Much research has been conducted concerning social attitudes since social psychology was established some 100 years ago. Attitudinal research so far encompasses a wide range of areas, such as attitude formation, attitude sources, attitude structures, attitude changes, attitude measurement, and attitude behavior relationships. In this article, however, special attention was paid to the transmission of authoritarianism and conservatism, and empirical studies in both sociological/psychological fields and behavioral genetic fields were reviewed.
By showing the high correlation between parent-offspring attitudes, sociologists and psychologists have argued that social leaming, as experienced in the family environment, is significant in the formation of the individual attitudes of authoritarianism and conservatism. On the other hand, behavioral genetic studies allow the source of individual differences in observed human traits to be identified as either genetic, or environmental, or a combination of both. This indicates that genetic factors cannot be ignored to explain the familial transmission of social attitudes. To bridge the gap brought about by these different paradigms, a fusion of sociological/psychological approaches and behavioral genetic approaches is sought, and integration of the findings accumulated by both paradigms is required.
|
