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Factors Relating to Misanthropy in Contemporary American Society,☆☆,

https://doi.org/10.1006/ssre.1997.0592Get rights and content

Abstract

Misanthropy is higher among those with lower socioeconomic status, subgroups toward the social periphery such as racial and ethnic minorities and Southerners, people suffering recent negative life events, those who do not attend church and fundamentalists, and members of more recent cohorts. For blacks, misanthropy is decreased by more social contact with whites, but the misanthropy of whites is not affected by contact with blacks. There has been some recent increase in misanthropy, but claims that misanthropy has shown a large and long-term rise are not well supported by the time series.

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      As a result, there is no recent research on the urbanicity-misanthropy relationship—only two studies examined this relationship employing quantitative methods (Smith, 1997; Wilson, 1985). Smith (1997) lists a simple bivariate correlation between urbanicity and misanthropy among dozens of other bivariate correlations in a General Social Survey technical report without discussing the topic. Therefore, Wilson (1985) is the only quantitative study solely focusing on the urbanicity-misanthropy nexus.

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      A negative attitude toward human nature was assessed with the three items (e.g., “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people”) of the misanthropy index. This measure is used in the US General Social Survey (GSS) (Smith, 1997) and captures the extent of the belief that people in general are untrustworthy (item 1), unfair (item 2), and unhelpful (item 3). ( Note that this measure does not ask for any feelings of hate toward people; hence, the term “misanthropy” may be inappropriately chosen here.)

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    This research was done for the General Social Survey project directed by James A. Davis and Tom W. Smith. The project is supported by the National Science Foundation, Grant SES-9122462.

    ☆☆

    Address correspondence and reprint requests to Tom W. Smith, National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago, 1155 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

    E. C. Viano, Ed.

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