ABSTRACT
This introduction presents some key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is concerned with some of the interdisciplinary relations of social psychology: with political science, anthropology, and sociology. It touches political science and attempts at conceptual mapping and draws upon a psychological perspective. The book is also concerned with anthropology, which is seriously dated, since it takes no account of the "new ethnography" of componential analysis that makes provocative contact with modern cognitive psychology. It focuses on attitudes and values as products of socialization that predispose the person to behave distinctively in social situations. The book provides an empirical study of authoritarianism, provides a bridge from the study of attitudes to that of broader constellations of personality. It also focuses on the recent on-growth of long productive interchange with fellow members of the Social Science Research Council Committee on Socialization and Social Structure.
