ABSTRACT
David Krech first appeared on the academic scene in psychology shortly after the end of World War II, when he accepted an appointment as assistant professor of psychology at Swarthmore, a small co-educational liberal arts college near Philadelphia founded by the Religious Society of Friends. He accepted the Swarthmore appointment, Krech had become a social psychologist, trained in this emerging discipline not in the university but through his experiences during the previous decade. Schools were not always open, university professorships were not easy to obtain, and social activism was interpreted as communistic radicalism. In the introduction to the book, Petrinovich and McGaugh pointed to the four major threads that run through Krech's work: a concern for the importance of individual differences, an insistence on the primary importance of the Big Question, an attempt to discover the basic mechanisms underlying molar behavior, and a strong commitment to the essentials of Gestalt psychology.
