An Investigation Into the Relationship Between Opinion Intensity in Social Issues and the Hostile Content in Rorschach Inkblots

Abstract

In the past twenty years since L.L. Thurstone's development of standard attitude scales, the analysis of opinions and attitudes has received a large portion of attention from research workers in the fields of sociology and psychology. Empirical construction of attitude scales, validated upon representative samples of the population , has reduced the statistical inadequacies present in earlier attitude research to an extent sufficient for further study to be devoted to the psychological and sociological f actors contributing to opinion formation and persistence. Among the sociological factors which have been related to opinion formation are age, sex, race, religion, vocation, geographical location, and membership in a stable group such as a political party. More recently investigative work has been directed toward the psychological determinants operating when individuals consistently conform to various group norms. In spite of the vast amount of opinion research, connections between opinion intensities and personality traits have not been sufficiently explored. Personality dimensions such as hostility, anxiety, conflicts, and reality contacts, may yield fruitful information regarding opinion intensity. Undoubtedly, the absence of a standard scale or method by which the opinion intensities of one person may be reliably compared to the opinion intensities of another person, has hindered research work concerning the relation between personality traits and intensity of opinions. Even though the absence of a scale of relative opinion intensities introduces inaccuracies in the interpretation of experimental data, this shortcoming, alone, cannot justify neglecting this area of psychological research. Reliance upon the subjective reports of the experimental population in combination with limiting instructions to the subjects, might diminish the error in opinion intensity analyses. Therefore, the problem to be considered in this paper is the amount of relationship between the frequency of opinion intensities and the hostile perceptions of individuals. ... DEVELOPMENT OF HYPOTHESES Clinical psychologists, in particular, have endeavored to examine the relevance of projective test data to manifest behavior under experimental conditions. The work in this special area has hardly progressed beyond the exploratory stage. Hence, the conclusions secured have been tentative ones. The formation, persistence, and intensity of opinions are forms of manifest behavior which, as yet, have not been inspected as attributes of personality traits to any considerable extent. The aim of the current study is to explore the connections, if any, between the individual's amount of covert hostility and the frequencies of his opinion intensities before and after opposing majority opinions are revealed to him. The amount of conformity to the majority opinion among high and low hostile persons is the principal object of interest within this study. Opinions are probably more closely related to conscious motives than to covert personality factors. Moreover, notable resistance to compromise or abandon one's personal opinion with respect to a majority opinion may be attributable to confidence in one's personal knowledge of the subject matter contained in an opinion questionnaire, in addition to a partial expression of overt hostility. Therefore, taking the above elements into consideration, one would not expect a direct relationship between opinion intensity frequencies and hostile perceptions. However, two additional kinds of relationships are plausible. First, an inverse variation may exist between opinion intensity and hostility. Or, the correlation between the two variables may be a curvilinear one. In view of these possibilities, the following hypotheses are offered: 1) The expression of hostile content in Rorschach inkblots is inversely related to the frequency of intense opinions. 2) Upon the introduction of a majority opinion, individuals with high levels of hostility will conform more readily than individuals with low hostility ratings. 3) Finally, in the presence of the majority opinions, the retention of all opposed opinions will tend to be smaller for persons exhibiting high hostility than or persons with low hostility. Finally, the anticipation of difficulty in obtaining a dispersion of covert hostility scores by random sampling methods lead the writer to adopt a selective sampling approach in this study. The measurement of hostility within an emotionally and mentally healthy population sample could easily yield scores closely centered about the average score. In an attempt to achieve an approximation of normally distributed hostility ratings, it seems preferable to carry out this study upon a minority group sample, whose Rorschach protocols may reveal more diverse levels of hostility. For these reasons, this investigation will be applied to American Negroes. Although studies directly relating opinion intensity to covert hostility cannot be found in the literature, illumination of the present problem can be acquired by reviewing the research literature concerning projective test developments and attitude evaluations, respectively.