Here two social psychologists at Harvard University take exception to the views presented by William Petersen in his article “Prejudice in American Society” (October 1958), and Mr. Petersen replies. 

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Herbert C. Kelman & Thomas F. Pettigrew:

Two decades of intensive research into intergroup conflict and prejudice have led investigators to agree on a number of important conclusions. First, group prejudice is now commonly viewed as having two components: hostility and misinformation. And second, it is now realized that a variety of factors is required to deal with the complexities of the problem. Only a theory employing the insights, techniques, and data of all of the social sciences can adequately account for the phenomenon.

Readers of William Petersen’s article, “Prejudice in American Society: A Critique of Some Recent Formulations” (October 1958), may be surprised to learn of this agreement and progress in the study of prejudice. Mr. Petersen neither believes that a two-fold definition of prejudice is widely accepted, nor agrees that psychological contributions are helpful. Moreover, Mr. Petersen seems to have some peculiar motions regarding the political commitments of researchers in this field. Our present discussion attempts to correct the erroneous image of the present state of research into prejudice which his article gives, to explain the assumptions and purposes of a social-psychological analysis, and to counteract the false dichotomy Mr. Petersen makes between psychological and sociological approaches.

Mr. Petersen’s argument, as far as it pertains to the study of prejudice per se, seems to be as follows: In recent work on prejudice, there has been a “revision of the older theory” of intergroup relations, involving a shift from a sociological to a psychological emphasis. A great deal of this revision “has not represented an improvement.” The trend in recent work, he believes, has been to view prejudice simply as hostility toward a minority group and ignore its original connotation of prejudgment—i.e., “a judgment about a group before the facts concerning it are known.” There is a need, according to Mr. Petersen, to reverse this trend and to analyze prejudice in its factual context. The study of prejudice needs to focus primarily on the object of prejudice rather than on the subject, i.e., the person with the prejudice.

It seems to us absurd to pose the sociological and the psychological approaches as alternatives to each other. No current authorities now advocate, as Mr. Petersen implies, an exclusively psychological approach. Psychologists like Gordon Allport and sociologists like Arnold Rose have repeatedly made it clear that both sociological and psychological approaches are necessary for a full understanding of prejudice. Social psychologists have never proposed psychological analysis as a substitute for a sociological approach; rather they have sought to introduce some additional variables which may help to round out the picture. To create an issue between sociological and psychological theories can only have the effect of retarding research in the field of prejudice.

Mr. Petersen’s contention that there has been a marked tendency in recent work to deprive the definition of prejudice of its original meaning—judgment without an adequate factual base—is unwarranted. In the chief work in this area, Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice (to which, curiously, Mr. Petersen does not refer), ethnic prejudice is defined as “an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization.” Allport makes it clear that prejudice may involve a favorable as well as an unfavorable prejudgment. In ethnic prejudice, however, negative attitudes are a central feature, and these therefore represent his chief concern. In any event, his definition most certainly treats prejudice as “an attitude based on incomplete knowledge.” The same is true for the definitions offered in another standard review of the field (G. Saenger’s The Social Psychology of Prejudice), in various social psychology texts (e.g., Theory and Problems of Social Psychology by D. Krech and R. S. Crutehfield and Social Psychology by L. W. Doob), and even in a general psychology text (C. T. Morgan’s Introduction to Psychology) . Thus, Krech and Crutchfield speak of prejudices as “beliefs that are established prior to the revelation of the pertinent objective facts.” They give this example: “When people are ‘prejudiced’ against the Catholic or the Russian, it means only that the perceptions they have about the Catholic or the Russian will tend to deviate in an unfavorable direction from the objective facts” (italics ours).

Even the definitions that Mr. Petersen quotes as evidence of how the pre-factual character of prejudice is being ignored, when seen in full context, do not have the implications that he ascribes to them. For example, T. M. Newcomb, in Social Psychology, takes essentially the same position as Krech and Crutchfield. He indicates that he is not using prejudice “in the original sense, according to which it meant any kind of prejudgment,” but rather “in the more limited (and more common) sense of ‘prejudice against’” (italics ours). Thus, for Newcomb hostility is a necessary ingredient of the definition of prejudice, but certainly not a sufficient one, as Mr. Petersen claims. Clearly, Newcomb is talking only about hostility that constitutes a prejudgment. Indeed, all of these writers accept the dual nature of prejudice: hostility and prejudgment. One cannot accuse them of saying, or even implying, that unfavorable attitudes toward any group constitute prejudice. But this accusation, as we shall see, is a major building block in Mr. Petersen’s argument.

