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

社会整合与自治：社会秩序、威胁和政治不容忍

• 批准号: 9818635
• 负责人: Stanley Feldman
• 金额: $ 9万
• 依托单位: SUNY at Stony Brook
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1999
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1999-04-15 至 2001-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9818635&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Social; Conformity; Versus; Autonomy; Order

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.

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特定群体公民自由的意愿。 在 20 世纪 50 年代和 1960 年代，人们普遍审视人们对共产主义者和其他左翼团体的态度。 到 20 世纪 70 年代，研究表明，仅仅关注左翼群体（或任何其他特定群体）低估了许多人的不宽容程度。 开发了一种新的方法——最不受欢迎的群体方法——来评估对（相对）恒定的群体的不容忍和厌恶。 最近的许多研究都使用了这种方法。 无论所有人对同一群体还是对他们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不同群体之间不宽容的实质性正相关性。 尽管仍然存在相当大的特定群体成分，但那些不容忍某一群体的人也有一种强烈的倾向，即不容忍许多其他群体。这种不宽容的群体间一致性很重要，因为它提供了看待这一现象及其决定因素的另一种视角。 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整合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，这种价值冲突就出现了。 稳定的社会秩序是由自主个体的自由互动产生的，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？ 社会整合-自治的这一维度在主要的跨国价值观研究中很明显，并且应该成为人们关于政治和社会政治辩论本质的信念的核心组成部分。除了对不容忍的稳定个体差异提供基于理论的分析之外，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，但尚不完全清楚感知威胁是什么。 它要么被广泛地衡量（通过一系列描述该群体的成对形容词），要么被具体化为威胁或好战。 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，对于那些重视社会一致性而非自主性的人来说，这种威胁应该特别突出。 因此，社会整合-自治维度与对社会和政治秩序的感知威胁之间应该存在强有力的统计相互作用。这里提出的研究在四项实验问卷研究中测试了这一新观点的预测，其中两项研究针对大学生，两项研究针对来自纽约大都市区的成年人的非随机样本。 这两项学生研究的重点是社会整合-自主维度的测量，并论证其对广泛的政治信仰和态度的影响。 学生研究还预先测试成人研究的实验材料。 这两项成人研究进一步验证了更具代表性的样本中的社会整合-自主性测量，并检验了有关威胁对不宽容的影响的假设。 第一项研究利用有关政治团体的虚构新闻故事，将对政治秩序的威胁与暴力威胁进行对比。 第二项研究探讨了政治秩序面临的两种威胁的联合影响：直接来自政治团体的威胁以及来自日益增长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研究了政治威胁的本质以及社会整合-自治在调节威胁感知和影响方面的作用。