Personality and Ethnocentrism
All groups stimulate the growth of ethnology centrism, but not all members of the group are equally ethnocentric. There is some evidence that many people in American society develop a personality which .is predisposed to ethnocentrism. How can we explain this? One answer is that some of us are strongly ethnocentric as a defense against our own inadequacies. At one time, it was believed that social science had established a definite link between personality patterns and ethnocentrism. In The Authoritarian Personality, Adorn [1950] found that ethnocentric people tended to be less educated, more socially withdrawn, and religiously more orthodox. In this approach, ethnocentrism was defined primarily 3S inter t. to an ethnic or national group long with prejudice against other ethnic or national groups. The trouble with this definition is that it excludes some other types of ethnocentrism. If an uncritical loyalty to the views of one's group is to be the test of ethnocentrism, then members of supposedly liberal and educated circles may be just as ethnocentric as those in conservative and uneducated circles. The conservatives may be uncritical of religious orthodoxy and national patriotism and q ite sure of the superiority of their own ethnic group. The self styled liberal may be equally rigid in the ooposite direction: sure that the national foreign policy is always wrong, that orthodox religion is mere superstition, and that business people, blue-collar workers, and politicians are invariably either stupid or corrupt
(Cree ey, 1970; Offer, 1969; Lerner, 1969; Lipset and Ladd, 1972]
Ethnocentrism may be appealing j It firm the individual's to the group while it offers comfortingly simply explanations of complex social henchmen. the old, the socially secluded, the politically conservative but lung, the well traveled, the politically
"Jr. I 1 and the well-to-do may also be [Ray 1971 1976]. It is debatable which there is any significant variation, by social background or personality type, in the degree to which people are ethnocentric.
