Group Experiment and Other Writings

Download or read book Group Experiment and Other Writings written by Friedrich Pollock and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the occupation of West Germany after the Second World War, the American authorities commissioned polls to assess the values and opinions of ordinary Germans. They concluded that the fascist attitudes of the Nazi era had weakened to a large degree. The author and his colleagues, who returned in 1949 from the United States, were skeptical. In their view, public opinion is not simply an aggregate of individually held opinions, but is fundamentally a public concept, formed through interaction in conversations and with prevailing attitudes and ideas "in the air." In this book, they published their findings on their group discussion experiments that delved deeper into the process of opinion formation.