ABSTRACT
Man has always had a variety of notions about his place in nature and about his own nature. In the past, these 'images' and ideas drifted slowly from various specialist groups to the population at large. Today, with the unprecedented growth of the means of public information available to us, ideas which catch the fancy or the imagination of the new myth makers can sometimes spread more quickly and widely than an epidemic; and often they have a longer life-span. This revolution in the diffusion of ideas presents an entirely new problem to social scientists, and particularly to social psychologists. The massive assimilation and simplification of new points of view about human nature, human society, and the physical and biological environment of man, is capable of affecting attitudes and behaviour of large populations as never before.
