Newcomb's Bennington College Study

Beginning in 1935 the social psychologist Theodore Newcomb undertook a multi-year study of attitude change among students at Bennington College, then a small and newly founded women's college with a socially liberal faculty, tracking the same incoming class of students' political and social attitudes from their first year through graduation and publishing the results in his 1943 book Personality and Social Change. Measuring students' views on a range of contemporary political and economic issues at multiple points across their college years, Newcomb found that most students' attitudes shifted markedly from the relatively conservative views typical of their family backgrounds toward the more liberal views associated with the college's own social climate, particularly among students who became more actively involved in campus community life. Newcomb concluded that the college had become each student's new reference group, whose prevailing norms and values gradually displaced those of the family and community she had come from. Methodologically, the study was also notable as one of the first to follow the same group of individuals repeatedly over time rather than comparing separate groups at a single point, and it remains a foundational study in the psychology of attitude formation, reference groups and group norms.