The plans for this study were formulated between 1956 and 1958. For some time then, I had been interested in the processes of personal and social accommodation and in the factors that were responsible for resistance to change. While a graduate student at Columbia University at that time, I was also affiliated with a multidisciplinary research group at Cornell University Medical Colleges studying the reactions of people of various cultural and social backgrounds to situations of stress. The Hungarian refugees were one of the groups being studied. I thus decided to undertake a study of the...