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The notion that thoughts, beliefs, att's & behavior tend to be organized in consistent & meaningful ways is common to the concepts of balance, congruity, & dissonance, but they differ in their implications for theory & res on att's. Heider's early formulation of balance involving 2 persons & an impersonal object as cognized by a single person was generalized by Cartwright & Harary to include diff's in degree of balance & any number of objects. In the concept of strain toward symmetry Newcomb took the notion of balance out of the individual's head & applied it to the relations between 2 people, but up to now the consequences of balance theory have been rather limited. The concept of balance is similar to Osgood & Tannenbaum's principle of congruity, but the latter is superior in that predictions as to the direction & degree of attitude change can be generated. Of the 3 the most general theory is Festinger's concept of cognitive dissonance which has been useful in organizing diverse empirical data & in generating predictions of non-obvious consequences. It is suggested that these theories, while lacking much in generality, serve the useful purpose of organizing much data & of pointing up their own deficiencies. C. M. Coughenour.

As part of a larger project dealing with social influence among groups of children, it was assumed that there are 2 general mechanisms used by individuals to attain security in interpersonal relations: (1) a preference for affiliative behavior (forming affective associations, being friendly, etc), & (2) its counterpart, a preference for power solutions (controlling the behavior of others or letting them control you). In the course of validating a projective test designed to determine the presence of such preferences, 2 groups of children between 9-13 yrs of age were exposed to two different radio programs dealing with a journey to Mars. The rocket ship in each script had two leaders, one being primarily affiliation-oriented, and the other primarily power-oriented. In one of the scripts the affiliation-oriented leader was successful in dealing with interpersonal problems (a mutiny, etc) and the other type of leader unsuccessful, while in the other script, the power-oriented leader was successful and his counterpart not. The children were then asked questions designed to measure their degree of identification with each of the leaders. Results indicate that the children would prefer to be like the leader who is successful, regardless of the mechanism used to solve the interpersonal problems, and that they admire affiliation-orientation and power-orientation values essentially to the extent that these are successful in enabling the leader to deal with the situation at hand. Apparently a most important criterion for identification with a model is his degree of success, though other factors, such as the nature of the situation he must handle and the values current in the culture must be considered. K. Geiger.