Comment on “Opinions, Personality, and Political Behavior”1

The type of comprehensive conceptual scheme presented by Professor Smith in the foregoing paper is, in the writer's opinion, the most useful framework currently available for studying the relationship between opinions and personality. The paper draws upon a major work by Smith and his colleagues, Opinions and Personality, which has not only been greeted as a “pattern-setter for a new phase of attitude research” but is already having an important impact on political behavior studies.That political scientists should find the pluralistic theory proposed by Smith congenial, cannot be explained merely by the fact that it is accompanied by an emphatic rejection of the type of simplistic theorizing about personality and opinion already in disfavor with most of them. Rather, its appeal is solidly intellectual, deriving from the fact that it stems from a general (and long awaited!) movement of convergence within the field of psychology.