The Handbook of Social Psychology 5. [antikvár]

Preface to the First EditionThe accelerating expansion of social psychology in the past two decades has led to anacute need for a source book more advanced than the ordinary textbook in the fieldbut yet more focused than scattered periodical literature. Murchison's Handbook ofSocial Psychology (1935), the only previous attempt to meet this need, is out of dateand out of print. It was this state of affairs that led us to assemble a book that wouldrepresent the major areas of social psychology at a level of difficulty appropriate forgraduate students. In addition to serving the needs of graduate instruction, we antic-ipate that the volumes will be useful in advanced undergraduate courses and as areference book for professional psychologists.We first considered the possibility of preparing a Handbook three years ago. How-ever, a final decision to proceed with the plan was not reached until the fall of 1951.During the interval we arranged an outline of topics that represented our convictionsconcerning the present state of social psychology. We then wrote to a large numberof distinguished social psychologists asking them whether they felt our venture waslikely to be professionally valuable and asking for criticisms of the outline we hadprepared. The response to these letters was immensely gratifyingsocial psycholo-gists as a group appear sufficiently altruistic to spend large amounts of time criticizingand commenting on a project of which they approve even though they may be unableto participate in it themselves. We also asked for specific recommendations of peoplewho seemed best qualified to prepare the various chapters. After receiving answerswe drastically revised our outline and proceeded to invite authors to prepare thevarious chapters. It was not until the spring of 1952 that we completed our list ofcontributors and even this list later underwent change. We first suggested (tongue incheek) that the manuscripts be submitted by September 15, 1952. However, as wesecretly expected, we were forced to change this due date to January 1, 1953. This"deadline" we tried hard to meet. But of course we failed and shifted our aspirationin