7 - One True People: Putting a Face on the Theory

Summary

I have argued that individuals possess relatively stable predispositions to intolerance, that these predispositions are adequately reflected by the qualities they deem most desirable to encourage in children, and that those inclinations heavily influence their reactions to people, beliefs, and behaviors that differ from their own. In the preceding chapters, I have provided an array of evidence indicating that authoritarian predispositions importantly determine intolerant attitudes. But it remains to be seen to what extent these purportedly fundamental predispositions, conceived and measured in this simple fashion, will predict, as they should, and some considerable time subsequent to their measurement, attitudes expressed in natural conversation and actual behavior toward strangers and different others. This would certainly increase our confidence that we have isolated a fundamental and relatively stable predisposition to be intolerant of all manner of difference.

That is the logic of the investigations reported in this and the following chapter, which rely upon data generated via in-depth interviews (see Chapter 3 and Appendix A2) with forty of the very most and least authoritarian respondents to the originalDCS97 (Appendix A1), conducted in their own homes by randomly assigned interviewers of varying race. As explained in Chapter 3, the potential subjects for the in-person interviews were the 30 most and 30 least authoritarian individuals from among the 361 white respondents to the first wave of the DCS97.