Although Homans came from a long line of lawyers and politicians,[4] during his undergraduate years, he pursued poetry and developed a grand ambition to become a writer and poet.

As an undergraduate, he assisted Samuel Eliot Morison in writing Massachusetts on the Sea, so much so that Morrison named Homans co-author.

[6] Although he served for the duration of the war, in his autobiography Coming to my Senses: The Education of Sociologist (1984), he later expressed his "impatience with the constraints of the naval hierarchy and his disdain for staff desk officers, especially those in bureaucratic branches such as the Supply Corps.

"George ... was attracted to de Voto's stories about the plains and the prairies, but more, to the actuality of the lives of people and the American character, as expressed in midwestern writing.

In many ways, "George adopted the mannerisms of de Voto, the outwardly boisterous tones (but not for either the boosterist mentality) and the scorn of intellectualist rhetoric".

[8] Lawrence Joseph Henderson, a biochemist and sociologist who believed that all sciences should be based on a unified set of theoretical and methodological principles, was an important influence on Homans' perspective.

Whom, Homans was assigned readings by prominent social anthropologists such as Bronisław Malinowski, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, and Raymond Firth.

"[9] Homans argued, contrary to Anthropology that "cultures were not unique and what was more, their similarities could only be explained on the assumption that human nature was the same over the world.

From 1934 to 1939 Homans was selected to become a part of the Society of Fellows a newly formed institution founded by A. Lawrence Lowell at Harvard, undertaking a variety of studies in various areas, including sociology, psychology, and history.

For his junior fellowship project, Homans undertook an anthropological study of rural England, later published as English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (1941), which he wrote instead of a Ph.D. that he never received.

[14] In 1939, Homans became a Harvard faculty member, a lifelong affiliation in which he taught both sociology and medieval history, "as well as studied poetry and small groups.

[17] Homans was very dedicated to his students, and did not give any different treatment to neither his pupils nor those he worked with, he did not turn anyone away due to their age, sex, rank, or social status.

[16] Homans was impressed by Henderson's notion of a conceptual scheme, which consists of a classification of variables (or concepts) that need to be taken into account when studying a set of phenomena.

[17] Homans was very interested in Henderson's conceptual scheme as a way of classifying phenomena and applied it to his own study of small groups.

"[1] Homans establishes that, "the general propositions would have to meet only one condition: in accordance with my original insight, they should apply to individual human beings as members of a species.

Although this wasn't Homans' greatest piece of work, it allowed him to become more familiar with this type of methodology and led him to explain elementary social behavior.

Hypotheses are formulated in terms of relationships among variables such as frequency of interaction, similarity of activities, intensity of sentiment, and conformity to norms.

Using notable sociological and anthropological field studies as the grounding for such general ideas, the book makes a persuasive case for treating groups as social systems that can be analyzed in terms of a verbal analogue of the mathematical method of studying equilibrium and stability of systems.

The heart of Homans' Exchange Theory lies in propositions based on economic and psychological principles.

According to Homans, they are psychological for two reasons: first, because they are usually tested on people who call themselves psychologists, and second, because of the level at which they deal with the individual in society.

Overall, Homans' exchange theory, "can be condensed to a view of the actor as a rational profit seeker.

[23] Homans, through his Exchange Theory, believed that individual beings and behavior are relevant to understanding society.

[22] Furthermore, he introduces some basic every day examples to help explain and give shape to his framework of the psychological propositions as sociological in nature, as well.

Homans uses the workplace example, using "Person" to refer to an individual who is an employee at an office but needs more support than the regular co-workers.