Environment dictates whether authoritarian dispositions surface as dominance or deference.

Evidence

A good example of a contingent relationship in which the impact of personality is mediated by the environment is to be found in the work of Katz and Benjamin (1960) on the effects of authoritarianism in biracial work groups in the North and the South. Katz and Benjamin compared white undergraduates in the two regions who scored low and high on one of the various authoritarian personality measures to see how they comported themselves in interracial problem-solving groups. They found that in the South authoritarianism (which previous studies showed to be associated with race prejudice) was associated with attempts of white students to dominate their black counterparts, but that in the North the authoritarians were more likely than the nonauthoritarians to be deferential to blacks. The investigators’ conclusion was that the sociopolitical environment of the Southern authoritarians enabled them to give direct vent to their impulses, but that the liberal environment of the Northern university led students with similar proclivities to go out of their way to avoid coming in conflict with the prevailing norms. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1140

Categorization

• SHARE: A strikingly counterintuitive finding — authoritarians in a liberal campus bent over backwards to be deferential to blacks — that would fascinate someone interested in how social context inverts personality expression.
• QUESTION: Does the liberal-campus deferential-authoritarian effect replicate today, or is 1960-era status competition too different now?