ABSTRACT
What intrigued Festinger about Westgate was the possibility of developing general theories of social behaviour. His work directed social psychology in the 1950s towards abstraction and the study of functional relationships and away from experientially based theorizing. Festinger and his colleagues looked at how small physical distances accounted for the formation of friendships through what he called passive contacts. He argued that functional distance – for example, where one picks up mail, where there are staircases – also influences the possible contacts and therefore the friendships; but, for the most part, the conclusion is that small distances form the basis of the formation of friendships in homogeneous groups, with the greatest choice being made of next-door neighbours. From forty Westgate women, selected at random for interviews in the summer of 1946, parts of two of the transcripts were reported and they provide a more detailed understanding of the life circumstances of women with and without children in the housing project.
