Those concerned with the problem of race hatred have been turning increasingly to the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis for light. It has become recognized that along with political, social, and economic factors, we need to know the psychological patterns and inner motivations of the prejudiced human being. This month this department reports on a number of scientific studies aimed at discovering the inner roots of hatred, and at testing the hypothesis, now held quite widely, that prejudice is only one expression of a certain type of personality.

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In digging down to the roots of prejudice, social scientists have long been dissatisfied with the conception of the individual as a bundle of separate likes and dislikes. It is fairly common knowledge that if a person is anti-Jewish or anti-Negro, he is usually both. Indeed, experience indicates, such people hate “other races” in general, and are often political reactionaries to boot.

Common sense has often been wrong. But Gardner Murphy and Rensis Likert in their extensive study of the relationships between the different attitudes held by college students, Public Opinion and the Individual (Harper 1938) proved fairly decisively what had been suspected: anti-Jewish, anti-Negro, and other anti-minority prejudices generally ran together and both were found predominantly in persons who were conservative or reactionary on domestic and international issues. Tolerance, conversely, went together with liberal and radical attitudes, and with dissatisfaction with the status quo in American culture generally.

More crucial for the study of prejudice than its simple presence and absence, many social scientists consequently felt, was the way it was bound up with a total personality. What did it imply about the individual’s other attitudes, his general outlook and behavior? What apparent role or purpose did prejudice play in his life? The focus of the study of prejudice shifted from its horizontal distribution in the community to its vertical depth in the individual. The results to date, while only preliminary, and, like so much other social psychological research, limited primarily to college students, have been highly suggestive.

This article reports on four recent studies in this field. What we shall have at the end of our survey is a number of portraits of the bigot. We will then try to see where they coincide, and where they conflict.

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The study described in “The Anti-Semitic Personality” by Else Frenkel-Brunswik and R. Nevitt Sanford (in Anti-Semitism, A Social Disease, edited by Ernst Simmel, New York, International Universities Press, 1946), is only a preliminary report in a very extensive research project, indeed the largest psychological study of prejudice ever undertaken, the University of California Public Opinion Study, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. While the project has advanced far beyond the stage described in the Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford article, this article remains the most significant published contribution on the prejudiced person.

The study began with the filling out of a questionnaire covering both attitudes toward the Jews and other minorities and towards general social and political questions. Two hundred and sixteen college women and a smaller number of male students at the University of California received the questionnaire.

The first results were in line with the conclusions of other tests: anti-Semitism, in this group, was part of a more general attitude or reaction—”ethnocentrism.” Ethnocentric individuals indiscriminately include in their antagonism Negroes, foreigners, etc. Furthermore, they tend to have a conservative social and political outlook. Automatically they prefer to support the status quo. (But in some cases the authors also detect a “pseudo-conservatism” that does not hesitate to use force and violence.)

Twenty subjects—eight drawn from the group revealed as most anti-Semitic, eight from the least anti-Semitic, and four from the average group—were then selected for detailed study by means of personal interviews and projective tests—the Rorschach test and the Murray Thematic Apperception test. (By his reaction to the inkblots or pictures presented in these tests, the subject unwittingly reveals his characteristic ways of approaching life and his unconscious motivations.)

The outstanding characteristic of the bigoted girls, as it emerges in this study, is the sharp cleavage between the conscious and unconscious layers of their personalities—between what they think they are and what they really are. On the surface they are poised, polite, self-confident, optimistic, conventionally moral, untroubled by guilt or anxiety, kindhearted, devoted to their parents and friends, and apparently making a “good social adjustment.” But deeper probing reveals that underneath this conventional exterior lurk powerful destructive and sadistic impulses (often directed at parents), unsatisfied sexual desires, and intense anxiety about social status.