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The conception of prejudice as hostility without factual base, rather than as mere hostility, is implicit in the most important psychological study of prejudice, The Authoritarian Personality, by T. W. Adorno et al. (which Mr. Petersen cites). In this study ethnic prejudice is seen as part of a syndrome which includes characteristic ways of dealing with the factual world. Typically, the prejudiced individual is not open to new facts which threaten his image of the world. He tends to be rigid in the face of anxiety and ambiguity, and unable to alter his preconceived evaluations. Thus these personality studies of prejudice—the principal target of Mr. Petersen’s critique—not only conceive of prejudice as hostility without a factual base, but actually postulate a dynamic connection between hostility toward ethnic groups and inability to reexamine one’s attitudes in the light of new facts.

How, then, can one claim that there has been a massive abandonment of the original definition of prejudice as prejudgment? We believe Mr. Petersen is right when he argues that hostility toward a group does not necessarily mean prejudice. We believe he is wrong when he assumes that there is anyone who disagrees with him.

Mr. Petersen then proceeds to argue that we need to analyze the factual context of prejudice and to focus on the object of prejudice. Again, we agree with this—as a general admonition. It is important, for example, to study the minority groups which are culturally defined as objects of prejudice in order to gain some understanding of the reasons why they have been selected as scapegoats. Such an understanding cannot be derived simply from the study of prejudiced persons, but requires a historically based analysis of the characteristics of the minority group and of its position in the general social structure. The importance of the factual context, however, is not at all an issue in the study of prejudice. Recognition of this point does not require one to differentiate between a sociological and a psychological approach. If there is any differentiation, it is between an intelligent and an unintelligent approach. This does not mean, of course, that every study of, say, anti-Negro prejudice must concern itself with the reasons why the Negro is selected as a popular object of prejudice. It is perfectly legitimate to accept this as given and to study why some individuals or groups are more likely to take advantage of this culturally defined object than others.

For Mr. Petersen, the importance of studying the object of prejudice seems to have the following implication: in order to decide whether an individual’s hostility toward a particular ethnic group represents prejudice, we must study the group itself; if it turns out that the individual’s statements conform with the facts, then the individual cannot be considered prejudiced. Now we agree that the factual accuracy of a given statement is an important datum, but in and of itself it tells us nothing about the presence or absence of prejudice in an individual. The fact that an individual’s unfavorable statement about a group happens to be accurate is certainly no proof that he is unprejudiced, just as the fact that his statement may be wrong is no proof that he is prejudiced. How he arrived at this unfavorable opinion, how he maintains it, how he fits it into his system of beliefs and actions, is the issue.

Let us suppose it is established that a particular ethnic group has a lower average level of intelligence than the rest of the population. To believe that this group is relatively unintelligent would no longer be a sure sign of prejudice. It would not follow, however, that anyone holding this belief is necessarily not prejudiced, and that the belief itself is automatically irrelevant to any “diagnosis” of prejudice. We would want to find out what the psychological processes are which underlie this belief, accurate though it may be, for a given individual. Did he actually take the known facts into account in arriving at his opinion? Is he able to entertain various interpretations of this fact? Is he at all open to contrary facts, or is he only open to facts that confirm this belief? Does he use these facts as a basils for advocating discriminatory actions against the group? Does he show awareness of the fact that individual members of the group may be found along the whole range of intelligence, even though the average for the group as a whole is relatively low? It is on the basis of answers to such questions that we would decide how prejudiced the individual is, regardless of how accurate his facts may happen to be.

Conversely, if it is established as a fact that there is no difference in intelligence between the particular group and the majority of the population, this would not mean that every individual who believed there was a difference must ipso facto be considered prejudiced. He may have tried conscientiously to obtain the facts, but have been exposed to the wrong information or misinterpreted what he heard. He may thus hold an unfavorable opinion which is out of keeping with the facts, and yet we would not consider him prejudiced in view of the process by which he arrived at this opinion and the way in which it functioned for him. Presumably, this individual would abandon his unfavorable opinion once exposed to the true facts or to the proper interpretation of these facts.

To fail to understand this distinction is to miss the most elementary assumption of a psychological analysis of prejudice. Questions about the source and function of an individual’s prejudiced attitudes cannot be answered just by studying the facts about the object of prejudice. This is not to say that the study of the object is unimportant, but that we are asking a different set of questions when we want to find out what makes a particular individual prejudiced.

