The recently published bookSoviet and Western Perspectives in Social Psychology (Strickland, 1979) reports a conference between Russian and Western (largely Canadian) social psychologists held in Canada. On the first page, the editor guides the reader to what should be the conclusion, as he talks about the ‘success’ of the conference: ‘it is ... remarkable that such a brief meeting should have been as fruitful and spontaneous as it turned out to be’ (Strickland, 1979, p. 1). The evidence in the book for such ‘success’ takes the form of the papers from Eastern and Western participants, together with transcripts from the discussion which followed the formal papers. As such, the book provides the opportunity for a rarely undertaken analysis and comparison of the theoretical bases of Western and Soviet social psychology; in fact, it is only in the light of such an analysis that the perceived ‘success’ of this type of venture can be understood, let alone evaluated. Social psychology has developed later in the Soviet Union than in the United States (see, tor example, the histories of Soviet psychology by Rahmani, 1973, and McLeish, 1975). One of the Russian participants, Galina Andreeva, points to the late 1950s as the time when social psychology began to emerge as a separate discipline, whilst Kerbikov (1969), himself a Soviet social psychologist, has suggested that it was the Second Congress of Psychologists held in 1963 which allayed previous Soviet hostility to social psychological research; he comments that ‘the necessity for doing such research now arouses no suspicion whatsoever’ (p. 392). So just as Western and Eastern physicists, biochemists, geologists, etc. meet in congresses in an atmosphere of scientific cooperation, it seems inevitable that representatives of the somewhat younger science of social psychology should become involved in similar international meetings, designed to facilitate the flow of scientific information across national and ideological boundaries. However, it will be suggested that the nature of social psychology in the West and in the Soviet Union raises particular problems for such meetings.