Prejudice, Social Tolerance, and Openness to Experience

Living cooperatively in a culturally diverse world is one of the great challenges of our time. This issue has become especially salient in the United States as record numbers of immigrants are crossing the southern border, many of them illegally. People often fear immigrants because they are "not like us," suspecting that they will break our laws, undermine our values, steal jobs, and receive undeserved benefits.

Prejudice and Social Tolerance

Psychologists have long studied two contrasting attitudes toward people "who are not like us"—that is, members of out-groups. Prejudice is a fear-based, negative evaluation toward people who look and act differently from us. Fear and suspiciousness toward members of out-groups exist in all of us to some degree, apparently a tendency encouraged by the natural selection that has occurred in the long evolutionary history of conflicts between different human groups. But prejudice is also an individual-differences variable, which means that some people have stronger prejudices than others. Berkeley psychologists Nevitt Sanford, Elie Frenkel-Brunswik, and Daniel Levinson studied anti-Semitism in the aftermath of World War II, seeking to understand the Nazi prejudice that led to the Holocaust. Joined by political philosopher Theodor Adorno, they developed the California F-scale, a measure of the authoritarian personality syndrome, which includes high levels of prejudice against members of out-groups (Adorno et al., 1950).

A second attitude toward out-groups studied by psychologists is social tolerance. Social tolerance is a tendency to counteract prejudice, a willingness to tolerate those whose appearance and practices differ from our own. Prejudice and social tolerance seem to emerge from two different areas of the brain. Prejudice occurs with activation in the amygdala, the center of fear and anger. Social tolerance occurs when the prefrontal cortex activates, damping down signals of fear from the amygdala (Sapolsky, 2023).

Openness Facets

Prejudice and social tolerance, centered in two different parts of the brain, are two different psychological tendencies, not just opposite ends of the same trait, although it has taken psychologists years to realize this. For example, when Harrison Gough constructed the Tolerance Scale of the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), he began with MMPI items that predicted an anti-Semitism scale developed by Levinson and Sanford. The CPI Tolerance Scale is essentially an anti-Semitism scale scored in reverse, implying that tolerance is simply the opposite of prejudice (Megargee, 1977). Research on the five major personality factors has indicated that the factor openness to experience correlates negatively with prejudice and positively with social tolerance, again suggesting that prejudice and social tolerance might be opposite ends of the same spectrum.

Recently, however, doctoral thesis research by Da Xuan Ng (2024) has indicated that prejudice and social tolerance are not simply opposites, but are separate traits uniquely predicted by specific, narrower aspects of openness to experience, called facets. His research examined the six-facet structure of openness to experience from Costa and McCrae's (2008) NEO Personality Inventory and a NEO analog, the IPIP-NEO (Johnson, 2014). The labels for the facets in the NEO are openness to fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, actions, ideas, and values. The labels for the analogous IPIP-NEO facets are imagination, artistic interests, emotionality, adventurousness, intellect, and liberalism. Ng also investigated a four-facet structure of openness to experience found in the HEXACO Personality Inventory (Lee & Ashton, 2004); the labels for these facets are aesthetic appreciation, inquisitiveness, creativity, and unconventionality. Finally, Ng included in his study the Six-Facet Openness Scale (SFOS; Woo et al., 2014), which measures intellectual efficiency, ingenuity, curiosity, aesthetics, tolerance, and depth.

Ng administered all these measures of openness to experience to four new samples (two from the United States and two from Singapore) along with a number of different measures of prejudice and tolerance, and he compared the results to a meta-analysis of published research on openness, prejudice, and tolerance. As he predicted, most facets of openness from all measures showed negative correlations with prejudice and positive correlations with tolerance in all samples. However, the magnitudes of correlations with prejudice and social tolerance differed for specific facets of openness.

Across studies, the NEO openness to values (and corresponding IPIP-NEO liberalism) facet was consistently one of the strongest predictors of prejudice, with correlations ranging from -.37 to -.53. On the other hand, the SFOS tolerance facet was one of the strongest predictors of tolerance, with correlations as high as r=.74 (and this is not simply because the SFOS tolerance facet used items similar to the measures of social tolerance). These results might seem obviously predictable, but less obvious is that NEO openness to aesthetics, IPIP-NEO artistic interests, HEXACO aesthetic appreciation, and SFOS aesthetics were not far behind in the prediction of both prejudice and tolerance. How do we explain these findings?

Openness to experience, in its broadest and most general sense, refers to an attraction toward novelty and variety, whereas closedness to experience refers to a preference for routine and familiarity. Because members of one's in-group are familiar and similar, and members of out-groups are unfamiliar and different, it is easy to see why people who are open to experience are less likely to have negative reactions toward strange outsiders. In fact, they are likely to be intrigued by the novel appearances and behaviors of outsiders.

But a facet-level analysis provides a more fine-grained explanation of openness, prejudice, and social tolerance. The label "openness to values" on the NEO might sound like an interest in values that are different from the values one already holds. In reality, the items on this facet scale refer to the rejection of traditional, conservative values such as absolute group loyalty, obedience to authority, unchanging laws and morals, and conventional religiosity in favor of liberal values such as individual freedom, viewpoint diversity, and permissiveness. (This explains the IPIP-NEO label liberalism for this facet). Because conservative morality is focused on conformity and loyalty to the in-group while liberal morality is more concerned with harm avoidance and fairness (Haidt, 2012), people who are low on openness to values are more likely to experience prejudice against out-groups such as immigrants (Miklikowska, 2015; Stewart & Morris, 2021).

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Tolerance is sometimes described as a moral virtue that accompanies other liberal values such as fairness, empathy, respect, and avoiding harming others (Witenberg, 2014). Witenberg believes that genuine tolerance is more than just putting up with (tolerating) people and ideas you don't like. Tolerance is not just the prefrontal cortex subduing the amygdala (although that might be involved). Tolerance as a moral virtue means feeling empathy for others, putting yourself in their shoes, and having a genuine interest in where they are coming from, no matter how different or strange they might be. The items on the tolerance facet of the SFOS reflect this kind of tolerance, a genuine interest in the ways that people are different. Examples of items reflecting this attitude are, "I enjoy experiencing the rituals associated with different religions"; "I learn a great deal from people with differing beliefs"; and "I like to hear different people’s views on political issues."

The ability of openness facets describing aesthetic or artistic inclinations to predict both lack of prejudice and tolerance is a topic too complex to explore fully in this blog post. I can say that we know that the level of openness in artists is higher than for any other occupational group. Fundamental to the artistic mind is an attraction to ambiguity, complexity, novelty, and diversity. The aesthetically inclined are also emotionally sensitive. These characteristics make it likely for those who are open to aesthetics to seek out and appreciate what is novel and different in people from other backgrounds and cultures.