ABSTRACT
This lack of interest in the relation between attachments to groups and to their members is most likely due to the fact that these two types of attachment have been viewed instead as competing bases for groups. For most of this century, social psychology has been dominated by an individualistic conception of the group, by which groups are simply the sum of their individual parts. The manifesto of the individualist position was provided by Floyd Allport (1924) in his classic, Social Psychology. Allport began his text by dismissing the group as a meaningful unit of analysis, stating, “If we take care of the individual, psychologically speaking, the groups will take care of themselves” (p. 9). Forty years later, Allport’s commitment to the individualist position had not diminished: “When the group dynamicist speaks of the ‘attraction of the group for the individual’ does he not mean just the attraction of the individuals for one another? If individuals are all drawn toward one another, are they not ipso facto drawn to the group?” (1962, pp. 23-24). Thus, for Allport and for successors to the individualist position, any question of the relation between attachment to the group and attachment to the individual group members is meaningless. There can be no greater or lesser attachment to the group than to the individual members, because the group has no representation or reality distinct from that of its members. Humankind consists solely of the men and women who make it up, no more and no less.
