Introduction Daniel Kat t and Herbert Hyman

The solution of practical and scientific problems too often has a his- tory of tortuous and circuitous efforts before the logic of a naive, straight- forward approach asserts itself. The direct approach carries the threat of actually facing up to the problem and meeting its difficulties. Comparative research in social psychology has suffered from this general unwillingness to face squarely the primary methodological issues. There has been no frontal attack upon substantive problems with a methodology involving similar samples, common research design, common procedures and func- tionally equivalent measures. Anthropological studies have done much to make us aware of the culture-bound character of our discipline, but our attempts to build systematic knowledge on the basis of comparative and cross-national research have been feeble and fragmentary. W e have devoted considerable energy to interpreting qualitative anthropological material but have done little to impose controls in the gathering of the data to insure comparability and adequate quantification. There have been occasional at- tempts at replication in which one investigator tries to carry through in some fractional manner part of a study carried out in another nation. But again no true comparability of method has been achieved. The samples are gen- erally not comparable and sometimes have no known characteristic, and the procedures and methods vary widely.

The results of comparative studies will always be ambiguous and will comprise an area of speculative interpretation rather than systematic scientific knowledge until we can attack problems with the same essential method- ology in different nations and cultures that we apply within an experimental or research program in a single country. New techniques and procedures may have to be devised but the basic experimental logic which calls for controls in the gathering of data, for quantification of variables and for manipulation of variables through experimental or statistical procedures can not be suspended merely because the research site includes more than one country. The major purposes of cross-national research are to test the extent to which principles found in one culture or sub-culture can be gen- eralized to other cultures, i.e., to discover the limiting conditions of our generalizations and to find out the effects of cultural variables on social- psychological processes. At some point then we need to move boldly and directly to set up studies which maximize comparability of research designs and procedures.

The attempt to achieve such comparability is the point of departure of the project reported in the following pages in which social scientists

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from seven Northwestern European countries organized themselves into The Organization for Comparative Social Research to plan and carry through a seven-country study as a unified piece of research.

The problem which the social scientists from the seven countries se- lected for investigation was the effect upon group processes of perceived threat to the group. The original interest of most of the members had been broader and had been concerned with the causes of national and international tension. It was soon realized that any thorough exploration of the causes of war with its necessary economic and historical investigation would be too ambitious and too long-term a program for a first project in cross-national research. Accordingly, it was decided not to study the original causes of tension but to accept the existence of national tensions arising from per- ceived threat as a fact and to investigate the social-psychological effects of these tensions. This formulation of the problem not only made it research- able with respect to national tension but also permitted equivalent types of hypotheses to be tested statistically through nation-wide surveys and experi- mentally at the small group level.

Thus the basic hypothesis under investigation was that, as perception of threat to the group increases, the central values of the group become more salient and the pressures toward conformity become greater. These effects may be manifest in a narrowing of group norms, in a redefinition of the boundaries of the group, in more actual felt pressure to conform, in a perceptual distortion of the threatening outgroup, etc. This is basically the old position of Felix le Dantec who held that every social unit existed only because there was a common enemy. In fact, one major group of theorists has traced the rise of the state and of all coercive organizations to either the fear of an out-group or the need to exploit the out-group (Gumplowicz, Spencer, Oppenheimer) . And as Gordon Allport points out, the resort to building up a perception of threat from the out-group has become a well- known political technique. Hitler viould have been greatly handicapped without the presence of the Jewish group he tried to exterminate. McCarthy’s fantastic rise to national prominence and power rested largely upon his securing acceptance for his role of attacking traitors during a period of national insecurity. Orwell in 1984 presents an extension of this theme when he describes a world situation in which a dictatorial regime maintains some degree of localized warfare and hence a constant condition of threat and danger to the nation to reinforce the devastating conformity pressures vital to the existence of the dictatorship.

Although it is possible to find ready acceptance for the thesis that external threat makes for group solidarity of an intolerant quality, it is still true that we lack systematic evidence about the extent to which this gen- eralization holds, about the nature of the limiting conditions, and about the processes which bring it about. In World War I1 the threat of German invasion to France seemed to work in the opposite fashion, namely to increase divisionism within the social structure. It is important, therefore,

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for social research to carry out some experimental analysis of the problem which will make explicit the nature of the threat and the nature of the group structure which is likely to be affected. Thus the present cross- national project was envisaged as an attempt to move into this broad prob- lem area with a virtual identity of approach with surveys and group experiments in the seven countries. Though the interest was centered about the Orwell thesis it was realized that the survey material would afford a rich safety factor. It would provide comparable material from seven nations on such intervening variables as personality factors and child rearing prac- tices and on dependent variables such as attitudes toward out-groups and tolerance for non-conformity, and in this way make possible valuable types of secondary analysis.

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