Personal Experiences Underlying the Formulation of Attitudes of Liberalism and Conservatism

Abstract

Social attitudes are a popular subject of investigation in psychological research. The problems of determining the expressions, and of the various ways of altering at least the expression of an attitude have been especially prolific topics for investigation. The present study is directed towards the solution of none of the above problems, but is an attempt to determine the actual dynamic factors in an individual's environment which go to make up his social attitudes. With this problem under consideration, an attitude scale was constructed, not in order to measure the subjects' inclination towards liberalism or conservatism alone, but also to bring out those factors which would seem to be personally significant to the development of these inclinations. This scale consisted of seven parts. First, the subject was instructed to write a short paragraph giving his concept of liberalism and a short paragraph giving his concept of conservatism. Next, he was to characterize himself as a liberal or a conservative. For this purpose a sevei-point graphic scale, running from extreme liberalism, through neutrality, to extreme conservatism was provided. Following this he was to select from a list of thirty items, five important discoveries which he had made about life. This list contained those discoveries which had seemed to be important in cases which had been dealt with in the Fort Hays Kansas State College Psychological Clinic. They were designed to include six types; discoveries concerning morality or immorality in others, discoveries relating to hypocrisy both in others and in the subjects, discoveries relating to control by parents and other environmental influences, discoveries of the impossibility of attaining the vocational ambitions of youth, discoveries of the subject's failure to live up to his own moral standards, and discoveries which related to the fact that love is not all that it is reputed to be. Next the subject was instructed to select from a list of thirty-seven items, five social actions which he considered dangerous. The next task was to classify forty sociologically important groups as to liberalism and conservatism. The following section required the subject to classify people, both international figures of the past and present, and persons with whom he was personally acquainted, as to liberalism and conservatism. Last, a list of the people who constituted the individual's critical social milieu were to be characterized from a prepared list of personality traits. The subjects used were 164 college students of various classifications and interests. Each subject was given all the time which was necessary to complete the questionnaire. The hypothesis which was set up was that a person's social attitudes are as much the product of local personal incidents as of the bias of his education. Support for this hypothesis had come from clinical observations in dealing with individual cases.