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Mr. Petersen implies that we should never call an individual prejudiced if his facts happen to be right. He does not, however, seem particularly interested in making this point with regard to ethnic prejudice, since he agrees that the facts rarely, if ever, warrant a generalized hostility toward an ethnic group. It is only when he applies his general reasoning about ethnic prejudice to anti-Communism that this point emerges explicitly. Apparently, the defense of the anti-Communist is a key point in Mr. Petersen’s article, as evidenced by the space devoted to it and by the featuring of it in his summary statement at the end.

Mr. Petersen pleads for the need to distinguish between ethnic minorities and other minorities, such as the Communists, and to recognize that being anti-Communist does not have the same meaning as being anti-Negro. We doubt if there is any competent social scientist in the United States who does not agree with this distinction. He himself seems to recognize its triviality when he says: “In an area less dominated by sentimentality and confusion than the analysis of ethnic relations, it would be no contribution to point out that to fight discrimination against Negroes, to disagree with Catholics about the moral legitimacy of birth control, and to abhor and oppose Communism, are not inconsistent attitudes simply because all three axe ‘minority’ groups.” We would modify his statement only this far: even in the area of ethnic relations—which is probably not as sentimental and certainly not as confused as Mr. Petersen thinks—it is no contribution to point this out. We ourselves, and most of our professional colleagues—many of whom are students of ethnic relations—subscribe to these three positions and do not find them inconsistent.

But Mr. Petersen goes on to say that “to understand why a man is anti-Communist it is necessary first to look not into his mind but at Soviet society.” This statement is absurd. To understand why a man is anti-Communist, we must “look into his mind”; there is no other place to look. Of course, it makes little sense to “look into his mind” without taking full account of the reality situation within which his attitudes have developed and are functioning. Admittedly, this mistake is sometimes made in psychological, particularly in psychoanalytic, analyses of attitudes toward social and political issues. That is, it is sometimes assumed implicitly (though rarely explicitly) that one can make sense of an individual’s beliefs purely in terms of his internal dynamics, without reference to the external reality within which these beliefs operate. But one can be critical of such singleminded approaches without adopting the impossible position that to understand an individual’s attitudes one need only look at the object of his attitudes.

When one “looks into the mind” of an anti-Communist, there are many things one might find. Many anti-Communists could not be considered “prejudiced” by any definition of the term. These are people whose anti-Communism is rational. It is based on a thorough knowledge and examination of the facts about Communism, and it derives from a well-integrated system of values. On the other hand, we may find that there are some people whose anti-Communism is irrational and deserves the label “prejudiced” in the sense of Mr. Petersen’s own definition of the term. This would include people whose anti-Communism derives primarily from personal needs which they “externalize” and project onto a political object. For these people, anti-Communism is certainly not based on a careful examination of the facts and is not rooted in a rational system of values. While some of their opinions may be justified by the facts about Soviet society, one can hardly say that it is these facts which led to the formation of their attitudes and which govern the way in which their anti-Communism maintains and expresses itself.

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There is another group of people for whom anti-Communism does not have the same personal meaning, but whose anti-Communism also has an incomplete and inadequate factual base. These are the people whose anti-Communism is largely a matter of social conformity and whose information about Communism and the Soviet Union comes from a haphazard exposure to the mass media. There are “anti-Communists” who have not the slightest idea what a Communist is, as evidenced by the survey conducted by the Madison Capital Times a few years ago.¹ There are many good citizens who respond to what they conceive as the Communist threat by favoring the suppression of all nonconformist views.² Their anti-Communism is not rooted in the facts. They do not know the truth about Soviet society. They are anti-Communists for the wrong reasons.

No amount of knowledge about Soviet society will help us understand these two types of irrational anti-Communists. Nor does it follow, simply from the realities of Soviet society, that these men should not be labeled “prejudiced,” if anyone is interested in labeling at all.

Mr. Petersen’s objection to psychological analysis is apparently based on the mistaken notion that to inquire into the motivations of a man’s beliefs and into their relationship to his personality is the equivalent of calling these beliefs irrational and unfounded in reality. This notion derives from a distorted view of psychological analysis. To illustrate our point, we should like to cite the detailed psychological analysis of attitudes toward Russia held by ten individuals which M. B. Smith, J. S. Brunei, and R. W. White make in Opinions and Personality. The authors distinguish three general functions that opinions can fulfill in an individual’s personality: object appraisal, or the function of opinions in helping an individual organize and make sense out of his environment; social adjustment, or the function of opinions in helping an individual to establish and maintain ties with groups that are important to him; and externalization, or the function of opinions in reflecting a person’s inner conflicts and indirect ways of resolving these conflicts. It is the last function, externalization, which is most frequently referred to in discussions of prejudice that emphasize the role of projection and scapegoating. The study of Smith et al. shows the different meanings that their opinions toward Russia can have for different individuals, the different ways in which their opinions can be related to their over-all personalities, and the different functions and combinations of functions they can fulfill.

