Page 352 - The Social Animal

334 The Social Animal

insecure and highly dependent on their parents; they fear their par-
ents and feel unconscious hostility toward them. This combination
sets the stage for the emergence of an adult with a high degree of
anger, which, because of fear and insecurity, takes the form of dis-
placed aggression against powerless groups, while the individual
maintains outward respect for authority.
In a study of authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union, Sam
69
McFarland and his colleagues found that people high on the F
scale tended to be in favor of overthrowing their newly acquired
democracy and restoring the former Communist regime. Ideologi-
cally, this is quite different from American authoritarians, who tend
to be anti-Communist. The common link, of course, is not a spe-
cific ideological belief but rather a kind of conventionalism and re-
spect for authority. Both American and Russian authoritarians are
linked by their need to conform to the traditional values of their cul-
ture and by a tendency to be suspicious of new ideas and of people
who are different from themselves. More recent research has both
confirmed and extended this research, suggesting that people who
tend to measure high in authoritarianism tend to believe that it is
natural for some people to dominate others, 70 that equality of the
races is neither natural nor desirable, 71 and that political conser-
vatism is superior to liberalism. 72
Although research on the authoritarian personality has added to
our understanding of the possible dynamics of prejudice, one prob-
lem with it is that the bulk of the data are correlational. That is, we
know only that two variables are related; we cannot be certain what
causes what. Consider the correlation between a person’s score on the
F scale and the specific socialization practices he or she was subjected
to as a child. Although it is true that adults who are authoritarian and
highly prejudiced had parents who tended to be harsh and to use
conditional love as a socialization technique, it is not necessarily true
that this is what caused them to develop into prejudiced people. The
parents themselves were highly prejudiced against minority groups;
perhaps their children acquire their prejudices through the process of
identification, as described in Chapter 2. That is, a child might con-
sciously pick up beliefs about minorities from his or her parents be-
cause the child identifies with them.This is quite different from, and
much simpler than, the explanation offered by Adorno and his col-
leagues, which is based on the child’s unconscious hostility to and re-