The Need to Be Liked and the Anxious College Liberal

Robert E. Lane
Additional contact information
Robert E. Lane: Yale University

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1965, vol. 361, issue 1, 71-80

Abstract: From the material in twenty-four autobiographi cal student accounts of their political beliefs, a particular mo tivational syndrome is isolated consisting of: (1) a strong need to be liked as a person, (2) frustration induced by certain feel ings of inferiority and self-consciousness, (3) a flight into intel lectuality and drives for rational mastery. The consequent social anxiety and impaired interpersonal relations seem to produce a kind of anxious liberalism through the following mechanisms: the drive for rational mastery encourages prob lem-solving reformism; interpersonal discomfort with dominant elite figures encourages a kind of compensating identification, but not necessarily empathy, with underdogs; the need to be liked makes an ingratiating approach to distant, and often only symbolic, others attractive; and personified government is en couraged to behave, like the subjects themselves, in an ingrati ating manner.

Date: 1965
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000271626536100107 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:361:y:1965:i:1:p:71-80

DOI: 10.1177/000271626536100107

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().