A central part of the analysis of each case is an examination of the role of information in the development of opinions—and of the informational context within which the opinions are held. This study in no way fits the trend that Mr. Petersen claims to have discerned. Not for a moment does it assume that an unfavorable attitude represents a prejudgment, or a displacement, or anything of the sort. The authors recognize the possibility that these attitudes may be, to quote Mr. Petersen, “the end product of a conscientious effort to arrive at the truth.” At the same time, however, they do not beg the psychological question as Mr. Petersen does; they do not conclude that just because the attitudes may be rational, there is no longer a need to try to understand the meaning and function they have for the individual under investigation. The study is clearly a psychological one. It does not pretend to explain the nature of Communism, or of Soviet society, or of East-West relations. Yet it does take into account the factual context, insofar as it is relevant to the understanding of an individual’s opinions about the Soviet Union.

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There is an additional reason, however, for our wishing to reply to Mr. Petersen. Upon the shaky superstructure that we have been describing, Mr. Petersen apparently bases the fantastic innuendo that social scientists, particularly psychologists specializing in the study of prejudice, are soft on Communism. One wonders if the essential purpose of Mr. Petersen’s critique was to put across the message that anti-Communists are not sick, and that anyone who tries to analyze their motivations in psychological terms is more likely than not a Communist sympathizer. “In a very large proportion of recent writing” on the subject of prejudice, writes Mr. Petersen, the distinctions between discrimination against Negroes, disagreement with Catholics, and abhorrence of Communism “have been passed over, either explicitly or by drawing our attention else-where.” How has this been accomplished? One way, according to Mr. Petersen, has been to concentrate on the prejudiced person and his irrational mental processes, thus making it unnecessary to explore the object of the prejudice. “This emphasis, of course, has been in part a reflection of the professional interests of psychologists, but it is remarkable, too, how much it has overlapped with a tolerance of Soviet totalitarianism. From the point of view of Communists and their sympathizers, it has been very convenient to analyze, say, anti-Semitism and anti-Communism—though not usually anti-Catholicism—as analogous expressions of a sick mind” (our italics). Mr. Petersen does not specify whether the emphasis on the prejudiced individual is part of a deliberate conspiracy of Communist sympathizers, or just part of a syndrome which includes tolerance of Soviet totalitarianism.

Mr. Petersen cites only one reference which is even remotely related to his claim that there is a tendency to equate prejudice with anti-Communism. This is a transcript of a discussion: held by a group of social scientists and others in 1947, in which, among other things, hostility toward Russia was examined in terms of the scapegoat mechanism.³ The participants suggested the possibility that attitudes toward Russia might reflect some displaced hostility, and explored the implications of this possibility. Nowhere did they imply that scapegoating was the only reason for hostility toward Russia, even though they did not feel the need to put such a disclaimer explicitly into the record. This was, after all, an oral discussion which naturally would not contain the usual caveats and qualifications which one expects to find in written documents. To Mr. Petersen, however, anyone who engages in such a discussion without proclaiming loudly the belief that hostility toward Russia is completely justified and noble is immediately suspect.

One of the participants in the discussion, whom Mr. Petersen quotes, was Gordon Allport. If Mr. Petersen were to look at Allport’s book, to which we have already referred, he would find a clear distinction drawn between the use of “Reds” as scapegoats and the use of minority groups as scapegoats. The main distinction is in terms of the existence of a factual and realistic conflict. “When a conflict is entirely realistic,” Allport says, quite unambiguously, “we can speak neither of prejudice nor of scapegoating.” Of course, Allport and others, as we have already indicated, assume that some of the mechanisms underlying anti-Communism in some individuals can be similar to some of the mechanisms underlying ethnic prejudice. The comparison is based on the structure of the man’s opinions and not at all on their specific content. Indeed, recent writers have shown that in some cases the mechanisms underlying a pro-Communist ideology may be similar to the mechanisms underlying ethnic prejudice.⁴

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As for the remarkable overlap between the psychological analysis of prejudice and the tolerance of Soviet totalitarianism that Mr. Petersen has observed, there is not even an attempt to document it. Mr. Petersen drags in by the heels two references in which the writers comment favorably on the Soviet government’s policy toward ethnic minorities. One is to a Chapter written by a sociologist, now deceased, and published in 1945. The other is to a pamphlet written by two anthropologists, one of whom is now deceased, and published in 1943. We leave it to the reader to judge the relevance of these references to the claim that current trends in psychological research on prejudice reflect a tolerance for Communism.

