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This is a report of the fifth, and final, Columbia conference on Group Processes.1
Julius B. Richmond discusses in detail the experimental aspects of pediatrics, particularly concerning problems of homeostasis and the relation between heart-rate and stimuli in babies. Mirsky discusses the rejecting baby and Margaret Fries gives some good advice about the handling of hypersensitive babies (treat them like premature ones). Konrad Lorenz and Liddell consider the problems of promiscuous geese and goats and their behavior in experiments.
A report on Analysis of Behavior in Terms of Control Systems, by Horst Mittelstaedt, is so mathematical that the analytic reader easily gets lost. For instance Mittelstaedt states: '… the arm may get proprioceptive feedback in order to maintain a constant calibration of the second subsystem…'. Even Fremont-Smith has to ask whether this refers to theory or to a living arm (as it does).
More than half of the book is devoted to reports by Margaret Mead and Theodore Schwartz, the latter giving a fascinating account of the cult as a condensed social process. These authors discuss their experiences in field work with the Manus people, visited by Margaret Mead in 1928 and again twenty-five years later. Her second visit revealed that all the people living in one village (in New Guinea) had been converted to Catholicism. After going through the war and occupation by the Japanese and then by the Australians, and finally experiencing the invasion of the Americans, they all defected