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

政治宽容的性质和决定因素是近50年来政治学理论和研究的主要焦点。 典型的情况是，关于不容忍的实证研究审查了人们拒绝给予特定群体公民自由的意愿。 在1950年代和1960年代，审查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）低估了许多人的不容忍。 一种新的方法-最不喜欢的群体的方法-被开发来评估不容忍与不喜欢对集团举行（相对）恒定。 这种方法在最近的许多研究中使用。 无论所有人都对同一个群体或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忽略了群体之间不容忍的实质性正相关性。 虽然仍然有相当多的群体特有成分，但也有一种强烈的趋势，即那些不容忍一个群体的人也不容忍许多其他群体。群体间在不容忍方面的这种一致性很重要，因为它提供了对这一现象及其决定因素的另一种看法。 是什么原因导致了这些个体间的不容忍差异？ 我在本研究中认为，这个问题的答案是社会一致性和个人自主性价值观之间的根本冲突。 这种价值冲突是在人们处理如何维持社会秩序的问题时产生的。 一个稳定的社会秩序是来自自主的个人的自由互动，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-自治的这一维度在重大的跨国价值观研究中显而易见，并且应该成为人们对政治和社会政治辩论性质的信仰的核心组成部分。除了提供一个基于理论的分析稳定的个体差异的不容忍，这种方法产生了新的见解的性质和影响的感知威胁。 最近的研究表明，感知威胁是不容忍的主要预测因素之一，但并不完全清楚什么是感知威胁。 它要么被非常广泛地衡量（通过一系列描述该群体的成对形容词），要么被操作为威胁或好战。 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，这种威胁的维度对于那些更看重社会一致性而不是自主性的人来说应该特别突出。 因此，在社会一致性-自主性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。本文提出的研究在四个实验性问卷调查中测试了这种新观点的预测，其中两个是大学生，两个是来自纽约大都市区的非随机成年人样本。 这两个学生的研究集中在测量的社会整合自主性的尺寸和示威的影响，广泛的政治信仰和态度。 学生研究也预先测试实验材料的成人研究。 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措施，并测试了有关威胁对不容忍影响的假设。 第一项研究使用关于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。 第二项研究审查了两类对政治秩序的威胁的联合影响：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。 这两个实验研究提供了一个更密切的关注的性质，政治威胁和社会整合的作用，在缓和的感知和威胁的影响。

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.