Political Tolerance is More Fragile Than Intolerance

People typically consider tolerance to be a virtue, whether it means accepting the annoying habits of one's partner or remaining calm in the face of everyday disagreements at work. This extends to tolerance for more substantial disagreements such as religious, cultural, and political differences.  

But tolerance is difficult to practice. People want to resist the things they oppose, so tolerance requires self-restraint in putting up with beliefs or practices that they object to. When striving for tolerance, people get caught between wanting to resist due to their distaste for the other person's views and staying calm due to recognition of others' right to hold these views despite disagreeing with them.

On the other hand, intolerance is easy. Opposing someone's view and lashing out at them are perfectly in sync. This makes tolerance subjectively more "painful" than intolerance.  As a result, people are less likely to follow through with an intention to be tolerant and quicker to abandon it. In other words, tolerance is more fragile than intolerance.

The difficulty of tolerance and ease of intolerance led my research team and me to think that persuasion wouldn't be equally effective in both directions. Instead, we thought it should be easier to convince a tolerant person to be intolerant than to convince an intolerant person to be tolerant.

Political Tolerance

My colleagues and I tested these ideas in the context of political disagreements.  Tolerance is a central pillar of liberal democracy. Political tolerance involves granting one's political opponents the full rights of citizenship, such as giving public speeches, seeking public office, and holding peaceful demonstrations and protest actions.

We surveyed hundreds of people in the Netherlands who reflected the typical Dutch population. We gave them a list of mainstream political groups across the political spectrum such as "right-wing activists" and "feminists". We first asked them to think about the group they liked the least and then to indicate whether they tolerated this group engaging in socially disruptive protest actions like holding protests in their neighborhood and distributing pamphlets and leaflets at the entrance of public buildings. Unsurprisingly, some people were quite tolerant of the group they disliked and others were quite intolerant.

We then tried to change their level of tolerance. We asked our more tolerant participants to carefully consider and reflect on the importance of public order and safety, which should make them more concerned about socially disruptive protests. And we asked our more intolerant participants to reflect on the importance of freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate, which should make them more accepting of public protests. To see if our nudges made a difference, we asked everyone if they were inclined to change their views about whether their most disliked group ought to be able to express their views by protesting.

We found that when more tolerant people carefully considered the importance of public order and safety, they indeed became somewhat less tolerant of disruptive protest actions. However, when more intolerant people carefully considered the importance of freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate, it did not make them any more tolerant. In fact, they became even more intolerant! Our attempt to make them more tolerant backfired.

Implications

Our findings showed that it is easier to create intolerance out of tolerance than vice versa. Populist appeals that encourage intolerance of the rights of minority groups and political adversaries are likely more persuasive than appeals to tolerance. Yet, tolerance is indispensable for our increasingly polarized liberal democratic societies.  When you feel tempted to take the easy and comfortable route of intolerance, you may want to remind yourself that tolerance really is a virtue, and it requires self-restraint.  Some day, it might be your own political rights that are threatened by intolerance. 

For Further Reading

Verkuyten, M., Yogeeswaran, K., & Adelman, L. (2023). Testing the asymmetry hypothesis of tolerance: Thinking about socially disruptive protest actions. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 11(1), 397–407. https://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.11269.

Gibson, J.L. (2006). Enigmas of intolerance: Fifty years after Stouffer's communism, conformity, and civil liberties. Perspectives on Politics, 4, 21-34. https://doi.org/10.1017/S153759270606004X
Verkuyten, M. (2023). The social psychology of tolerance. Oxon, UK: Routledge.

Maykel Verkuyten is Professor of Interdisciplinary Social Science at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He studies social identity, diversity, and intergroup relations.