Vilfredo Pareto's Sociology : a Framework for Political Psychology

Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology
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feelings of superiority which help us feel whole. Enduring feelings of inferiority 
are likely to stimulate exaggerated, overcompensatory efforts towards superiority, 
which might for example involve the projection of inferiority feelings onto others, 
or identification with others perceived to hold higher social rank.  
Fortunately, Adler’s theory gels with more modern perspectives based upon 
empirical evidence. As the section below dealing with Pareto’s distinction between 
force and fraud will mention in more detail, the mental states of humans and other 
primates depend upon brain concentrations of the neurotransmitters dopamine and 
serotonin. Those who perceive themselves to have high status within social hierarchies 
tend to have high levels of dopamine, which produces feelings of relaxation, whilst 
those perceiving themselves to have lower status will tend to have low levels of 
serotonin, which makes them feel frustrated and aggressive (indeed, just as Adler 
had earlier linked inferiority to aggression). Oliver James (1998) cites this research 
in order to suggest that its claims concerning status consciousness have implications 
for how we understand those feelings of depression and perceived personal failure 
so common in today’s ‘low serotonin society’. He draws particular attention to the 
pained social comparisons which individuals make with others whose status they 
perceive to be slightly above or beneath their own, in their efforts to reduce inferiority 
feelings. James’ argument thus breathes some fresh insight into Adler’s insistence 
that inferiority and superiority complexes often combine, and by extension, Pareto’s 
altogether hazier notion that there are distinguishable ‘sentiments of hierarchy’ 
involving orientations towards both inferiors and superiors.  
Further insight into these ‘sentiments of hierarchy’, which clarifies their closer 
affinities to psychological conservatism than to psychological liberalism (just as 
Pareto envisioned) is provided by recent work on hierarchy attenuation and hierarchy 
enhancement, undertaken by Jim Sidanius and others. Before approaching this 
literature, it is important to understand the general direction of authoritarian personality 
research over the last three decades. Robert Altemeyer’s (1981) development of the 
right wing authoritarianism (RWA) scale represents a milestone in this literature. 
Altemeyer’s RWA scale was born out of the failure of Adorno et al.’s (1950) F-
Scale. Adorno et al. had identified nine interlinked components of authoritarianism, 
all of which they theorised as relating to the psychodynamic conflicts of the child 
who has been reared harshly, and who journeys throughout adulthood with repressed 
hatreds of parental authority which discharge on political levels against out-groups. 
These were: conventionalism, aggression, submission, destruction and cynicism, 
power and toughness, superstition and stereotypy, anti-intraception, projectivity, 
and intense concerns relating to sexual matters. Altemeyer’s contribution was to 
notice that of Adorno et al.’s nine components, only the first three intercorrelated 
sufficiently as to justify the treatment of authoritarianism as a unitary dimension. 
This tight cluster of conventionalism, authoritarian aggression, and authoritarian 
submission, from which he constructed his RWA scale, provides us with a vivid 
sense in which Pareto was right to link the class II and class IV residues, and in 
particular to envision a personality type which harbours pro-social sentiments in 
conjunction with preferences for the use of force in politics. 
Thus established as a psychometric entity no longer reliant upon psychoanalysis 
for its existence, the RWA scale became widely used. Stenner’s (2005) review of the 

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Pareto’s Psychology
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literature on authoritarianism is clear that RWA studies have generated contradictory 
evidence concerning exactly what authoritarianism is, where it comes from, and 
how it is best measured. She stresses, however, that previous research attests to 
the robustness of the link between authoritarianism and social threat established 
earlier in this chapter, even to the point of arguing that our general understanding of 
intolerance should be founded upon an appreciation of this link.  
Altemeyer’s revival of a narrower, more psychometrically viable authoritarianism 
cleared space for other researchers to develop a similar yet distinguishable construct 
called ‘social dominance orientation’ (SDO). This shares with RWA its affinities with 
psychological and political conservatisms. Both fundamentally involve antipathy 
towards out-groups (Sidanius and Pratto 1999). Yet SDO differs from RWA in 
important respects. Following their initial development of social dominance theory 
during the early 1990s, Pratto et al. (1994) constructed the ‘SDO Scale’ and reported 
on its key predictive and discriminant validities. They define SDO as an individual 
difference variable which refers to:
… the extent to which one desires that one’s in-group dominate and be superior to out-
groups. We consider SDO to be a general attitudinal orientation towards intergroup relations, 
reflecting whether one generally prefers such relations to be equal, versus hierarchical, that 
is, ordered along a superior-inferior dimension. The theory postulates that people who are 
more social-dominance oriented will tend to favour hierarchy-enhancing ideologies and 
policies, whereas those lower on SDO will tend to favour hierarchy-attenuating ideologies 
and policies. SDO is thus the central individual difference variable that predicts a person’s 
acceptance or rejection of numerous ideologies and policies relevant to group relations 
(Pratto et al. 1994, 742). 
They found that men tend to outscore women on SDO. Furthermore, ‘hierarchy 
enhancers’ (i.e. student respondents who anticipated careers which protect, serve 
or benefit members of the elites) were found to outscore ‘hierarchy attenuators’ (i.e. 
student respondents who anticipated careers which would benefit the oppressed more 
than the elites). They also found SDO strongly related to ideological constructions 
entailing prejudice against ‘other nations, ethnic groups, and women’. Importantly, 
however, although SDO is prosocial in the limited sense that it entails positive 
identifications made by individuals towards favoured in-groups, Sidanius and Pratto 
found it to be negatively related to ‘empathy, tolerance, communality and altruism’. 
According to Duckitt and Fisher (2003), RWA and SDO each express motivational 
goals activated by some combination of worldview and personality structure. High 
RWA expresses the motivational goal of ‘social control and security’, which is 
said to be activated by a view of the world as ‘dangerous and threatening’. The 
corresponding personality component is ‘dispositional social conformity’ which is 
said to raise perceptions of threat to the social order, as well as the premium placed 
on the goals of social control, security and stability. High SDO, on the other hand, is 
linked to the motivational goals of ‘power, dominance and superiority over others’. 
It is said to be activated by a view of the world as a ‘ruthlessly competitive jungle in 
which the strong win and the weak lose’. The corresponding personality component 
is ‘tough-mindedness’ (which is said to involve being hard, tough, ruthless and 
unfeeling towards others, rather than compassionate and altruistic), which is viewed 

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