ABSTRACT
Throughout recorded history scientists, philosophers, and storytell ers have sought to understand how it is that their fellows can appear to remain the same while at the same time changing all the while. Behav ioral scientists have been trying to catch up with the novelists and play wrights who have explored and exposed the dramatic conflicts between human stability and change. The present authors are among the rela tively few behavioral scientists who have chosen to follow the progress of a large cohort of people, in this case as they experienced a consider able portion of their adult lives from when they were first studied in 1954 to when they were reinterviewed twenty years later, in 1974.
