Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Social Personality
53
constitute a particularly negative orientation towards emotion and passion which 
may well underlie his ‘error complex’. This coldness might even deserve explanation 
with reference to that ego defence against emotional expressiveness which Wilhelm 
Reich would later term ‘affect-block’.
3
 Pareto believed that:  
In the practice of the social sciences one must be especially on one’s guard against 
intrusions of personal sentiments; for a writer is inclined to look not for what is and 
nothing else, but for what ought to be in order to fit in with his religious, moral, patriotic, 
humanitarian, or other sentiments (Pareto 1935, §1737).
We may agree with Pareto on this and many similar points made within the ‘Treatise’, 
yet still find many ways in which we gain from interactions between sentiment and 
thought. In his (2003) ‘The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics’, 
George Marcus concerns himself with mind-brain interaction. He argues that our 
brains contain ‘emotional appraisal systems’ which structure how our conscious 
minds engage with the world by providing preconscious emotional appraisals of 
environmental stimuli. As Marcus et al. (2000) had previously observed, these 
appraisals occur several hundred milliseconds before our conscious mental 
perceptions; hence, when our minds perceive stimili, these arrive with emotional 
appraisals already attached by our brains. Most notable amongst these appraisal 
systems are our ‘disposition systems’ and ‘surveillance systems’. The purpose of the 
disposition system is to support our habits (or heuristics) by enthusing us to engage 
these in familiar circumstances, and by making us feel anger or despair when we 
disengage these things. This helps us routinise complex tasks, it reduces the quantity 
of information we require to act, and it releases mental processing capacity so we 
may accept heavier mental workloads or focus our minds. Our surveillance systems, 
on the other hand, provide emotional cues which help us cope with change and the 
unfamiliar, in particular by making us feel anxious. These feelings, Marcus argues, 
have value by making us review our threat-preparedness and question whether our 
habits are appropriate under changing conditions. Marcus draws attention to the 
particular role of anxiety in determining how these systems interact. When anxiety 
is low, the disposition system regulates our use of existing heuristics; when anxiety 
is high, the surveillance system engages, leading us to make new judgments based 
upon fresh information. Hence these systems represent our frontline responses to 
environmental uncertainty. They prime us with immediate impressions of what is 
uncertain and what is not, what carries risk and what is safe. 
Marcus’ theory cannot put to rest the many intrapsychic conflicts and structural 
deficiencies of personality which lead many to fear their emotions, but it can 
at least sensitise us to the fact that we should value our emotions and use them 
well (which might even have some therapeutic potential for those who fear their 
emotions). However, what he says concerning our political lives asks us to raise 
our evaluations of emotion even further. He suggests we should recognise the 
3  Although we cannot be certain about this, we can be more confident that Pareto’s 
orientation towards emotion will appeal especially to the conservative-authoritarian mind, 
which, as the next chapter shows, seems related to higher levels of emotional repression, 
numbness and blockage.

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Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
54
functional value of emotion displayed on collective, political levels, together with 
the rhetoric which stokes this passion, because, within such contexts too, emotions 
are essential to processes of political judgment. They should count amongst the 
elements of our reasonableness, and we must understand them if we are to increase 
our reasonableness. To that end, a literature is developing which explores how our 
emotional appraisal systems influence political cognition (Marcus et al. 2005). 
The closely related question of how these systems relate to personality structure is 
also still in its infancy. Wolak and Marcus (2006) show that individual differences 
influence both the intensity of our ‘policy anger’ responses to ‘policy threat’, 
and of our emotional responses which prompt us to learn about and engage with 
political issues. This research raises the possibility that our personalities may shape 
our orientations towards uncertainty, in part through structuring influences upon 
our emotional appraisal systems. It also follows from this research that we should 
perhaps raise the status of the emotional appraisal system to become a centrepiece 
of social personality, and credit it with particular significance as an element of social 
personality capable of providing heuristic guidance under uncertain conditions. 
Peter Marris’ (1996) also uses psychological theory to explain our non-rational 
motivations. He views these as consisting to a large extent of our strategies for 
managing social relations. Marris draws upon John Bowlby’s theory of early 
childhood attachment (which owes much to psychoanalysis) to argue that how we 
experience uncertainty as adults depends upon the extent to which we achieved 
secure attachments in early childhood. This is because it is in childhood that ‘[the] 
mental organisation of attachment experiences sets the context in which all future 
experiences of and opportunities for attachment will be interpreted’ (Marris 1996, 
43). And so the meanings which we construct to make sense of our attachment 
relations in adulthood, for example with political institutions or employers, are said 
to derive in large measure from those models of specific attachment relationships 
developed throughout infancy. Part of Marris’ purpose in centralising the influence 
of meanings upon behaviour, is to more adequately represent human adaptability 
(through interaction between meanings and the circumstances where they are applied) 
than would be achieved if behaviour were regarded as an output from the internal 
structure of individual personality (Marris 1996, 4, chapter 3). Marris is effectively 
delivering a warning that when we limit our attention to features of individual 
personality which might seem to provide guidance on how we negotiate uncertainty, 
we may neglect that plasticity which allows us to interact reflexively with diverse 
and fast flowing circumstances. Of course, this has implications for what it means 
to say that ‘social personality’ can help organisations negotiate uncertainty. To take 
Marris’ argument on board we must theorise social personality as encompassing 
resonances between personality structures and meanings shared widely throughout 
groups. Taking social personality as an empirical construct, it is important to 
recognise that when psychometric tools are used to tap social personality, they must 
tap these resonances to some extent. They cannot tap personality traits without also 
demonstrating that respondents have attached similar meanings to scale items. 
Marris does however assume some resonance between individual personality 
structure and the meanings we attach to our social relations when he argues that 
these meanings are influenced by early childhood experience. Some good supportive 

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