A questionnaire designed during the study of the ‘authoritarian personality’ to measure an individual’s tendency to authoritarianism (F for fascism). On the basis of individual clinical work and social surveys, the designers of the F-scale believed that a potential fascist would score high on the scale, while someone less rigidly conventional, obsessed with power, or subservient to authority, would score low.

Telling fantastic stories as though they were true though not involuntarily as in the case of people suffering disturbances of MEMORY (CONFABULATION).

A sociological concept of friendship using the economic terminology of the market place where people estimate their ‘worth’ and look for people of equal or greater worth to exchange friendship with.

See EXCHANGE THEORY.

A way of explaining the relationship between two people in a DYAD. It is mainly concerned with examining the relative rewards and costs of the relationship for each individual. The theory was introduced to SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY by John Thibaut and Harold Kelley, and to SOCIOLOGY by George Homans.

A movement or school that views the task of PSYCHOLOGY as an understanding of CONSCIOUSNESS and the contents of the MIND. The basic method of this school is INTROSPECTION, the concentration on immediate AWARENESS. This is supposedly a growing emphasis in psychology although it goes back to WILHELM WUNDT in the nineteenth century.

A movement that rejects theMEDICAL MODEL for the treatment of mental illness in favour of trying to analyse the conscious SELF of the disturbed individual. Such a person is not treated as a patient to be cured but rather as an individual to be understood and to be helped in achieving selfunderstanding.

See also LAING.

A gradual process of genetic development and change in life over many generations. Those members of a species best adapted to their environment in any generation (i.e. the ‘fittest’) have the best chance of surviving and reproducing successfully.

See DARWIN, NATURAL SELECTION and SURVIVAL VALUE.

The attempt to analyse and understand the ethnic group patterns of BEHAVIOUR described by ETHNOGRAPHY.

A COMPULSION to expose oneself in public, either literally or metaphorically.

A branch of applied genetics which attempts to improve the inherited qualities of a species by selective breeding. When the species concerned is homo sapiens, the goals, values, criteria and methods of eugenics immediately become ethical questions which have been debated since Plato first proposed them in the 4th Century BC.