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Comment on “Opinions, Personality, and Political Behavior”1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Alexander L. George
Alexander L. George
Affiliation:
The RAND Corporation
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Extract

The type of comprehensive conceptual scheme presented by Professor Smith in the foregoing paper is, in the writer's opinion, the most useful framework currently available for studying the relationship between opinions and personality. The paper draws upon a major work by Smith and his colleagues, Opinions and Personality, which has not only been greeted as a “pattern-setter for a new phase of attitude research” but is already having an important impact on political behavior studies.

That political scientists should find the pluralistic theory proposed by Smith congenial, cannot be explained merely by the fact that it is accompanied by an emphatic rejection of the type of simplistic theorizing about personality and opinion already in disfavor with most of them. Rather, its appeal is solidly intellectual, deriving from the fact that it stems from a general (and long awaited!) movement of convergence within the field of psychology.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , March 1958 , pp. 18 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1958

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References

2 Douvan, Elizabeth, of the Survey Research Center, University of Michigan, in her review of Opinions and Personality in Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 20 (Summer, 1956), p. 478CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Political scientists will also find helpful the commentary on Opinions and Personality by a leading authority on attitude research, Hyman, Herbert H., in World Politics, Vol. 10 (October, 1957) pp. 144–153CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Since in the foregoing paper Smith concentrates his remarks on the possible utility of his approach for the study of opinion, I have reluctantly decided not to comment on the importance of his work for the study of political leadership and political personality, though I believe it has considerable relevance for political scientists from this standpoint too. See especially op. cit., pp. 280–284.

4 Gabriel A. Almond, “The Appeals of Communism and Fascism,” (mimeo.) presented at the 51st Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boulder, Colorado, 1955.

5 In addition to the pertinent passages of Smith's, paper, see also the discussion of “Opinion and Action” in Opinions and Personality, pp. 46–47Google Scholar.

6 The authors of Opinions and Personality define “attitude” (which they use interchangeably with “opinion” and “sentiment”) as “a predisposition to experience, to be motivated by, and to act toward, a class of objects in a predictable manner” (p. 33).

7 Helpful in this regard is Simon's, Herbert A. discussion of such models in “Some Strategic Considerations in the Construction of Social Science Models,” in Lazarsfeld, Paul F., ed., Mathematical Thinking in the Social Sciences (The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1954), pp. 388–415Google Scholar. Purely psychological models of action (such as, for example, that proposed by Tolman, Edward C., in Parsons, Talcott and Shils, Edward, eds., Toward A General Theory of Action (Cambridge, Mass., 1952)Google Scholar may also be suggestive, but they seem less applicable to problems met in political science. Useful leads for the empirical study of action have also been furnished by practitioners of social and market research. See Lazarsfeld, Paul F. and Rosenberg, Morris, eds., The Language of Social Research (The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill., 1955), esp. p. 7Google Scholar and Section V.

8 See, for example, Hans Morgenthau's statement on how the rational hypothesis is applied in analyzing foreign policy, in his “Another ‘Great Debate’: The National Interest of the United States,” this Review, Vol. 46 (December, 1952), pp. 965–6Google Scholar.

9 In The Open Society and Its Enemies (Routledge and K. Paul, London, 2d ed., rev., 1952), Vol. II, pp. 96–7, 265Google Scholar. See also Gardiner, Patrick, The Nature of Historical Explanation (London, 1952), pp. 49–50, 113–139Google Scholar. A fuller version of these remarks on the logic-of-the-situation approach is contained in forthcoming publications on propaganda analysis (for the RAND Corporation) and on the problems of psychologically oriented political biography.

* In a personal communication after this comment was written, M. Brewster Smith has kindly called my attention to the fact that Opinions and Personality contains a number of differentiations of “attitudes” and suggestions for taxonomy, and that he is in essential agreement that “attitudes” is too global a concept for the analysis of action.

10 In Opinions and Personality, the authors explain that they have given much attention to the “object appraisal” function of opinion “out of a sense that the time has come, given the assimilation of Freud's great insights, to look again at the manner in which and the degree to which man deals rationally with the world around him in the light of his interests” (p. 266).

11 See, for example, David Easton's extended discussion of this problem in his The Political System.

12 Opinions and Personality, p. 33.

13 Redl, F. and Wineman, D., Children Who Hate (Glencoe, Ill., 1951)Google Scholar. While concerned with a problem at some remove from that of political opinion, these authors too find it necessary to push further the analysis of ego functioning. Their study is extremely suggestive of the directions in which clinically oriented research on opinions and personality might move. See particularly the restatement and discussion of four major ego functions (pp. 61–67) and the systematic inventory of the variety of techniques and strategies employed by delinquent children in order to defend themselves against their own consciences and to resist efforts to bring about changes in their behavior and attitudes (pp. 141–199).

14 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.

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