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"Ideas, like individuals and nations, have histories, and so do the research enterprises that sometimes stem from ideas. The history of the research that is reported in the following pages is mainly one of indebtedness. The 34 men who, week after week, faithfully provided the bricks of information out of which this monograph is constructed were, of course, my principal benefactors. Not one of them ever lapsed, for even a single week, and my debt to them is most inadequately repaid by sending each of them a standard model of this monograph. The writing of a research report, too, has its own history, and in the writing of this one I came to the conclusion that it would be a bare-boned research report, together with only such theoretical connective tissue as in fact inspired the initial planning of the research. The reader will find that I have sometimes oscillated between the reporting of tests of theoretically derived prediction and the presenting of exploratory findings. Insofar as the latter are interesting or significant, I have no apology to make for them--especially as one who has often criticized students who, in their eagerness to find support for cherished hypotheses, ignore serendipidous findings. The phenomena of getting acquainted, like most others which one studies intimately for a period of years, are full of interesting surprises, and none of us is capable of anticipating all of them"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

"Of the writing of texts in social psychology there is no end. The author or each of them believes that he has a special justification for offering his own particular version of the common theme, and I am no exception to this general rule. Perhaps I can formulate the raison d'etre of this volume by outlining a little of its history and by expressing my indebtedness to a few of the individuals from whom its main ideas have been borrowed. These and other converging influences have led me to frame nearly every kind of social-psychological problem in terms of psychological processes which take their particular form from the interactional context in which they occur. And I have come to see group memberships as providing the sine qua non for specifying the interactional context of human social behavior. Groups provide their members with shared frames of reference--particularly in the form of positions and roles, in terms of which they perceive themselves as well as one another. So little social behavior is immune to such shared influences, and so much of it is very largely determined by them, that I have come to accord them a central place in my own thinking. I hope that, in so doing, I have not fallen into the fallacy of assuming that social behavior springs merely from the interiorizing of social norms. This would be quite as disastrous as to ignore social norms altogether. At any rate, this point of view has led me to view social behavior as occurring on the part of biological organisms which are also group members. To understand it we must study both individual life and group life, in terms of a single body of coherent concepts and principles. I have therefore tried to sketch an outline of the psychology of group membership in a way which is neither merely psychological nor merely sociological but which, I hope, may contribute to the growth of a body of concepts and principles of truly social-psychological nature"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)