Society and Personality. An Interactionist Approach to Social Psychology: By Tamotsu Shibutani. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1961. 630 pp.

'To understand what a man does', says Shibutani, 'an observer must get at the assumptions with which he begins'. To appreciate this book, one must accept the interactionist approach in social psychology, the formulation of 'man's personality … as developing and being reaffirmed from day to day in his interaction with his associates'. To the author, such a study bears to psychoanalysis and other individualistic disciplines a relation like that of anatomy and physiology to cytology. His own treatment, however, is microscopic as he dissects and defines conduct as reflected in act, in meaning, in role in the person, and in the group.

Shibutani ranges widely over variations in cultures, in communications, in the roles played by individuals, in the development of their sense of identity, their self-esteem, status, and self-control; yet he is consistently guided by one recurring theme—that those with whom an individual associates re-enforce or inhibit the tendencies peculiar to him. The author's explorations end in the contemplation of social psychology in this brave new world, courageous of necessity because it is perplexed, and awed by the potential threats of nuclear power and of automation, and by the bewilderment of living in the 'gigantic interdependent units' of industrialized urban life. Here he sees the social psychologist as mentor and as leader.

Widespread and diversified as is his field, and complex as are some of the details, he describes it simply enough for a freshman newly come to college from his father's dairy farm, or the hypothetical visitor from outer space to visualize it, to understand from it much of human society. This is largely because the author's abstractions are delineated sharply enough to serve as beacons from lookout to lookout, and his generalizations are endorsed by many examples.

So much for what the author says; what does he leave out, deliberately