ABSTRACT
Some years ago I had a teaching assignment that threatened to be a small disaster. I was asked to give a lecture in a course required of all first-year graduate students in psychology. The teaching assistant for the course, who happened to be one of my students, came to me to express her concerns. The particular group of students taking the course that year had a passionate ideological commitment. They felt strongly that it was not meaningful to speak of people in general. Rather a person could only speak to the behavior of specific cultural and ethnic groups. The class had been aggressive in support of this position; they had, in the words of my student, been “eating guest lecturers alive.” Knowing that I took a basic process approach, with a focus on mechanisms and inclinations that all people shared, she feared I was in for an experience that would be frustrating to say the least.
