8 - Individual Differences: The Influence of Personality

Summary

Certain inner psychological states … may help to determine whether an individual will be disposed to allow or suppress the exercise of freedom by people whose opinions, conduct, or social characteristics offend him or her.

McClosky and Brill, Dimensions of Tolerance

Throughout this book, we have distinguished among the roles of predispositions, standing decisions, and contemporary information in shaping tolerance judgments. We conducted three basic experiments in which we examined the impact of contemporary threat perceptions on tolerance judgments, and we replicated these findings in a subsequent study. We assumed that the cumulative impact of predispositions generally was encapsulated in standing decisions, as measured by respondents' pretest tolerance and their support for democratic norms.

Much of our purpose in Chapter 4 was to analyze threat perceptions as contemporary information that provides meaningful guidance for people when they make concurrent tolerance judgments. In Chapter 5, however, we also analyzed the influence of global threat perceptions that constitute predispositions, and of least-liked group threat perceptions that constitute standing decisions. We found that these antecedent considerations are strongly related to political tolerance. Global threat perceptions and least-liked group threat perceptions lead some people to be less tolerant, independent of contemporary information, and affect how people process contemporary information and arrive at current tolerance judgments.

As noted in Chapter 3, Gray's emotional mood theory suggested how threat perceptions may affect political tolerance. We will also rely on Gray's theory and the circumplex model to examine the role of more stable personality traits.