Regional differences in racial attitudes exceed what personality can explain

Evidence

Perhaps the most radical development since Allport concerns his moral evaluation of conformity. Although Allport considered conformity to be a sign of deviance, that stance is no longer held by social psychologists. In fact, conformity is now seen as perhaps the most important normal social process. In 1954, Allport needed to explain why a person might not actively seek individual expression as a weakness of the soul or spirit. Shortly after Allport’s book appeared, however, one of his students, Thomas Pettigrew, embarked on a decades-long program of research on normative theory and prejudice. Pettigrew looked at white racial attitudes in the American South and apartheid-era Republic of South Africa (Pettigrew, 1958, 1959). He showed that differences in authoritarian personality could not account for the large regional differences in racial attitudes between North and South in the USA, nor the large national differences in attitudes between the USA, Europe, and South Africa. Instead, Pettigrew has focused on how historical, political, and social factors shape social norms, which in turn play a large role in determining racial attitudes, social policy, and interpersonal conduct (Pettigrew, 1991). — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 1896

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the reader’s earlier highlights ranking institutional and norm-based mechanisms (Milgrom’s law merchant, bourse reputation systems) above individual dispositional explanations. — connects to: Southern and non-Southern whites changed racial attitudes at equal rates — Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington, Why Did the Democrats Lose the South?…, 319; Regional culture, not selection method, explains interstate differences in judge backgrounds
• DEEPTHINKING: Reverses a foundational framing: conformity as pathology vs. conformity as the load-bearing normal social process — a genuinely paradigm-shifting reframe with wide reach.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 1896