If we leave aside the “technicality” that the writers to whom Mr. Petersen refers are not psychologists, and that the whole pseudo-logic of his argument thus collapses, and look at his evidence, what do we find? To Mr. Petersen, a favorable evaluation in 1943 or 1945 of the Soviet policy toward its minorities is proof positive of a tolerance for Soviet totalitarianism in all of its ramifications. “For persons interested in combating ethnic prejudice,” he writes, “the clear implication of the alleged lack of it in the Soviet Union was that our tolerance must be extended to include both that enlightened regime and its American representatives.” This is not only a non sequitur, but also a very dangerous doctrine. Whatever the political leanings of the authors whom Mr. Petersen cites, the fact that they expressed themselves favorably about the Soviet policy toward minorities in 1943 and 1945 is not in itself evidence of Communist sympathies. During those years the belief that the Soviet Union had an enlightened and successful program for its minorities was widely held. It was not at all restricted to social scientists, nor to Communist sympathizers. To be sure, the facts about the Soviet treatment of minorities were already available at the time in Russian language sources. But it was not until several years later that these facts became generally known. Now Mr. Petersen could perhaps accuse these authors of poor scholarship. But can he accuse them of a “tolerance of Soviet totalitarianism” simply because they accepted a widely held belief which presented a favorable picture of Soviet policy and which happened, subsequently, to be proven false? We believe that such an accusation has ominous implications for those who value free inquiry.

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William Petersen:

I find no intellectual pleasure in replying to Messrs. Kelman’s and Pettigrew’s rather impassioned critique. But the subject is an important one, and I am concerned lest even some of COMMENTARY’s regular readers, because my article was published so long ago, confuse my critics’ presentation of my argument with what I actually wrote.

On one point after another in my article, I deliberately limited the scope of the argument. And on one point after another, Messrs. Kelman and Pettigrew ignore these limitations, in order to set up a straw man and knock him down. Before discussing their substantive criticisms, it will be well to dispose of these—shall we call them terminological?—disputes.

1. They quote correctly one sentence from my article—“To understand why a man is anti-Communist it is necessary first to look not into his mind but at Soviet society”—and then proceed to berate me as though the sentence did not contain the word “first.”
2. Both in the title of the article itself and again in the text, I made it clear that I was criticizing “some” recent discussions of prejudice. I did not speak, as my critics do, of “a massive abandonment of the original definition of prejudice”; I certainly knew that a number of the analysts of prejudice, some of whom they cite, were not subject to my strictures. Messrs. Kelman and Pettigrew were correct, however, in asking why I had failed to mention Professor Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice. Since I quoted a minor silliness of his from a discussion in which he participated, courtesy demanded that I balance this with a reference to his much more significant and generally excellent work. I am happy to make amends here, and freely acknowledge that I have learned much from reading The Nature of Prejudice.
3. The title of my article spoke, moreover, of some “recent” formulations, and the precise meaning of “recent” might not have been clear to the reader. On the first page of the article, therefore, I indicated what I meant, by contrasting the earlier limitation of studies of intergroup relations to “racial and ethnic minorities” with their later extension to “minorities defined by religious, cultural, occupational, or political criteria.” The former tradition culminated, I would say, in Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, and the period since its publication (1944) is roughly the one I mean by “recent.” If I had intended to limit myself to books and articles published within the past year or two, I would have designated them as “current.” I did not, but Messrs. Kelman and Pettigrew introduce the word into their paraphrase of what I wrote and even italicize it.
4. My objection to a psychological analysis of prejudice, according to my two critics, “is apparently based on the mistaken notion that to inquire into the motivations of a man’s beliefs and into their relationship to his personality is the equivalent of calling these beliefs irrational and unfounded in reality.” If they got nothing else from my article, I might have hoped they would understand that it was about prejudices, not about beliefs in general. They might perhaps even have understood that I objected to a psychological analysis of prejudice, not because it leads to the conclusion that beliefs are irrational and unfounded in reality, but on the contrary because it tends to set aside the question of the rationality or irrationality of beliefs altogether, because too often it has no interest in comparing beliefs with reality.

