Status anxiety drives prejudice through projection and displaced aggression chains

Evidence

We see at last why the authors of The Authoritarian Personality have argued that the empirical clustering of beliefs that are not logically related argues for the existence of a dynamic psychological relationship. Why should people whose parents were anxious about status have an idealized image of themselves and of their parents and a very bad opinion of minorities and foreigners? It is because status anxiety produces authoritarian discipline which produces repression of faults and shortcomings and of aggression against authority. It is the fate of repressed faults and shortcomings to be projected to minorities and outsiders. It is the fate of the repressed aggression to be displaced from authority and directed against minorities and outsiders. Finally the projected faults and shortcomings rationalize the aggression. Prejudice plays an integral role in the total ideology but the role is psychological rather than logical. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 563

Categorization

• XREF: The projection-and-rationalization chain recalls Freudian defense-mechanism theory; also connects to contemporary moral-foundations and system-justification accounts of prejudice. — connects to: Racial ideology grew from status anxiety, not empirical perception of threat — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 195; Status and competition jointly explain divergent forms of prejudice — Susan T. Fiske et al., A Model of (Often Mixed) Stereotype…, 307; the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ideologically clustered but logically unrelated beliefs reveal a dynamic psychological system is a subtle methodological-epistemological point that resists quick summarization.