The villain in this psychological drama is, according to the authors, a tyrannical and childish conscience. Largely unconscious, this conscience retains intact all the taboos of childhood and fails to make a mature adjustment to adult reality. (In Freudian language, the conscience is the “super-ego,” the internalized image of the parents in their disciplinary role.) Having been made to feel guilty about their normal aggressive and sexual impulses, the prejudiced girls repress them, becoming unaware of both impulses and guilt. In essence, they take over their parents’ puritanical social attitudes. Because of their upbringing, these same girls also have an intense desire to raise their social status, and while they are actually economically secure as members of the middle-or upper-middle class—they are wealthier than the non-anti-Semitic girls—their intense anxiety about rising in the social scale leads to the fear that they may fall.

The puritanical conscience and the drive for status make them conventionally “proper,” stereotyped, lacking in individuality. They have little interest in personal achievement. They believe in an “externalized causation”—that is, they think of things as happening to them rather than as caused by them. They tend to accept superstitions, such as astrology, and they “conceive of fate not only as threatening, but as providing care, protection, and support in critical situations.” Their tendency is to “project” their own unconscious repressed impulses on to objects in the environment, including supernatural forces, and to see these as causes. (What more likely objects than Jews, Negroes, foreigners?)

Their repressed hostility toward their parents finds partial expression in exaggerated suspicion and distrust, particularly towards older, parent-like individuals, and so we find them reluctant to talk about themselves. They express admiration for power and scorn for the underdog, advocate harsh punishments, and view human relationships in terms of dominance and submission.

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Since ethnocentrism is part of the conservative social outlook of the typical middle-class parent, it would seem that the bigoted girls, in the process of taking over their parents’ outlook, would also adopt prejudiced attitudes toward minority out-groups. This is a simple explanation and is probably correct. But it fails to account for the function of prejudice in the personalities of the bigots. It is in this regard that Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford make a significant contribution. They stress repressed hostility, repressed sexual wishes, and status anxiety as the mechanisms and dynamics of prejudice. “Basic impulses which are conceived as low, destructive, and dangerous, have to be kept repressed and can find only devious expressions, as for instance, in projections and ‘moral indignation.’ Thus, anti-Semitism, and intolerance against out-groups generally may have an important function in keeping the personality integrated. Without these channels or outlets . . . it may be much more difficult, in some cases impossible, to keep the mental balance. Hence, the rigid and compulsive adherence to prejudices.”

This seems to be in harmony with the widely-accepted “frustration-aggression” theory of prejudice: the child in our society, this theory asserts, is frustrated by his parents and by other persons towards whom he cannot express conscious hostility; consequently, to maintain his psychic equilibrium, he “displaces” his hostility on to culturally sanctioned scapegoats. (It should be added that adult frustrations as well as those of childhood engender aggression.) At the same time the repressed individual projects his own socially disapproved hostile impulses upon the scapegoat groups. He is convinced that it is they who hate him and his group.

Repressed sexuality and status-anxiety support prejudice in the following way: “The fear of losing status . . . seems to be connected . . . with the possibility that with respectability gone they [the anti-Semitic girls] will be tempted to release their inhibited tendencies in the way they believe Jews and proletarians do.” The authors here may be indulging in the Freudian practice of putting the psychological cart before the sociological horse. It seems more likely that the fear of losing status is primary, and that this in turn leads to the fear of releasing inhibited tendencies because that would identify them with lower-caste groups and cause them to lose status. It is possible that prejudice also serves to exclude minority-group competitors from the contest for social prestige.

The root cause of race prejudice in these girls, to sum up, appears to be their middle-class parents’ anxiety about status, anxiety which is aggravated in times of social confusion and unrest. There arise “feelings of insecurity in both parents . . . and these in turn give rise to unreasoning concern and overaction in the mother and to desperate aggressiveness in the father. . . The mischief is done when those trends which are taboo according to the class standards become repressed, and hence, no longer susceptible to modification or control. This is most likely to happen when parents are too concerned and too insistent with respect to their positive aims for the child and too threatening and coercive with respect to the ‘bad’ things.”

