertransference responses; Interplay between patient-analyst interaction and unconscious process.

Research conducted during the last few years has investigated the relationship between these personality variables and several dependent variables including performance on classroom tests, preference for certain degrees of risk, estimation of future success, persistence at tasks, and several others. The extent of these findings has seemed substantial enough to warrant the use of achievement-motivation variables as predictors of performance in applied as well as laboratory studies. This is not to imply that the reported findings are always consistent or that significant differences are always discovered. Since the theory of achievement motivation does appear to be of considerable potential use in several areas, any attempt at clarification would seem to be a contribution in a practical as well as a theoretical sense. In this paper one such attempt will be reviewed and data will be presented that seem to clarify some of the inconsistencies in the literature. In particular, control-of-reinforcement theory, originally devised by Julian Rotter, will be reviewed and an attempt will be made to show how a consideration of this theory along with the theory of achievement motivation can aid in understanding the conditions under which both theories apply.

The present paper pursues the inquiry further by considering what experimental Ss had to say about their experience, and what relationships exist between the way an S perceived the situation and his tendency to yield. In the earlier paper, the position was taken that Ss are not passively controlled by the group norm, but rather that they are actively engaged in problem solving. The judgmental tasks are cast in familiar multiple choice format. However, the experimental situation differs fundamentally from the typical examination in that the difficulty inheres not in the form or content of the questions but in the discrepancy between what appear to be the obvious answers and the answers being given by others. It is because the questions are so very clear and easy, and because the others are people like oneself and hence certainly able to answer correctly, that their peculiar judgments are so difficult to account for. In short, what would otherwise be a simple and straightforward examination-like task becomes a situation of conflict because of S's knowledge of others' apparent responses.

The relationships between personality and the phenomenon of prejudice have been the concern of several recent investigations. To study ethnocentrism the investigator employed the California Ethnocentrism Scale for adult subjects and the California Attitude Scale for children. It was assumed in the study that a score on these attitude scales gave "a measure of the extent of a subject's ethnocentrism." This implied that the responses were accepted at their face value. Overlooked were the possibilities that, in spite of the anonymity which was guaranteed, subjects might not have responded truthfully on the paper-and-pencil questionnaire, particularly since highly controversial issues were involved, or that the answers given depended on the subject's interpretations of his task and of the questions, or that they were due to momentary sets or other conditions particular to the time and place of responding. It was stated that a "high ethnocentrism score represents prejudice and a low score represents lack of prejudice."

The paper studies a pattern of thought, sometimes called "the practical syllogism". The first premise of this pattern is a statement about an agent's intention to achieve a certain result. The second premise is a statement about what he considers necessary for him to do in order to achieve this aim. The conclusion is a statement to the effect, roughly speaking, that the agent proceeds to do the necessary things. What is the logical status of this type of argument or inference? The paper purports to show that the argument, when it is logically conclusive, is a schema of understanding behaviour in the light of assumed intentions and cognitive attitudes of an agent The argument also has uses for explanatory and predictive purposes. The author contends that, as a schema of explanation, the practical inference pattern holds a position in the human and social sciences similar to that of the deductive-nomological inference pattern ("the covering law model") in the natural sciences. Since the patterns are of different logical type, there is thus also a difference in kind between explanation in the natural sciences and in the sciences of man. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on exploring connections between some concepts in the theory of action. The initial distinction between orientation primacy and situational problem is abandoned--at least as far as the content of the classification is concerned. Instead, the distinction between variables particularly relevant for need-dispositions and for role-expectation analysis is picked up-but the basis for that distinction, or the classificatory principle, is changed. Now, the classification is based on indeterminacies of objects vs. indeterminacies in attitudes. It seems that the first classification principle is kept, but that the resulting grouping is the one originally produced by the second principle. So, this conclusion is reached--before a situation can have determinate meaning for the actor, its objects must be defined either in performance- or in quality-terms and in terms of either universalism or particularism; and he must so to say select either affectivity or affective neutrality and either specificity or diffuseness as relevant principles for his attitude formation.

