ABSTRACT
In an autobiographical introduction to Bruno Bettelheim's book The Informed Heart, he describes the dilemma he experienced as a young man after the First World War, trying to decide where to focus his energies. If only the good men could create the good society, then the problem was how to change existing man so that he would become the good man who would then, in his image, create and perpetuate the good society. The research project was carried out from within the then Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, which was administering the Conditional Aid programme, the first major government programme funding industrial social research. Social science and its peculiarities was new to the administrators of government research funds, and it had been thought useful to locate one of the projects in the funding department itself, in order to learn about social science's special characteristics.