It will help point up this portrait to describe the unprejudiced group. In comparison with the bigots, the unprejudiced girls are relatively unafraid of facing reality both in themselves and in their environment—they acknowledge their own impulses and do not lean on fate. They have more insight into their own motivations, are willing to discuss their shortcomings, and do not hesitate to criticize their parents. Not as well-groomed as the prejudiced girls and less at ease socially, they do not seem to be making as good an adjustment to society at large. Non-conformist in personal behavior and ideology, they have broken with the conservative beliefs of their parents. Instead of a childish super-ego, they apparently have a mature moral outlook that does not require the complete repression of sexuality and hostility. Accordingly, they have no need for displacement, projection, and reaction-formation.

Perhaps this is a bit too rosy a picture. Almost all individuals, in our society at any rate, face problems in dealing with their destructive and sexual impulses. The equalitarian girls do have guilt-feelings, which, being conscious, are much in evidence. Perhaps they have merely used a different psychological defense-mechanism: “introjection.” Turning their aggression inward upon themselves, they blame themselves for the sins of the world. Their life-histories, we notice, are less happy than those of the bigots (or perhaps they have not repressed the unhappy memories) and their suffering has made them introspective. They identify with the downtrodden instead of with the powerful.

The girls with intermediate scores on anti-Semitism shared the conventional morality and the strong drive for status of the bigots but exhibited less repressed hostility and were more introspective.

The authors caution us not to generalize about prejudiced types that may be found in other cultures from the bigoted type they describe. The Nazi leaders, for example, and our own home-grown fascists certainly don’t seem conventional or inhibited, although, like the puritanical anti-Semites, they do have aggressive and authoritarian tendencies.

Nevertheless, the biography of Homer Loomis Jr. of the Columbians, in the January 12 PM, shows to what an extent this personality type can be duplicated in a real American fascist. It is also probable that this pattern of character traits is not limited to the upper-middle class, since the causal factors—for example, the striving for status advancement—exist in all strata of the population, even among factory workers.

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In the study described in “Some Roots of Prejudice” (July 1946 Journal of Psychology) , Gordon W. Allport and Bernard M. Kramer tested 437 college undergraduates from Dartmouth, Harvard, and Radcliffe with a paper-and-pencil test and a smaller number of these with a “racial awareness” test (the subject guesses whether persons in photographs are Jews or non-Jews). Some of the items in their test were taken from the questionnaire used by Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford, and other items were inserted to test hypotheses on the relations between prejudice and personality raised in that and other studies.

The “racial awareness” tests showed that prejudiced persons not only judged more of the faces to be Jewish but were more accurate in actually picking out faces of Jews. Their prejudice, the authors suggest, may have sensitized them to “Jewishness.”

Quite interesting are the relations between prejudice and early experience revealed in the questionnaire. The more prejudiced a respondent, the greater the number of unpleasant experiences with members of minority groups he is able to recall. The authors consider it quite unlikely that there should be such a precise relationship between prejudice and the actual number of unpleasant experiences. They suggest as more likely the hypothesis that those who are prejudiced more easily recall or invent unpleasant experiences to justify their attitudes.

Another question asked how much and what kind of contact students had had with members of minority groups. The results show that mere contact has no clear-cut impact upon prejudice, but intimate association with members of minority groups of the same status as one’s self—neighbors, friends, students—is positively correlated with tolerance. One wonders, though, just how seriously the unverified reports of contacts are to be taken. Might not the unprejudiced tend to forget unpleasant equal-status contacts, just as the prejudiced forget pleasant contacts?

