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Journal
o/
Personality
and
Social Psychology
1972, Vol.
23, No. 3,
420-428
ECONOMIC
THREAT
AS A
DETERMINANT
OF
CONVERSION RATES
IN
AUTHORITARIAN
AND
NONAUTHORITARIAN CHURCHES
STEPHEN
M.
SALES
*
Carnegie-Mellon
University
It has
often
been suggested
that
threat
is an
important contributor
to
indi-
viduals' levels
of
authoritarianism.
A
variety
of findings
seem congruent with
this hypothesis; however, virtually
all of
these supportive data have been
generated
in
laboratory experiments involving relatively peripheral aspects
of
the
behavior
of
undergraduate students.
The
impact
of
these results
is
thus
potentially limited
to
these somewhat
artificial
situations.
The
present investi-
gation
extends
the
validity
of
this hypothesis beyond such settings
by
indi-
cating
that
economic
bad
times
(exemplified
both
by the
Great Depression
and
by
recent conditions
in the
Seattle, Washington, area) increase
the
rate
of
conversions
to
authoritarian churches, while economic good times increase
the
rate
of
conversions
to
nonauthoritarian churches.
The
implications
of
these
data
for
Marx's description
of
religion
as
"the opiate
of the
people"
are
also
discussed.
In
their highly
influential
book,
The au-
thoritarian personality (Adorno,
Frenkel-
Brunswik,
Levinson,
&
Sanford,
1950),
Adorno
and his
coauthors
(19SO)
devoted
some
effort
to
determining
the
factors which
caused some individuals
to be
authoritarian
and
others
to be
nonauthoritarian. Although
their data regarding this issue seem somewhat
suspect (Brown,
1965),
the
Berkeley group
was
nevertheless able
to
draw
an
apparently
reasonable conclusion
from
their results. Spe-
cifically,
they argued that
the
"threatening
traumatic, [and] overwhelming discipline
[p.
372]"
to
which some children
are
exposed
causes them
to
have highly authoritarian per-
sonalities
at
maturity.
Thus,
Adorno
et
al.
strongly implicated threat
as a
basic determi-
nant
of
authoritarianism.
Rokeach
(1960)
reached
the
same conclu-
sion. However,
in
contrast
to
Adorno
and his
collaborators, Rokeach
felt
that
threat
in the
environments
of
even mature subjects might
influence
these individuals' levels
of
authori-
tarianism.
In
Rokeach's terms, "The more
threatening
a
situation
is to a
person,
the
1
The
author
is
indebted
to
Garlie Forehand
and
Esther
G.
Sales
for
their
helpful
comments upon
an
earlier
version
of
this paper.
Requests
for
reprints should
be
sent
to
Stephen
M.
Sales, Department
of
Psychology, Carnegie-Mel-
lon
University, Schenley Park, Pittsburgh, Pennsyl-
vania
15213.
more
closed
[i.e.,
authoritarian]
his
belief
system
will
tend
to
become
[p.
377]."
This
hypothesis
is
readily testable,
and
various
in-
vestigations have
offered
supportive data.
For
instance, Rokeach reported several posi-
tive correlations between
his
dogmatism scale
and
anxiety,
and
Davids
(1955)
replicated
this result
for the
California
F
Scale. More
directly
relevant
to
Rokeach's
prediction,
Sales
and
Friend
(in
press) reported
that
failure-induced
threat
tended
to
increase sub-
jects' scores
on a
self-report index
of au-
thoritarianism, while success tended
to de-
crease their scores
on
this index. Sales
and
Friend also
found
that
their experimental
conditions
affected
subjects' willingness
to
conform
to an
authority
figure (a
reasonable
behavioral criterion
of
authoritarianism).
Fi-
nally,
Dittes
(1961)
indicated
that
threat
caused individuals impulsively
to
reach clo-
sure
on an
ambiguous task, Zander
and
Havelin (1960) reported that threat
led
indi-
viduals
to
reject persons dissimilar
to
them-
selves,
and
Berkowitz
and
Knurek (1969)
found
that
threat increased subjects' hostil-
ity
toward members
of
experimentally created
outgroups,
All of the
dependent variables
used
in
these latter investigations
are
behav-
iors
which
are
said
to
characterize authori-
tarian
persons;
all of
them were increased
420
