Group Movements, Sociocultural Change, and Personality

Abstract

This chapter discusses the relevant literature in the books and learned journals of sociology, social psychology, psychology, and psychoanalysis. It explores sometimes invoke personality factors to account for the linkage between social change processes and behavioral outcomes and analyses the employ them to account for behavior that influences social change processes. The chapter reviews research on what might be regarded as the simplest kind of social change: shifts in the relationship between a person and the balance of rewards and deprivations in his or her environment. Despite a lingering appreciation of the importance of the “great man” in historical causation, research linking the individual person with processes of social change has been scattered and generally meager. The study of social change and personality also shows evidence of discontinuities in paradigmatic emphasis—discontinuities, moreover, that reflect certain general theoretical and ideological developments in the social and behavioral sciences.