Opinions, Personality, and Political Behavior1

It is gratifying to be able to present to students of political behavior the approach that my colleagues, Jerome Bruner and Robert White, and I worked out for the study of “Opinions and Personality,†since throughout our explorations political scientists had been what the current jargon would call a “salient reference group†for us. As a psychologist and “outsider,†however, I offer these remarks with some trepidation, since the framework that we arrived at in the detailed study of ten men's outlook on Russia was, after all, distinctly psychological; therefore a limited view that embraces but one segment of the processes with which political scientists are properly concerned. Our investigations were long on the description and analysis of opinions, but short on the observation of consequential behavior, political or otherwise. And our study did not even focus on public opinion, in any sense that attemps a close conceptual distinction between the public and the private.