Those who report that they have taken over their parents’ attitudes toward minorities are generally prejudiced, while those who say they have reacted against their parents’ attitudes on minorities tend to be unprejudiced. (This is in agreement with the Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford results; there, the prejudiced reported less ideological friction with their parents than the unprejudiced.) But those who report that their parents have had no influence on them at all—that is, those who say they have neither taken over nor reacted against their parents’ attitudes—are the most prejudiced ! This result was completely unexpected, yet it fits in beautifully with the hypothesis that the prejudiced lack any sort of psychological insight into themselves. For obviously we are all influenced by our parents; to deny it is to be unaware of it.

The same lack of insight becomes clear in the questions dealing with school influences. Those who say that school has had no influence on them at all tend to be most prejudiced.

A further finding illustrating lack of insight; when asked whether they think they are more or less prejudiced than the average, the prejudiced misrate themselves far more often than do the less prejudiced.

Those who report having been considerably influenced by religion are more prejudiced than those who assert religion has influenced them only slightly or not at all.

One part of the test was designed to test the “frustration-aggression” theory of prejudice referred to before. The authors asked the respondents to indicate to what extent they felt they themselves had been discriminated against because they were members of minority groups, and discovered a slight tendency for those who felt themselves more victimized to be more prejudiced. Jews who felt they had been victims of discrimination were not only more prejudiced toward other groups but also checked more anti-Semitic items. This is in line with the “frustration-aggression” theory. But at the same time many Jews who felt themselves victimized also tended to show strong sympathy for Negroes. In other words, the Jews that felt themselves victimized concentrate around the extremes of prejudice and tolerance.

But the fact that Jews in general, in this and other tests, have less ethnic prejudice than any other religious group shows that identification with the oppressed, rather than prejudice against other groups, is the predominant Jewish reaction to discrimination. Since most Americans are members of minority groups, the effect of such membership upon ethnic prejudice is an extremely important problem for research. It has not yet received the attention it deserves.

The most interesting results are those that illuminate the respondents’ general attitude toward people and the world. The prejudiced believe that “the world is a hazardous place in which men are basically evil and dangerous” they believe that “there is not enough discipline in the American way of life” they are not prone to sympathize with underdogs. They are more afraid of swindlers than of gangsters (which is completely in line with the suspicious attitude toward people and the fear of “prying” reported by Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford).

One of the items reads: “Often when I meet a Negro I am slightly ashamed of the fact that I think of him as a Negro. Yes—, No—.” It is the less prejudiced who are more ashamed. “We are reminded of Myrdal’s characterization of the American Dilemma. Each American is susceptible to sharp conflict when his prejudices clash with his American Creed. Those who are conscious of the conflict and who suffer guilt feelings from it are closer to freedom from prejudice than are those who repress their shame and suffer no conscious discomfort. Shame is thus one step toward emancipation from bigotry.”

Besides Myrdal (An American Dilemma), Lynd, Dollard, Powdermaker, and a host of other social scientists have described the sharp conflict in American culture between equalitarian and discriminatory mores. The democratic emphasis on equality and the Judeo-Christian emphasis on brotherhood clash with the deprivations our society imposes upon subordinate classes and minority ethnic groups. The conflict between love and aggression, between cooperation and competition, between equality and status hierarchy are found in American economic and political life, in the home, the church, the school, and the community—and in the personality structures of most Americans.

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Eugene Hartley, in his Problems in Prejudice (New York, King’s Crown Presss, 1946), reports on a number of experiments.

The most interesting for our purposes is that in which he asked thirty-four male City College students—for the most part Jewish—who had previously been tested for prejudice to prepare a description of their “personality” in accordance with an outline. The papers of the five most prejudiced and of the five least prejudiced students were then turned over to Ruth E. Hartley, a clinical psychologist, for analysis.

Without knowing who were in the prejudiced group, and who in the unprejudiced, she divided the papers into two groups according to various criteria. While she was successful in placing eight of the ten papers correctly with reference to general tolerance (and the two misplaced were very short and had not followed the outline), it turned out that when divided according to certain other character traits, the prejudiced and the unprejudiced papers were not differentiated. The traits which seemed unrelated to prejudice were inferiority feelings, feelings of having been cheated, repressed aggression, super-ego conflict, projectivity, and integration of ego ideal. Most of these factors, one would think, should be correlated with prejudice if the Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford results are correct. Of course, only eight acceptable papers were under study here.

