Samuel Butler's Erewhon as Social Psychology

Abstract

Samuel Butler's (1872/1983) utopian novel, Erewhon, was used in a social psychology class to demonstrate the universality of social psychological insights and to provide a literary dimension to the course. Erewhon provides numerous examples of five social psychological principles: (a) the relation of physical attractiveness to interpersonal attraction and judgments, (b) the human drive for interpersonal agreement, (c) the drive for congruence in values and behavior, (d) the importance of values in understanding actions, and (e) attribution theory. Student evaluations indicate that Erewhon can be successfully used as a supplementary reading to increase the liberal arts value of a social psychology course.

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