This paper discusses the serious lag that exists in the synthesis and transmission of knowledge concerning the aged and in its utilization to meet human needs. Social work education should exercise leadership in challenging rather than reflecting inappropriate attitudes and approaches at every level from individual case management to social planning of broad programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT With the introduction of equity products by life insurance companies, investor attitudes will become increasingly important. This paper attempts to add to the theory of insurance consumption by analyzing such investor attitudes. The data indicate that investors have substantially different attitudes toward various investment media. In the ease of several media, the attitudes of annuity-prone and annuity-moderate investors are very similar. However, there are significant statistical differences between the groups in their attitudes toward five important types of investments. These data also show significant differences in attitudes toward anti-inflationary portfolio policy. The conclusions drawn from these data may be especially important in relation to the equity products of life insurance companies and there are implications for the more traditional life insurance products as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an earlier paper in this journal,* the author suggested that the processes of attitude change underlying mass communication impact are of two kinds: with low involvement to persuasive stimuli one might look for gradual shifts in perceptual structure, aided by repetition, activated by behavioral choice situations, and followed at some time by attitude change, while with high involvement one could look instead [or the classic and familiar conflict of ideas at the level of conscious opinion and attitude that precedes changes in behavior. The present paper describes the development and application of a workable tool to measure this involvement, a necessary step in the study of communication impact along these lines is to proceed further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents response of the author to the comments of psychologist M. Brewster Smith to the article of the author published in the fall 1953 issue of the journal "The Quarterly," concerning methodological distinction between opinions and attitudes. Smith sets forth the basis for his comments in his third and fourth paragraphs. Having found much of merit in the author's paper, he feels, on second thought that it may be just a piece of special pleading, so he comments "closer inspection leads one to suspect, however, that Wiebe is actually relegating attitudes to the realm of the trivial and academic, serious and practical people should, if they follow his analysis, devote themselves to the study of opinion, where to be sure, more exacting criteria of validation have to be met, but the pay-off in predictive power seems proportionately greater." Having stated what he suspects, Smith continues, "it is my contention, and the reason for this commentary, that this aspect of Wiebe's position, which I would regard as unfortunate, is a consequence of unacceptable starting points in his chain of reasoning."

The present research attempts to determine if the notion of separate theories for prejudice and discrimination, as put forth by Rose, is viable. The paper examines, as a result of differential responses to selected situational variables, some of the reasons wily nonprejudiced subjects discriminate against blacks and prejudiced subjects do not. The situational variables (social constraint and social distance) were experimentally introduced in a field setting. The paper concludes by agreeing with Rose's contention that separate theories for prejudice and discrimination are necessary. However, the authors take exception with the idea that theories of discrimination are sufficient to explain discriminatory behavior. In particular, in order to better understand discriminatory behavior, the argument is set forth that instead of restricting the scope of investigation, as suggested by Rose, it should be enlarged by including other relevant variables which have been shown to have an impact on discriminatory behavior. Other studies have indicated that conformity tendencies are often involved in producing behaviors which are inconsistent with attitudes. It is suggested that some measures of these, as well as of attitudes, should be included in future studies of discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a model and associated computer program for carrying out clustering of elements in a space of a predetermined number of dimensions. In addition to clustering of elements, the model may be used for multi-dimensional scale analysis and for construction of sociograms. The model takes as input data a set of 'affinities' between elements, the inverse of which may be considered as psychological or sociological distances. It then moves elements in a Euclidean n-space toward the point at which the geometric distance is equal to the given psychological or social 'distance,' as if a set of attractive and repulsive forces was acting upon each element from other elements. The second major portion of the paper consists of ten examples, which are analyzed by means of the accompanying computer program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifies reasons for the existence of the problems in attitude research and points up some implications of the problems for attitude research. Views of several researchers on problems in attitude research; Steps that should be taken to eliminate, or at least to reduce the shortcomings of attitude research using paper and pencil.

This paper attempts to devise a parsimonious explanation of human behavior in collectivities. For this purpose three main variables have been identified, which, when combined in a specific manner, serve to incorporate the major determinants of behavior. These variables, which will be put into technical jargon in this paper, include (I) a pre-existing attitude, (2) an emotional context, and (3) a situational effect. An individual's need for social approval (NSA), developed in previous interactional situations, is the preexisting attitude with which the paper is concerned. Need-for-social-approval may be simply defined as the degree to which one attempts to impress others in order to gain their approval. The emotional context of a situation may be accounted for by the intensity of the situation. In this sense, intensity may be viewed as density. That is, intensity may be defined as the quantity of interaction per time period or the quantity of interaction per geographical space. The situational effects upon behavior are the most important since they can eradicate the effects of the other two variables.