Regional Differences in Prejudice :

Analysis of a 1964 national survey reveals that residents of the South display a much higher level of anti-black prejudice than residents of the Nonsouth, but the regions differ only slightly on measures of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant prejudice and on certain psychological measures--authoritarianism, anomia, and psychic inadequacy. This pattern persists even after introducing controls for degree of urbanization, education, income, and occupational status. Those who spent most of their childhood in one region but later moved to the other have tended to assume attitudes toward blacks that are intermediate between the views of those who remained in the South and those who remained in the Nonsouth. All of this evidence tends to support a subcultural rather than a psychological or personality interpretation of the higher levels of anti~black prejudice in the South. The analysis shows, however, that the variation of individuals around the mean could be explained in virtually the same way in both the South and the Nonsouth. Similar factors appear to predispose individuals to accept prejudiced beliefs, norms, and values in both regions, but the anti-black prejudices that they are socialized to accept tend to be more extreme in the South.