Personality, political behaviour and the predisposition to intolerance

When political psychologists turn to the study of intolerance, they seem to be mostly preoccupied with what Allport has called ‘the horizontal dimensions that run through all individuals’ (1962, p. 409). Allport was writing about what psychologists routinely refer to as traits, predispositions, cognitions and motives that describe the ‘personality’ of individuals. What Allport described using a spatial metaphor is described by contemporary political psychology in not so different terms, as a ‘multifaceted and enduring internal, or psychological, structure’ (Mondak, 2010, p. 6). This chapter argues that although the influences of Allport’s ‘horizontal dimensions’ are some of the most discernible and significant, they are not the sole determinant of intolerance. This chapter contends that the nature of intolerance (and associated phenomena such as racism and moral exclusion) cannot be reduced to relatively stable inner predispositions or basic personality dispositions, and that the leaning of political psychologists to elucidate the general regularities of political behaviour can be profitably balanced, complemented by attention to culture, language, social interaction and the actual ways in which intolerance is enacted and accomplished by different ways of talking and behaving towards others.

In order to develop this argument this chapter discusses the appeal and manifestations of right-wing extremism in Western Europe, prejudice as collaborative accomplishment, and the extreme, moral exclusionary discourse against the Roma minority in Eastern Europe. One cannot understand fully the plural and contextual manifestations of intolerance if one only studies it as a predisposition underpinned by an authoritarian mindset. Intolerance needs to be studied in its own right – as it manifests itself, and as it is interpreted and enacted by social and political actors in social interaction and social practices. Intolerance is imbued with a variety of sociocultural meanings; it is the foundation and product of social activities.