Religion: Opiate or Inspiration of Civil Rights Militancy Among Negroes?

23 By treating alienation as a set of intervening variables, Seeman has advocated reducing the polemic element in alienation by empirically determining if the structural conditions of mass society have the presumed alienative effects and if the kinds and degrees of alienation have the behavioral consequences often specified. See Melvin Seeman, Social Learning Theory and the Theory of Mass Society, paper presented to the American Sociological Association, annual meeting, Los Angeles, September, 1963. On the psychological side, Rotter and his students have taken a similar approach. For a summary of the findings of these studies, see Julian B. Rotter, Generalized Expectancies for Internal Versus External Control of Reinforcement, Psychological Monographs (in press).