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My critics state that “no current authorities now advocate a strictly psychological approach.” This is preposterous. When I pointed to a significant tendency to disregard the factual context of prejudice and to concentrate on the allegedly prejudiced person’s psyche, I documented my allegation with a number of examples; Messrs. Kelman and Pettigrew ignore most of them. To repeat: in such an authoritative (and “current”) work as the Handbook of Social Psychology, prejudice is defined as “simply an unfavorable ethnic attitude.” To repeat: in neither the one analysis of stereotypes I cited, nor (so far as I know) any other of this numerous class of studies, is there ever a thought that it would be relevant to relate individuals’ ideas about various peoples to the actual characteristics of these peoples.

To repeat: Newcomb’s widely used text in social psychology defines prejudice as “a predisposition to perceive, act, think, and feel in ways that are ‘against’ rather than ‘for’ another person or group.” This definition, Messrs. Kelman and Pettigrew assert, does not mean what it very clearly says, for in an introductory sentence—dealing with what he does not mean by prejudice—Professor Newcomb happens to use the word “prejudgment.” The way to settle this dispute is, as my critics suggest, to see his definition “in full context.” In the rest of the chapter Professor Newcomb spells out in some detail what he means by the word prejudice, and my statement that he analyzes the concept without regard to the facts concerning ethnic groups is, if anything, an understatement. For he goes much farther. Learning to notice that a person is white or Negro, Jew or Gentile, Chinese or Japanese, he declares, “is one important aspect of acquiring prejudice.” “It just does not matter to people who have little or no anti-Semitism whether another person is Jewish or not, and hence they never learn to tell the difference.” If we are to believe Professor Newcomb, our recognizing American Jewry as a subculture within American society, or our acquiring some knowledge of the distinctive features of this culture group, is only “learning to be prejudiced.” Is there anyone concerned with COMMENTARY, whether as editor, writer, or reader, who can plead innocent to the charge of anti-Semitism so drawn?

Messrs. Kelman and Pettigrew call The Authoritarian Personality “the most important psychological study of prejudice”; the extraordinary number of studies that have imitated it, and the still wider acceptance of both the method used and the results obtained, would certainly seem to justify this estimate of the work. According to my critics, the conception of prejudice as hostility without a factual base is “implicit” in The Authoritarian Personality; in the study itself, however, the social and historical background of prejudice is explicitly omitted: “Historical factors or economic forces operating in our society to promote or to diminish ethnic prejudices are clearly beyond the scope of our investigation.” This sentence was quoted in my article. The central hypothesis investigated by the authors of The Authoritarian Personality pertains only to psychological variables: “that the political, economic, amid social convictions of an individual often form a broad and coherent pattern, as if bound together by a ‘mentality’ or ‘spirit,’ and that this pattern is an expression of deep-lying trends in his personality.” The social context of prejudice is ignored in this very first premise. Before one invoked psychological, even psychoanalytic, theory (“deep-lying trends”), it would seem reasonable to look at the configurations of values and attitudes to be found in social groups.

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The difference in approach can be illustrated by a recent article on authoritarianism written by a sociologist. Professor S. M. Lipset has collected a good deal of empirical evidence to show that members of the working class are more disposed than the middle class to support authoritarian political parties or religious sects, and to display ethnic prejudices and antidemocratic attitudes generally. He ascribes such behavior, however, not to a “personality type” but to “the typical social situation of lower-class persons”—namely, “low education, low participation in political organizations or in voluntary organizations of any type, little reading, isolated occupations, economic insecurity, and authoritarian family patterns.”⁵

In the Authoritarian Personality the term prejudice is rejected as too narrow; for it the authors substitute ethnocentrism. But note that both are defined wholly in psychological terms: “Prejudice is commonly regarded as a feeling of dislike against a specific group; ethno-centrism, on the other hand, refers to a relatively consistent frame of mind concerning ‘aliens’ generally. . . . Ethnocentrism . . . has to do not only with numerous groups toward which the individual has hostile opinions and attitudes but, equally important, with groups toward which he is positively disposed.”

