Word: berelson
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Findings. Financed by a wide variety of sponsors, including General Electric and the Carnegie Corporation, Human Behavior is the massive work of two highly literate behavioral-scientists, University of Chicago Psychologist Gary Steiner and Sociologist Bernard Berelson, vice president of the Population Council. By sifting hundreds of case studies and experiments, Berelson and Steiner have produced 1,045 concise findings "for which there is some good amount of scientific evidence." Many only give a scientific stamp to "what everybody knows," but others make concrete what is generally only suspected, prove (or disprove) folklore, or substantiate the obvious with interesting evidence...
Depressing Deceiver. What emerges from their findings, conclude Authors Berelson and Steiner, is a dour view of Western man-not the Greek lover of reason, the Christian believer in redemption, or the Renaissance liberator of human power, but a depressing creature with a vast talent for distorting reality because of psychological needs. "Behavioral-science man" thinks what fits his wishes, says what pleases his peers, avoids conflict and protects his neuroses. He votes with his friends, wants what he has to work for, and thinks that his group or organization ranks higher than it does. If threatened with disillusionment...
...this image is far from complete, as Berelson and Steiner are the first to point out. A certain "richness," they admit, "has somehow fallen through the present screen of the behavioral sciences"-the joy and pain of life, the variety of men, the central human concerns of love, hate, death, ethics and courage. But the image is bound to change; the behavioral sciences are not yet a century old. In the end, say the confident authors, the new sciences will make "an indispensable contribution to the naturalistic description of human nature-the contribution of hard knowledge tested by the methods...
...best books on more specialized aspects include Gilbert Highet's The Art of Teaching (1950) and The Academic Marketplace, (1958) by Theodore Caplow and Reece J. McGee (both out in paperback). Bernard Berelson's Graduate Education in the United States (1960), and John J. Corson's Governance of Colleges and Universities...
Other universities placed high on Berelson's list were California (Berkeley), California Institute of Technology, Chicago, Cornell, Columbia, Illinois, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan, Princeton, Wisconsin, and Yale