Stuart C. Dodd

Diffusion is Predictable: Testing Probability Models for Laws of Interaction

ranged as replicas of commonplace social situations conducive to cultural production. Since cultural phenomena were actually brought about in the experiments and not merely simulated, the miniature histories appear to be operational replicas. The matter of these particular replicas working outside of the laboratory has not been established. But the experiments do raise questions as to the actual workings of culture in history. Our most disturbing discovery was the creativity of isolated groups. The stimulation and novelty of experience in open social settings did not increase cultural creativity in the experiments. The experimental demonstration of the coincidence of social closure with cultural invention poses the problem of the extent of their association in history. There are plausible examples of socially restricted creativity in schools of art and thought, in golden ages and recurrent clusterings of all sorts of distinguished achievement. But the great example of mobile and cosmopolitan urban populations having made the most of cultural change runs counter to our experimental results. We should hesitate to extend these results without qualification to a general interpretation of all cultural accomplishment. However, our results do give reason to question any bland presumption that social mobility leads inevitably to cultural creativity. We should now be more careful to search for explicit circumstances under which either isolation or mobility may contribute to the production of culture.

Testing Message Diffusion in Controlled Experiments: Charting the Distance and Time Factors in the Interactance Hypothesis

E XPERIMENTATION in Project Revere centers around, although it is not limited to, the testing of a highly general hypothesis of human interacting to be described below. It analyzes all human interacting or group phenomena into nine classes of observable factors which are expected to describe it well enough for predicting it. This experimentation is part of a contract with the Air Force to study the diffusion of messages in enemy, neutral, or friendly populations, resulting from leaflets dropped from planes. This diffusion is a verbal, oneway case of massive human interacting. It is communicating from person-to-person in large populations. Our criterion of interacting within a group is the percentage of persons in a population who have learned from other people a given message that was started from leaflets. Our criterion of reacting of a plurel is the percentage of persons who learned a message

All-or-None Elements and Mathematical Models for Sociologists

preserve of a few strategists who make their own ground rules, it behooves all of us to take a more active part in theory-production. The persistent lack of a widely accepted set of tested propositions about human group behavior-an interdependent, internally consistent, and open-ended body of truth about relationships that goes by the name of systematic theory-is a hindrance to more rapid sciencebuilding in sociology. It means, for instance, that we are forced to direct most of our investigations toward individual theories, limited hypotheses, and similar bits and pieces of the grand design. This does not, or should not, relieve any of us of responsibilities for improving as best we can the conceptual and theoretical superstructure of our discipline. To fulfill its dynamic and seminal purpose, systematic theory must be built by many for mass consumption, not by the few for limited circulation. Therefore, I suggest that the gap created by the abolition of theory as a separate field might profitably be filled by a session which would work on the larger problem of reconciliation of theories from all fields of our investigation. Unless such a working synthesis can be put into concrete form soon, the centrifugal forces now at work in sociology may scatter it all over the academic countryside before the end of the century.

Developing Demoscopes for Social Research

T HE AIM of this paper is to forecast four new or further applications of demoscopest in basic social research of the future. By a demoscope is meant any scientific instrument for surveying or polling samples of people. By basic social research, pure scientific research is meant which is not primarily concerned with solving immediate problems nor immediate guiding of administrative decisions but which seeks social laws. Basic social research here means the search to generalize ever more widely the currently limited uniformities that have been measured in interhuman behavior and in their attendant conditions. Such generalizations give man in the long run more basic ability to predict and control human relations. The argument, in this paper, for developing demoscopes as promising instruments for observing social facts, involves the usual