ABSTRACT
The personality is made up of a number of 'personality traits', and the distribution of these is dependent on the particular group-belongingness of each person, according to J. F. Brown's view. Brown himself tended more than Lewin did to overemphasize the external field-influences. A normal distribution of attitudes is usually to be found in a relaxed social field; a skewed distribution is a sign of increased tension in the social field in the appropriate area of opinion. Social norms are generally understood as patterns of behaviour that are willed and sanctioned by 'Society' itself, and not by any separate particular partners or reference-groups. The equilibrium between the power-groups, which represent the norm-systems, does simulate an imitation form of social consensus. Besides offering a special instance, sanction-theories can also be thought of as a supplementary framework for theories of social utility. In social psychology the term 'utility' has a wider connotation than in economics.
