Cowdry, R. William, Kenneth Keniston, and Seymour Cabin.

The war and military

obligation: Private attitudes and public actions. Journal of Personality 38.4 (1970): 525549. Print.
In 1968, a study was conducted at Yale University to examine psychological elements of college
seniors attitudes of the Vietnam War. The results were published in the Journal of Personality in
1970 and the target audience was likely a group of people studying psychology or war attitudes.
The study was conducted by R. William Cowdry of Harvard Medical School, Kenneth Keniston
of Yale Medical School, and Seymour Cabin of San Mateo County Mental Heath Services. The
relationship between public action and private attitude was a prominent subject matter in this
study, because ones private attitude and the actions they perform can differ depending on several
factors. The hypothesis was that the elements that translate specific attitudes into actions depend
on many situational factors. The study comprised of 131 graduating seniors at Yale, most of
which lived a middle-upper-class lifestyle and had parents with college degrees. Each participant
was polled on their attitudes towards war, and later on their plans for future military service. One
of the tests involving public action required seniors to publicly declare in an ad in the Yale Daily
News, Many of us feel compelled to resist the draft openly. Those of us who do accept military
service will do so knowing that we are violating our consciences in order not to violate the laws
of our country. Many strongly anti-war participants chose not to sign this to avoid taking public
action and possible shame from society. Results from this study found that private attitudes
towards war did not always reflect the actions citizens are willing to take.
The writers discuss reasons for these contradictions, including the possibility that family
background might affect ones actions. If all the subjects had learned early in life that public
expression was successful, the data for this study might have been altered. Refusal to participate

in civil disobedience is also related to fear of the status of ones career.

Other quotes: Despite several decades of intensive research on attitudes and attitude change, the
factors that lead to the translation of privately expressed attitudes into actual behavior have been
minimally studied (Zimbardo & Ebbesen, 1969) (527).
Various perceptions of the situation in Vietnam appear to be related primarily to the subject's
attitude toward the war and not to the actions he takes or to his family background (536).
The antiwar subject more often sees himself as idealistic, passionate, eager for knowledge, and
nonconformist, and less often as conservative, determined, and realistic (537).
The variables associated with both war attitudes and taking action provide a partial, if
incomplete, explanation for why some individuals with private antiwar attitudes acted publicly
on them and others did not (540).
In brief, this is a study of the intuitively obvious but often scientifically neglected fact that even
strong convictions are not always expressed in action (547).
Analysis: This study looks for the exact data I am looking for in my inquiry question. It
addresses the attitudes of war on citizens, as well as how far they are willing to go in order to act
on what they believe in. As I thought, this study concluded that the war attitudes did not match
the actions of the participants of the study. The reasons for these include fear, laziness, and desire
to avoid social shame. This long article is very overwhelming to read, but its shorter than it
looks. A large chunk of this article is just statistics that are summarized briefly in the paragraphs
that follow.
I also like that this article mentions the work of psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, the leader
of the Stanford Prison Experiment.