From the late 1950s onwards, growing interest in development studies in economics and other social sciences was matched by studies of the social psychology of individual change in relation to development, having at least their initial orientation in the modernization school of thought.

Leonard W. Doob on ‘becoming more civilized’

A pioneer study in this field was that of the Yale psychologist L. W. Doob, whose previous work had included research on public opinion and propaganda. His ‘two principal questions’ were why some people in less civilized societies became more civilized in some respects, and what happened to them as they did so.

Among the earlier studies of societies undergoing change, many of them the work of anthropologists, on which he drew in framing his hypotheses, were those by Lerner in the Middle East; and Doob used the terms ‘less civilized’ and ‘(more) civilized’ more or less interchangeably with Lerner's ‘traditional’, ‘transitional’, and ‘modern’. Doob's own field studies were carried out in the 1950s in Jamaica and three African societies, Luo, Ganda, and Zulu, by means of interviews comparing the responses of the old with the young and the schooled with the illiterate.

Some of Doob's twenty-seven hypotheses were quite specific and could be confirmed or disproved. Thus ‘people changing centrally from old to new ways’ were found to have longer time-horizons. People changing in other respects were likely to retain traditional family attitudes. And people changing their ways were probably apt to join new groups and put more value on traits like initiative, independence, and self-confidence.