ABSTRACT
The studies reviewed earlier in the book concerning the structure of attitudes and beliefs have clearly demonstrated the overwhelming importance of a general factor that is most appropriately labelled “conservatism”. The conservatism syndrome was found to include religious dogmatism, right-wing political orientation (in Western countries), militarism, ethnocentrism, intolerance of minority groups, authoritarianism, punitiveness, anti-hedonism, conformity, conventionality, superstition and opposition to scientific progress. The consistency with which these characteristics were found to intercorrelate together led to the proposal that personality dynamics must be involved in the organization of social attitudes, i.e. that individual differences in motivational processes are partly responsible for this tendency for attitudes to arrange themselves around a general factor of liberalism versus conservatism. Many of the studies described in the latter half of this book are concerned with testing hypotheses based upon such an assumption. In this chapter a preliminary attempt will be made to integrate the currently available evidence concerning the correlates of conservatism within the context of a general theory of the psychological origins of the dimension.
