Abstract
This book is about the processes involved in opinion change in large groups. Since each large group consists of many individuals, often with just as many opinions, it is impossible to describe these processes on an individual basis. Therefore, the author followed another route and focused on the collective aspects of these opinion change processes. The starting-point for this approach is the well-known phenomenon that, despite the enormous variety of opinions that may exist in a large group, the combination of all individual opinion changes frequently shows some clear collective trends. These underlying collective opinion shifts are the major focus of this book. (A)