Marcuse (1951): a college class's judgment of the two calm answers

Levi & Goldberg, transcribed 2026-10-14 from the page image of

• Marcuse, F. L. 1951. "A Note on 'Anti-Minority Remarks: A Problem for Action Research.'" Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 46: 603. Received 18 July 1950. U of T interlibrary loan copy.

What the note reports

Marcuse showed a class of 160 elementary psychology students at Cornell University two of the plays printed in the appendix of Citron, Chein and Harding (1950): the American-tradition answer and the individual-differences answer. Members of the University Dramatic Club acted both "in a restrained manner", which corresponds to the calm (low-manner) answers. At the end of the presentation, before class discussion, students were asked which argument was "most effective". Of the 90 per cent who gave an opinion, all chose individual differences. Marcuse reads the result as not in agreement with Citron et al. but not necessarily contradictory, given the different samples, and suggests that different arguments may suit different groups.

File

marcuse1951.csv, one row per fact: id, page, item, value, unit, quote (short extract), notes. The count of students with an opinion (144) is derived from the printed 90 per cent of 160 and is marked as derived.

Cautions

• The note does not report the order in which the two plays were shown. One class presumably saw one order, and in the authors' own preference series most audiences chose the second answer (72 to 78 per cent of choices, Selltiz et al. 1950).
• Students judged which argument was most effective. No attitudes were measured, so the note speaks to preference, not to attitude change.
• Jewish students were not separated out, unlike in the 1946 analyses.

python3 scripts/verify_selltiz.py checks the two numbers that can be checked (90 per cent of 160 is a whole number, and the derived count matches).