Social Conformity Versus Autonomy: Social Order, Threat and Political Intolerance

过去50年来，政治宽容的性质和决定因素一直是政治学理论和研究的主要焦点。通常，关于不宽容的实证研究考察了人们拒绝给予特定群体公民自由的意愿。在20世纪50年代和60年代，审视对共产主义者和其他左翼团体的态度是很常见的。到20世纪70年代，研究表明，只关注左翼团体（或任何其他特定团体）低估了许多人的不宽容程度。一种新的方法——最不喜欢的群体方法——被开发出来，用来评估对（相对）不变的群体的不容忍和不喜欢。这种方法在最近的许多研究中都得到了应用。无论所有人对同一群体还是对自己选择的不喜欢的群体做出反应，这种以群体为中心的方法都忽略了群体间不宽容的实质性正相关关系。尽管仍有相当大的群体特异性成分，但对一个群体不宽容的人也有一种强烈的倾向，即对许多其他群体不宽容。这种群体间不容忍的一致性很重要，因为它提供了另一种视角来看待这一现象及其决定因素。是什么导致了这些不宽容的个体差异？我在这项研究中认为，这个问题的答案是社会从众价值观和个人自主价值观之间的根本冲突。当人们处理如何维持社会秩序的问题时，这种价值冲突就产生了。一个稳定的社会秩序是从自主个体的自由互动中产生的，还是我们必须要求人们遵守一套共同的社会价值观和习俗？这种社会顺应-自治的维度在主要的跨国价值研究中是明显的，并且应该成为人们关于政治的信念和社会中政治辩论的性质的核心组成部分。除了对不宽容的稳定个体差异提供基于理论的分析外，这种方法还对感知威胁的性质和影响产生了新的见解。最近的研究表明，感知威胁是不宽容的主要预测因素之一，但感知威胁是什么并不完全清楚。它要么被广泛地衡量（通过一系列成对的形容词来描述群体），要么被操作化为威胁或好战。我认为，感知威胁的另一个方面是对社会和政治秩序稳定的威胁。此外，对于那些更看重社会一致性而非自主性的人来说，这种威胁的维度应该特别突出。因此，在社会从众-自治维度和对社会和政治秩序的感知威胁之间应该有很强的统计相互作用。这里提出的研究在四项实验性问卷研究中测试了这种新观点的预测，其中两项是针对大学生的，另两项是来自纽约大都会地区的非随机成年人样本。这两项学生研究的重点是社会从众-自治维度的测量，并展示了它对广泛的政治信仰和态度的影响。学生研究也为成人研究预测实验材料。这两项成人研究在更具代表性的样本中进一步验证了社会从众自主性的测量方法，并检验了关于威胁对不宽容影响的假设。第一项研究利用关于政治团体的新闻报道，将对政治秩序的威胁与暴力威胁进行了对比。第二项研究考察了对政治秩序的两种威胁的共同影响：直接来自政治团体的威胁和来自日益增加的社会和文化多样性的更普遍的威胁。这两项实验研究更深入地探讨了政治威胁的本质以及社会从众自主性在缓和威胁感知和影响中的作用。

The nature and determinants of political tolerance have been a major focus of theory and research in political science for the last 50 years. Typically, empirical research on intolerance has examined peoples' willingness to deny civil liberties to particular groups. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was common to examine attitudes towards communists and other left-wing groups. By the 1970s, research was demonstrating that an exclusive focus on left-wing groups (or any other specific groups) underestimated intolerance for many people. A new methodology - the least-liked group approach - was developed to assess intolerance with dislike toward the group held (relatively) constant. This approach is used in much recent research. Whether all people react to the same group or to a disliked group of their choosing, this group-centered approach ignores the substantial, positive correlations of intolerance across groups. Although there is still a considerable group-specific component, there also is a strong tendency for those who are intolerant of one group to be intolerant of many others. This inter-group consistency in intolerance is important because it provides another perspective on the phenomenon and its determinants. What accounts for these individual differences in intolerance? The answer to this question, I argue in this resarch, is a fundamental conflict between the values of social conformity and personal autonomy. This value conflict arises as people deal with the problem of how social order should be maintained. Does a stable social order emerge from the free interactions of autonomous individuals, or must we require people to conform to a common set of social values and conventions? This dimension of social conformity-autonomy is evident in major cross-national studies of values and should be a central component of peoples' beliefs about politics and the nature of political debate in society. In addition to providing a theoretically based analysis of stable individual differences in intolerance, this approach yields new insights about the nature and impact of perceived threat. Recent research shows that perceived threat is one of the major predictors of intolerance but it is not entirely clear what perceived threat is. It is either measured very broadly (by a series of paired adjectives describing the group) or operationalized as threat or belligerence. I argue that another aspect of perceived threat is threat to the stability of the social and political order. Moreover, this dimension of threat should be particularly salient to those who value social conformity more than autonomy. There, thus, should be a strong statistical interaction between the social conformity-autonomy dimension and perceived threats to the social and political order. The research proposed here tests the predictions of this new perspective in four experimental questionnaire studies, two with college students and two with non-random samples of adults from the New York metropolitan area. The two student studies concentrate on the measurement of the social conformity-autonomy dimension and demonstrations of its effects on a wide range of political beliefs and attitudes. The student studies also pretest experimental materials for the adult studies. The two adult studies further validate measures of social conformity-autonomy in more representative samples and test hypotheses about the effects of threat on intolerance. Using constructed news stories about political groups, the first study contrasts threats to the political order with threats of violence. The second study examines the joint effects of two types of threat to the political order: threats directly from a political group and more general threats from increasing social and cultural diversity. The two experimental studies provide a closer look at the nature of political threat and the role of social conformity-autonomy in moderating the perception and effects of threat.