The indifference to the factual context of prejudice indicated in these general introductory remarks continues throughout the work. Take, for instance, the important “Anti-Semitism Scale.” This consists of a large number of statements about Jews with which the respondent is required to express agreement or disagreement. All are weighted equally in the scoring, even though they vary widely in their content and implications. At one extreme we find paraphrases of the Nazi program: “The Jewish problem is so general and deep that one often doubts that democratic methods can ever solve it.” At the other extreme there are statements to the effect that in various senses the Jews are and should remain a separate group, assertions that no rabbi or Jewish nationalist would find objectionable: for instance, “It is wrong for Jews and Gentiles to intermarry.” In between is a mishmash of more or less dubious, more or less valid, allegations concerning the Jews. Most sociologists would agree, for example, that compared with other components of Western populations the Jews are probably the most “alienated” (as Marx used this word), the most restless, what Koestler called the most urban. In such a statement as the following, are we to respond to the iota of this truth that it contains, or to the hostile and obnoxious attitude conveyed by the phrasing: “One big trouble with Jews is that they are never contented, but always try for the best jobs and the most money”?

The authors of The Authoritarian Personality might answer to such a criticism of the confusion in their anti-Semitism scale by saying that the anti-Semite, typically, is confused and illogical. True; but my point is that they have imitated this confusion; and they have done so, moreover, partly because they concentrated their analysis on the personality of the anti-Semite, rather than going on and also studying anti-Semitism as a social phenomenon.

The contrast made between “authoritarian” and “democratic” personalities is worth looking at in another context. Messrs. Kelman and Pettigrew quote, with vehement italicization, my statement that an emphasis on. the psyche in studies of prejudice has often overlapped with a tolerance of Soviet totalitarianism. As I wrote, “from the point of view of Communists and their sympathizers, it has been very convenient to analyze, say, anti-Semitism and anti-Communism . . . as analogous expressions of a sick mind.” At least implicitly, to use a favorite word of my critics, this is one main theme of The Authoritarian Personality. The “democratic” respondents were chosen in large part from the membership of a Communist-controlled trade union and the student body of a Communist-influenced school, as well as from various national groups that in California had a sizable Communist infiltration. The political views of these respondents, in other words, fitted in with the ideology of the Popular Front: the Soviet Union is a member of the democratic, antifascist camp, and indeed is the most democratic among its components.

The study also reflects the Soviet myth that fascism is extreme conservatism (rather than the no less radical twin of Communism). Thus, in the words of the study, “conservatives are, on the average, significantly more ethnocentric than liberals are. The more conservative an individual is, the greater the likelihood that he is ethnocentric.” The “proof” offered to support this assertion is so dubious that one can explain the general assent it has won only by assuming that many people accept the implicit political framework of the analysis. The additional documentation demanded by Messrs. Kelman and Pettigrew for my statement about the tendency to treat anti-Semitism and anti-Communism as analogous phenomena can be furnished, in fact, by referring to this single massive work, with its widespread influence.

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I doubt, however, whether my critics will be satisfied with either this or any other documentation, judging from their comments on the examples I already gave to illustrate my point. The report of the Cambridge Group Discussion that I cited, for instance, perhaps did not “contain the usual caveats and qualifications which one expects to find in written documents”; but if the point of view of any of the discussants was seriously misrepresented in the subsequent published report, he was certainly able—indeed, as a responsible scholar, he was obliged—to call this fact to the readers’ attention in the journal’s next issue. No one did so. Messrs. Kelman and Pettigrew write that “nowhere did [the participants] imply that scapegoating was the only reason for hostility toward Russia.” This is simply not so. It was explicitly stated that hostility toward Russia had nothing to do with the conditions in the Soviet Union; the subject of the discussion was: “Is our [hostile] attitude toward Russia based on deliberately falsified information, or misinterpretations?” These professional social scientists, as late as 1947, were so ignorant of the infamies perpetrated by the Soviet dictatorship that they excluded, even as one possibility among others, that hostility toward that regime might be based on accurate information correctly interpreted.

I am not sure what points Messrs. Kelman and Pettigrew want to make in their long paragraph about Opinion and Personality. This study collected detailed data from ten persons about the opinions they held on Russia, as well as various items concerning the respondents’ family background, education, working conditions, personality, and so on; and an attempt was made to see what relation, there was between the respondents’ opinions and these other factors. Some of the opinions about Russia were factually correct, others were not; but for the authors this was not an important difference. In general, the validity of beliefs is irrelevant to a psychological analysis of them—irrelevant, that is, to an analysis of the process by which opinions and attitudes (including prejudices) become incorporated into the personality. I tried to suggest that this delimitation of interest, while understandable in professional terms, is in a broader context something of a perversion!. Might it not be more useful, perhaps even more interesting for themselves, if psychologists made the same distinction that for other people is the crucial one—if they tried to investigate the process by which valid beliefs, as opposed to invalid ones, become incorporated into a person’s fund of knowledge?

