Most of us are intensely curious about why people do the things they do. Some actions can be understood without much difficulty, but there are so many paradoxes. Why do fathers and sons so rarely understand each other? Why do great men cheat, lie. and compete for petty advantage? Why is it that the some person can be gentle and helpful at one time, cruel and destructive of another? The social sciences represent on attempt to solve the puzzles inherent in the situation of man in society. A Citizen's Guide to the Social Sciences presents some of the basic ideas of the social sciences and the sources of these ideas. It offers a provocative over-view of the work of sociologists, ethologists, sociobiologists, socialpsychologists, anthropologists, and political scientists. In the opening section, Bernard Mausner demonstrates the functions of the various social sciences by presenting their different approaches to the analysis of Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, a play replete with the universal themes of human experience that form the raw material of the social sciences-questions of beliefs, interaction, morality, and behavior. Readers are led, in turn, through humanistic, psychoanalytic, psychological, and anthropological analyses of the play as a means of identifying the similarities of purpose and the differences in method of each branch of the social sciences. From questions of behavior and individual motivation to the study of society, cultures, communities, and groups, the author introduces ideas and theories that explain and define the content of each science.