Low SES can explain each authoritarian trait through situational pressures alone

Evidence

It is possible, however, that low IQ, education, and SES can account for the syndrome without recourse to personality dynamics. Perhaps parents with low SES stamp out all aggression against authority in their children because it is likely to lead to delinquency and trouble with the police. Perhaps people with low SES are prejudiced against Negroes because it takes severe discrimination to keep the Negro beneath them in status. They may be prejudiced against Jews because the stereotype of the ruthless, clannish Jew accounts in an agreeable way for his occasional economic ascendance. Perhaps the person of low SES is not reflective or introspective because he is too busy hustling to earn a living. We can easily imagine plausible reasons for the association of each authoritarian trait with the cluster that includes low IQ, little education, and low SES and so the explanation of the covariation among the traits is simply their several particular ties to the same underlying factors. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 636

Categorization

• XREF: This situational account of prejudice as status competition anticipates realistic conflict theory and economic-competition accounts of prejudice like Blumer’s group position theory.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did the empirical debate between socioeconomic-situational and personality-dynamic accounts of authoritarianism actually resolve in later research?