Opinion and Personality is a book worth reading, but in my view it fails just because of this attempt to analyze a political subject in, as it were, a political vacuum. Of course, the authors could not keep the vacuum absolute, and their difficulties were aggravated by their own apparent reappraisal of the Soviet regime. The interviews were taken in 1947; the book was published in 1956. According to various hints that the authors throw out, they underwent a considerable change of attitude toward Soviet society during this interval; we can recall that the single year 1948 saw the Communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin blockade, and Tito’s revolt against Moscow. For themselves, if not for their readers, the authors apparently found it necessary to have some idea of the truth about the Soviet Union; and so long as this was in flux for them, they found it difficult, even in a psychological framework, to analyze opinions about it.

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My comments on the analysis of anti-Communism as a prejudice, Messrs. Kelman and Pettigrew charge, have “ominous implications for those who value free inquiry.” This is a serious allegation; I am sorry that they did not see fit to develop it further. They do not accuse me of misquoting anyone, but rather of quoting verbal rather than written statements, of citing material from some immemorial past, ten or even twelve years ago. Nothing that happened in that period, when many social scientists carefully guarded their ignorance of the less positive aspects of Soviet society, is supposedly pertinent to any discussion today. Even to recall such cases would seem to be almost a breach of civil liberties. Such an attitude recalls one commonly found today in West Germany, where many valiantly try to forget the whole of the Nazi period as an unpleasant interlude, irrelevant to today’s tasks.

I think, on the contrary, that during the 1930’s and up to about 1948, a significant percentage of America’s social scientists (as well as other intellectuals) were either insufficiently aware of the dangers of Soviet totalitarianism or indeed were fellow-travelers; and that it is both right and necessary to rub our collective noses in this unpleasant fact from time to time. This is useful, first of all, because we are not yet entirely out of the woods. When Gene Weltfish stated some years ago on her professional authority as a anthropologist that the United Nations forces in Korea were using bacteriological weapons, Columbia University had enough and failed to reappoint her; but to this day the pamphlet on races that she co-authored, which I cited in my article, is probably the most widely used reading on this subject in America’s high schools and even colleges. Or, to cite another example, there is a new trend among some Sovietologists to blur the important differences between a democracy and a totalitarian state and to interpret the United States and the Soviet Union as essentially similar instances of “large-scale industrial society.”⁶

Even if there were no such current examples to cite, it would still be useful to remember occasionally the inanities of the Popular Front. As social scientists, most of us are teachers; and one useful pedagogic device is to recall our past errors and try to keep our students from repeating them. Moreover, is not a complex view of the world, which is able to see how well-meaning liberals were led to tolerate and even connive at the infamies of a ruthless dictatorship, more in accord with psychological reality than a view which sees people lined up either as “authoritarian personalities” or “democratic personalities”—an opposition as simplistic and mechanical as “good guys” and “bad guys”?

Messrs. Kelman and Pettigrew touch on a large number of points, which I have tried to answer. But they pass over the heart of my article. In the analysis of prejudice, I maintained, One must distinguish such a group as American Negroes from groups defined by religious, cultural, occupational, or political criteria. The Negroes want nothing that is not guaranteed them by the American credo; they want the same opportunities and rights that the rest of the population enjoy. They are different only in superficial aspects (e.g., skin color) or in ways that are a direct consequence of prejudice and discrimination (e.g., poorer education). Other groups are different in significant cultural attributes, want to maintain these differences, and sometimes want to impose their values on the rest of society. The moral flabbiness of present-day America—the shift, in David Riesman’s terms, from a typically “inner-directed” to a typically “other-directed” personality—has also been reflected in some analyses of the nature of prejudice.

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¹ “What is a Communist?” The Progressive (April 1953).

² S. A. Stouffer, Communism, Conformity, and Civil liberties (Doubleday, 1955).

³ Cambridge Group Discussion, Journal of Social Issues (Winter 1948).

⁴ M. Rokeach, “Political and Religious Dogmatism: an Alternative to the Authoritarian Personality,” Psychological Monographs, 70:18 (1956).

⁵ “Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism,” American Sociological Review 24:4 (August 1959).

⁶ See, for example, Alex Inkeles and Raymond A. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society, Harvard University Press, 1959.