Autistic Hostility and Social Reality
Abstract
AUTISTIC HOSTILITY AND SOCIAL REALITY by THEODORE M. NEWCOMB Presented as the Chairman's address before the annual meeting of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues in Philadelphia, September 3, 1946. I want to present a rather simple thesis concerning the changing of certain kinds of inter-personal attitudes. It is a thesis which, I believe, applies to attitudes toward others as members of groups-e.g., racial or class groups- as well as to attitudes toward others simply as individuals-e.g., a wife's attitude toward her husband. I should like to make it perfectly clear that I am primarily interested in hostile attitudes which are more or less conscious. The thesis has to do with the con- ditions under which hostile impulses develop into persistent attitudes. Briefly, it is this: the likelihood that a persistently hostile attitude will develop varies with the degree to which the perceived inter-personal relationship remains autistic, its privacy maintained by some sort of barriers to communica- tion. Such a thesis has an immediate plausibility. Attitudes, after all, are matters of judgment and perception which must take place within a frame of reference. If communication with others is cut off, the initial framework responsible for