SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH IN THE SOVIET BLOC.

The article presents information on the social science research in the soviet bloc. Social science research is developing in the communist countries in Europe, and reports of these developments have attracted great interest among social scientists elsewhere. Here is a review of these developments that was presented at the annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research at Lake George in May 1963. In the Soviet Union there has been no such blossoming of the empirical spirit, but there has been a great expansion of highly practical research in various social sciences, including psychology and sociology, and there have been two developments that are of special interest, a very recent development of public opinion polling, and the cybernetic movement. The other interesting development in Russia is cybernetics-the mathematical description of control processes. Russians have taken to cybernetics like ducks to water. They are fascinated by the analogies between the control systems of automatic machines, the control systems of the central nervous system, and the control systems of a human society such as the Soviet Union itself.