Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
106
note that sufficient evidence exists to allow it to be taken very seriously. It will soon be 
seen that psychoticism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy are closely overlapping 
constructs. Although there appears to be no evidence regarding whether levels of 
psychoticism are rising, there is some research evidence, and indeed a substantial 
weight of longstanding clinical and non-clinical opinion, which suggests that we are 
becoming more ‘Machiavellian’ and ‘psychopathic’. And it is especially interesting 
to note evidence suggesting that levels of Machiavellianism and psychopathy vary 
directly with levels of urbanisation and cultural sophistication.
In order to further consider the merits of Pareto’s assumed link between liberal 
personality and creativity, this section will now devote some attention to that 
considerable volume of research evidence which has correlated conservatism with 
reduced cognitive complexity. It has long been recognised that, as Pareto sensed, 
there exists some kind of link between the two. Herbert McClosky, for example, has 
observed in his psychometric study of conservatism that:
… conservatism is not the preferred doctrine of the intellectual elite or of the more 
intelligent segments of the population, but the reverse. By every measure available to 
us, conservative beliefs are found most frequently among the uninformed, the poorly 
educated, and so far as we can determine, the less intelligent (McClosky in DiRenzo (ed.) 
1974, 267).
McClosky’s measures included educational data, an ‘Awareness’ scale to tap ‘clarity 
of one’s grasp of the social process, past and present’ and an ‘Intellectuality’ scale 
‘which assesses the degree to which intellectual habits have been formed and are 
perceived as attractive’. Small wonder, McClosky mentions, that the conservative 
personality ‘derogates reason and intellectuality, eschews theory, regards intellectual 
activities as dangerous to established arrangements, and perceives intellectuals 
as deviants, bohemians and nonconformists’ (McClosky in DiRenzo (ed.) 1974, 
275).
Hinze, Doster and Joe (1997) review various studies which report this same 
phenomenon in various guises. They mention, for example, Wilson, Ausman and 
Mathews’ (1973) finding that conservatives prefer ‘simple representational paintings 
over complex abstract paintings’, and Gillies and Campbell’s (1985) finding that 
conservatives prefer simplicity to complexity in poetry. Arie Kruglanski’s theory 
of ‘lay epistemics’ may also be called upon to further explore links between 
conservatism and reduced cognitive complexity. As section 3.4 has already 
explained, Kruglanski’s theory holds that individuals vary, both in their personal 
needs for specific and nonspecific forms of structure (PNS), and in their ‘needs 
for ambiguity’. We either foreclose or delay epistemic sequences depending upon 
how we balance these demands, which is to say according to whether we place a 
higher premium upon reducing anxieties provoked by lack of structure, or upon 
reducing anxieties which are provoked by a lack of knowledge and understanding. 
It is the combination of a high PNS with a low need for ambiguity which explains, 
according to Kruglanski’s theory, why some are more inclined than others to prefer 
‘simple and habitual conceptions’ as well as ‘fast resolutions of uncertainties such 
as those posed by problems and figures with incomplete closure’ (Kreitler and 
Kreitler 1990, 260). 

---

Pareto’s Psychology
107
Research using the ‘tolerance of ambiguity’ construct confirms that conservative 
personality deserves to be understood in terms of its orientation towards ambiguity. 
Low tolerance of ambiguity has been positively correlated with ethnocentrism and 
prejudice (e.g. Block and Block 1951), a finding which seems to have a lot to do 
with the fact that it entails viewing others in a highly categorical and stereotypical 
manner. Dean Simonton (in Pervin (ed.) 1990, 673) mentions that longstanding 
research linking authoritarian personality both to low tolerance of ambiguity and to 
rigid, categorical thinking links directly with more recent research on information 
processing sophistication which uses the construct of ‘integrative complexity’. 
Integratively complex thinking requires, as Simonton puts it, being able to produce 
‘finely differentiated and yet fully integrated’ representations of phenomena. This is 
an ability which is widely reckoned to be tapped by Schroder, Driver and Streufert’s 
(1967) paragraph completion test which grades individuals along an integratively 
simple/complex mental processing continuum according to how well they put their 
thoughts to paper.
6
 Tetlock (1984) used this test to analyse transcripts from interviews 
originally conducted with a group of 89 members of the UK House of Commons by 
Robert Putnam in 1967. He found that:
… both extreme socialists and extreme conservatives exhibited a predilection for simple, 
undifferentiated and unidimensional mental habits, and both poles were decidedly 
distinguishable from the more respectable integrative complexity manifested by the 
moderate conservatives and the moderate socialists. So ideologues of all persuasions tend 
to display a more rigid and narrower kind of information processing (Simonton in Pervin 
(ed.) 1990, 674–675).
Tetlock (1979) had previously found that low scores on integrative complexity 
will often be achieved by individuals who are predisposed to comply with the 
weight of opinion which forms within collective decision-making contexts (social 
psychologists are inclined to use the term ‘groupthink’ to refer to situations where 
this tendency to comply becomes so widespread that the quality of group decision-
making begins to suffer). It does therefore seem that Tetlock’s two studies place 
certain aspects of Pareto’s thinking upon much firmer ground. His conclusion that 
the integratively simplex thinker inclines towards conformism and compliance and 
tends to remain close to the political extremities certainly lends weight to Pareto’s 
image of the conformist and dim-witted ‘lion’ who will tend to populate the minor, 
‘intransigent’ political parties which find it hard to access the political mainstream. 
In summary, therefore, it seems that Pareto’s class I (instincts of combinations) 
residues make most sense as being so generally sketched out as to easily encapsulate 
‘intellect’, ‘creativity’ and various rather more specific constructs which can be 
related to the essential skills of the Machiavellian. However, given that distinctions 
between intellect and creativity continue to pose real problems for personality 
psychologists, it is unlikely that he would have got very far had he tried to be more 
specific. Individual differences involving both what has been called ‘intellect’ (e.g. 
Digman and Takemoto-Chock 1981, Peabody and Goldberg 1989) and ‘openness to 
6  One of the main attractions of this test is that it can be used to rate both historical 
figures and senior political figures who are normally inaccessible to researchers.

---