ABSTRACT
The present volume offers testimony to the continuing vitality of the Witkin legacy. That legacy is represented by thousands of bibliographic entries—dissertations, convention papers, articles, book chapters, and books—devoted to the cognitive style of field dependence-independence (FDI) broadly conceived. There are very few areas of psychology that remain unexplored in respect to FDI. Given the massive nature of the FDI enterprise, we should not be too surprised to discover contradictions and loose ends in that enterprise. Many of these concern personality and socialization aspects of FDI, the primary foci of the present chapter. It would be presumptuous, of course, to maintain that we shall resolve all of these contradictions and tie up all of the loose ends. Our goal, rather, is to highlight these issues, showing where conceptualizations have gone awry and pointing to more adequate explanations.
