Opinions and Personality

By: m smith

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471803855
• ISBN13: 9780471803850
• Release Date: January 1956
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 294 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A classic and still relevant analysis

This book first appeared over 50 years ago and reports data from a survey completed almost a decade before then. It reports an investigation into the role that attitudes and opinions play in the lives of everyday people, how the possession of beliefs enable a person to function and sometimes how they interfere with optimal function. Why should a book so old be worthy of review? What relevance and value does it have today when we seem to know so much about attitudes and opinions and the role that they play in advertising, marketing and political propaganda? The answer is simply that it still provides a model of how best to investigate the function of opinions and relate them to everyday life, far and away better than the studies based upon other methodologies and other theories. "Opinions and Personality" reports an investigation in which a small number of men were interviewed in depth. The opinions they held on a variety of issues were explored to reveal how they functioned in a number of different ways. Much of the social psychological study of attitudes and opinions has been concerned with the structure of attitudes, the relationship between elements of action, feeling and thought (e.g. Festinger,Theory of Cognitive Dissonanceand The Handbook of Attitudes. These authors were concerned with the study of the functions of attitudes. Four separate functions were identified. The first, a knowledge-based utility function, enabled a person to develop a network of facts and opinions about objects and people in their environment, essentially to live adequately on a day to day basis. The second, a social adjustive function, was the way in which opinions enabled people to engage with like-minded people, join groups and conform to others. A third function was more value based, the expression of opinions related to deeper, fundamental values of society such as the values of liberty, democracy and social justice. A final function, dubbed ego-defensive, was related to socialization experiences in childhood and was a function not always able to be articulated consciously. The methodology enabled the exploration of these functions in ways not possible with questionnaire survey techniques. A person with a significant opinion based upon an ego-defensive function, for example, might be unable to articulate it fully and may resort to a verbal report which is seemingly based on a conformist or utilitarian function. Such erroneous links would result in an inability to predict how the opinion may be expressed in changed circumstances or how it may be changed by exposure to new experiences. Modern methods to explore the functions of opinions have been largely based upon survey methodology and while the results have been interesting there is always the big question of how valid and general are the functions that people can report. The theory behind the study, conducted by three psychologists all of whom were to emerge over the next few decades as highly significant fi