Ruth Hartley then drew up composite personality portraits for the two groups of papers. The unprejudiced tend to be imaginative, introspective, and theoretical, while the prejudiced have a practical, “tangible mechanical outlook.” The relatively tolerant group shows the following characteristics: “A strong desire for personal autonomy associated with a lack of need for dominance, a strong need for friendliness, along with a personal seclusiveness, fear of competition, a tendency to placate others along with lack of general conformity to the mores. [They are] likely to be fairly serious, to be interested in current events, to have ideas about bettering society, to be a member of a political group, and to have great need for personal achievement in the vocational area.” They dislike violence, appreciate the contributions of others, and adopt “a nurturant rather than a dominant attitude toward those younger than [themselves]. [They are] conscious of conflicts concerning loyalties and duties, and think very seriously about moral questions.”

The relatively intolerant show: “Unwillingness to accept responsibility, acceptance of conventional mores, a rejection of political interests and desire for groups formed for purely social purposes, absorption with pleasure activities, a conscious conflict between play and work, emotionality rather than rationality, extreme egocentrism, interest in physical activity, the body, health.” They dislike “agitators, radicals, pessimists. [They are] relatively uncreative, apparently unable to deal with anxieties except by fleeing from them. Often [their] physical activity has in it a compulsive component; it may be that this compulsion to be on the move . . . serves for [them] the same function that study and activities with social significance serve in the case of the individual with high tolerance.”

Hartley makes what may be a very important distinction between the magnitude of a prejudice and its “salience,” that is, its prominence or key position in relation to the other attitudes of an individual. He argues that a weak prejudice which is at the center of the individual’s attention can be more dangerous than a strong prejudice which is secondary to the individual’s dominant interests. Further research will be necessary before it can be determined whether a prejudice can be “salient” and at the same time “weak.” Judging salience by tendency of students spontaneously to make ethnic classifications in describing a series of photographs of people, Hartley found slightly less ethnic salience among the relatively intolerant than among the relatively tolerant. This would seem to be contrary to Allport and Kramer’s findings on their similar test of “racial awareness.”

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Ross Stagner, in his “Studies of Aggressive Social Attitudes” in the August 1944 Journal of Social Psychology, presents conclusions that conflict at important points with the other studies.

An attitude questionnaire administered to III college students showed that the intolerant tend to be nationalistic and “fascist” (“Fascism” seems to mean politico-economic conservatism), to accept the institution of war, and to approve of violence and capital punishment. Statistical analysis—which isolates general “factors” out of a large number of specific attitudes—revealed that there were two factors underlying all of these attitudes—”conservatism,” which influences the “fascist,” nationalist, and intolerant attitudes, and “a pure aggressive factor” (not further defined), which influences attitudes in regard to war, capital punishment, and violence.

The questionnaire also included items relating to satisfaction with childhood and affection for parents. The responses indicated that those who liked both parents tended to be slightly more intolerant, “fascist,” and nationalistic, but at the same time slightly more opposed to capital punishment and war, than those who disliked both parents. When a revised form of the questionnaire was given to 157 Dartmouth men, no difference in prejudice was found between those liking both parents and those disliking both. However, students who liked their fathers but not their mothers tended to be more intolerant than those who liked their mothers but not their fathers. Twenty-seven members of the Young People’s Socialist League, staunch advocates of racial equality, had much more antagonism toward both parents and were much less satisfied with their childhood.

