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As a check on our findings the models shown in Tables 5 and 7 were estimated using the 1987 General
Social Survey data
(Davis and Smith, 1987). This analysis confirms our results using the 1984 data. For
example, education has a strongnet effect on the full Civil Liberties scale (b= .26, p < .001), as does the
vocabulary measure (b= .59, p < .001). Adding the vocabulary measure reduced the net education
coefficient by 144%. Similarly, the main findings of the group-specific analyses examining only those with
negative attitudes toward the itarget group are also confirmed. Education had positive net effects for the
communist (b= .05, p<01), homosexual (b= 1.04, p < .05), racist (b= .05 , p < .01). and militarist b= 06,
p<.001) subscales. In each case, the vocabulary measure mediated a substansial fraction of the education
effect.
21 Our research has several implications for advocates (Nunn, Crockett, and Williams, 1978; Davis,
290 1975; Well, 1985) and detractors (Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus, 1979; Jackman and Muha, 1984) of the
education -tolerance hypothesis. Our findings suggest that previous research that relied on Stouffer-type
items has not been seriously compromised by a focus on left-wing target groups (cf. Mueller, 1988).
295 Questions on these groups behave much like those about right-wing groups and responses to both types of
groups form an underlying tolerance dimension. By implication then, increases in levels of tolerance
among the American mass public documented by Nunn, Crockett, and Williams (1978) and by Davis
300 (1975) are, contrary to some interpretations (Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus, 1979), probably very real.
9. Lack of a perceived threat measure is not a liability. First, Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus did not find
a relationship between perceived threat and education. Second, Green and Waxman (1987) found that
education still affects how tolerance is expressed among those who feel threatened by a group. Our analysis
differs also in that Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus included in their omnibus personality measure a dog-
matism scale. Including a dogmatism measure might further reduce the impact of education on tolerance,
but we do not have such a measure available. Importantly, such an effect,
I though as yet undemonstrated
with these data, would be consistent with our cognitive sophistication hypothesis.
22 The difference between our results and those of Sullivan and colleagues lies in a distinction between
tolerance under ordinary conditions and tolerance under extraordinary or extreme conditions. We have not
305 employed the perceived threat, general norms, and personality measures used in the Sullivan model, but the
effects of education we found occurred net of political ideology, trust in people (psychological insecurity),
and feelings of disapproval of the target group, and without regard to the left — or right-wing proclivities
310 of the target group. 9) This suggests that the key difference between our results and those of Sullivan and
colleagues involves the differing dependent measures. We suspect that Sullivan and colleagues found only
weak indirect effects of education on tolerance because their measure of tolerance identifies extremely
315 disliked groups. For example, several of the target groups — the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers, and
the Symbionese Liberation Army —identified in the Sullivan measure have histories of violence and
320 criminal activity. They are nor merely advocates of nonconformist viewpoints. Tolerance ofnonconformist
but less extreme groups and the connection of education to the latter are probably underestimated by this
measurement strategy.
23 Importantly, the sort of «ordinary» dislike/disapproval we have indexed may be a larger component
325 of routine politics than is the extraordinary dislike/disapproval we suspect is accorded «least liked» groups.
There are probably many more occasions when we are called upon to tolerate those views we merely
dislike than those we find to be extraordinarily objectionable. There are also a number of nonconformist
330 groups whose ideas and actions do not involve violence or lawbreak-ing but whose views are well outside
the mainstream. In addition, other research shows that the positive effects of education on tolerance extend
to greater approval among the highly educated for social protest by nonconformist groups (Hall,
335 Rodeghier, and Useem, 1986). Our results suggest that education, partly via its impact on conceptual
ability or cognitive sophistication, is important for tolerance of the merely disliked group but is
unimportant for tolerance of the extraordinarily disliked group.
340
24 Jackman's analysis concerned attitudes toward broad social categories (gender, race, and class), not