While his correlations are low, Stagner believes that the consistency and statistical significance of his results justify emphasis upon the attitude toward parents as a determinant of intolerance. His interpretation is that a happy childhood, involving affectionate relations with parents, leads to socio-economic conservatism, of which race prejudice is a manifestation. No explanation is given of the function of intolerance in the conservative’s personality structure. Moreover, no mention is made of the problem of whether affection for parents always engenders conservatism or does so only in the case of college students whose parents happen to be conservatives (as appears to be the case with the overwhelming majority of the Dartmouth students). On the other hand, an unhappy childhood and dislike for the parents, or at least for the father, Stagner asserts, engenders an equalitarian, liberal, or radical outlook coupled with more “aggressiveness” in regard to war and capital punishment. Symbolically associating their parents with the status quo, the equalitarians reject both.

Stagner’s findings, on the surface, are in complete opposition to the frustration-aggression theory of prejudice. For here it is the smug and satisfied who are prejudiced, while it is the frustrated and hostile who are tolerant. But this can be reconciled with the frustration-aggression theory if we assume that the bigot’s expressed affection for his parents is in reality but a disguise for repressed hostility. Yet Stagner explicitly rejects this possibility on two grounds. First, prejudice, he states, is primarily a function of conservatism rather than of “aggression.” Second, while an attitude-test score favorable to the father “does not disprove the existence of repressed aggression against the father. . . . it is somewhat less likely that a boy expressing conscious attitudes of hostility has a repressed affection for the father.” Thus, he considers men high on a parent-antagonism scale are on the average more basically hostile to their parents than those making low scores.

In rebuttal, it may be said that “repressed affection” is beside the point. If we assume that virtually all children (in our society at any rate) have some hostility toward their parents, then it is reasonable to expect that children with the most hostility will repress it, while children with the least hostility will be sufficiently secure to acknowledge their hostility consciously. The only question, then, is whether Stagner’s scale is capable of revealing unconscious antagonism. The argument could be settled scientifically by giving Stagner’s attitude questionnaire and Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford’s interviews and projective tests to the same group of subjects.

It may be, of course, that we deal with two kinds of prejudice. Some persons in the upper-middle class may take over prejudice from their parents, without it meaning more to them than an appropriate social attitude, while to others it is an essential part of the psychic mechanism, serving as a release for repressed impulses.

One should point out that the frustration-aggression theory cannot be conclusively tested until the distressingly vague concept, “aggression,” is defined. At the present time it is used variously to mean desire to inflict pain, self-assertion, tendency to lead other people, energy in competitive activity, unjustified attack on others, and a host of other things.

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Assuming that the personality and prejudice categories used by each of the investigators can be translated from one study to another—a somewhat risky assumption, as we can see from the case of aggression—what areas of agreement do we find?

The most striking fact is that Allport and Kramer, who conducted their investigation upon a large and heterogeneous sample, nevertheless emerged with results that were almost identical with those arrived at by Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford in their smaller but more intensive study. Similarly, the two intensive clinical studies, Hartley’s of a predominantly lower and lower-middle class immigrant male Jewish group and Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford’s of a predominantly middle-class “old American” female Gentile group, produced many similar conclusions which cut across these sex and cultural differences. Both studies revealed the prejudiced individual as relatively conservative, conformist, stereotyped, and unproductive, and the unprejudiced person as relatively liberal, or radical, individualistic, nonconformist, and intellectually creative. Both showed the bigot as immature, escapist, optimistic, and lacking in insight, while the equalitarian dealt objectively with his frustrations and anxieties and worked out his moral conflicts on the conscious level. In both cases, the intolerant were preoccupied with social life, egocentric, and unable to identify with the oppressed, while the tolerant were introspective, manifested great interest in social problems, and had a strong drive for socially-constructive achievement.

However, much of this is personality description. On the level of personality dynamics how did they get that way and why—there is less said and more disagreement. Murphy and Likert (in Public Opinion and The Individual), and Hartley stress the importance of conformity to liberal parents in explaining the development of tolerance, while Allport and Kramer and Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford stress a critical attitude toward conservative parents as the important factor. Differences in the samples (the former studies use many New York students) may explain this. Hartley states without explanation that “projectivity” is unrelated to intolerance. Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford are alone in finding that status anxiety and a puritanical attitude toward sex characterize the prejudiced. Perhaps these factors can only be discovered through the projective techniques that Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford use.

We have already referred to the disagreement concerning the frustration-aggression theory, defended by Allport and Kramer and, although not referred to explicitly, by Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford. Once again Hartley gives us only a cryptic statement, asserting that “repressed aggression” is not among the factors that are related to intolerance. Stagner’s attack on the theory can be refuted if it is proved that his “parent-antagonism scale” measures conscious hostility only—and that a high score may therefore actually represent relatively weak unconscious hostility and a low score disguise strong unconscious hostility.

Scientific efforts to define the bigoted personality and to trace the roots of this personality in family and social environment are, of course, only in their infancy. Actually, only a few score persons have been intensively investigated and only a few hundred more have taken questionnaires. Yet the personality type that emerges from these studies, we can be quite sure, is no figment of the imagination, no accidental product of statistical errors. One need only look, for example, at the personality so brilliantly described by Jean-Paul Sartre in his “Portrait of the Anti-Semite” (Partisan Review, Spring 1946) and see how closely it parallels the studies we have summarized. We deal with a real product of our society, described alike by philosophers, psychoanalysts, novelists, and scientists: the human being who cannot look into himself, who cannot look at or understand the real world, who is himself driven by unknown forces and is unaware of the real forces that drive the world.

Much is lacking in this picture, much is unclear and contradictory. When we have the full results from the monumental researches of the University of California Public Opinion Study—which have by now covered many groups in the population (not only students) with questionnaires, interviews, and projective tests—many of the present disagreements will probably be settled.

Meanwhile, the following would seem to be useful working hypotheses in regard to the causes and dynamics of prejudices in the individual in American society:

1. The individual participates in a culture that has an established pattern of prejudice against certain groups. But this culture also contains the conflicting pattern of equality.
2. The prejudice pattern, along with the conflicting democratic pattern, is transmitted to him by one or more of his primary groups, usually by his family.
3. He will tend to accept and maintain the prejudice pattern at the expense of the democratic pattern if he has certain personality tendencies for which prejudice provides an outlet and if other, more satisfying, outlets are not provided.
4. Among these personality tendencies there may be repressed hostility toward members of his primary group, status anxiety, authoritarian tendencies, repressed sexual wishes, and insecurity arising from self-hate.
5. His early family, school, and clique experiences are most important in creating these personality tendencies, but they are also influenced by adult experiences.
6. Prejudice tends to be strongest in those families and cultural groups in which the childrearing practices are such as to produce the prejudice-supporting personality tendencies.
7. Once prejudice is established, it is often reinforced by its usefulness as a rationalization for obtaining economic, sexual, or prestige gains at the expense of subordinate ethnic groups.

If these hypotheses are valid, what are their implications for the future of intergroup relationships—in fact, for the future of democracy itself—in this country? American culture, by creating personalities that need race prejudice in order to maintain their psychic balance, has created an enormous potential for fascism. This article has dealt with the personality tendencies that make many Americans ready to support a fascist movement, providing that social distress and confusion are present on a scale large enough to make people willing to give up their “American Creed”—and providing that in such an eventuality (another prolonged depression or another war, for example) the democrats are unable to provide more effective leadership than the fascists.

By and large, social conditions and tactics of leadership will determine whether prejudice will become sufficiently “salient” to come out of the club and go into the streets. The immediate problem, then, for democrats is to produce social conditions and political leadership that minimize the prominence of the prejudice pattern and maximize the prominence of the equalitarian pattern in the personalities of Americans. The long-run problem is to modify our institutions, particularly our child-rearing institutions, the home and the school, in such a manner that secure and loving, rather than insecure and hate-ridden, personalities are produced. How these things can be done—if they can be done at all—is, of course, no simple matter.

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