Tolerance

Conceptualization of Tolerance

Several factors challenge understanding the nature and development of tolerance. First, tolerance has been conceptualized as putting up with ideas, persons, or practices that one disagrees with or dislikes, as the absence of prejudice, and as positive attitudes toward groups. These inconsistencies in conceptualization of tolerance make it difficult to integrate research findings. Second, the definition of tolerance as putting up with something that one dislikes implies that one can be both tolerant and prejudiced. However, research has often assumed that tolerance and prejudice are opposites and thus much of the knowledge of tolerance comes from studies on prejudice. This fact is problematic, as, although related, prejudice and tolerance seem to be separate constructs with distinct trajectories and antecedents. Further, the fact that tolerance is not by definition good, and intolerance is not by definition bad, adds to difficulties in understanding tolerance. Blanket tolerance may result in approval of harmful beliefs or in sustenance of an undesirable status quo. Tolerance is more context dependent than previously assumed; that is, tolerance and intolerance may coexist in individuals hinging on what they are asked to tolerate. Finally, tolerance has often been operationalized as support for the principle of tolerance rather than practice. Yet, there is a discrepancy between endorsing tolerance as an abstract ideal and applying it in practice, as to disliked groups. [Page 2249]In result, our understanding of tolerant behavior is limited.

Development of Tolerance Across the Life Span

Development of tolerance across the life span has been of interest to developmental and social psychologists for a number of reasons.

First, researchers have been interested in examining a universal developmental trajectory—the course of tolerance from early childhood to late adulthood. Establishing such trajectory enables detecting nonnormative changes and designing developmentally appropriate interventions. Old persons and children are less tolerant than adolescents and adults, suggesting that normative development follows an inverted U-shaped pattern, with tolerance increasing from early to late adolescence, stabilizing in adulthood, and then decreasing in late adulthood. This pattern is subject to various interpretations. The life cycle model claims that adults become less tolerant as they age, possibly due to an increased need for stability. In contrast, the impressionable years model posits that tolerance is formed when individuals mature in adolescence and young adulthood and thereafter remains rather stable. Research supports the latter model by showing that old people today are not less tolerant than they were when they were young. This result suggests that contemporary differences between older and younger people are an effect of generational change rather than an effect of aging. Further, according to a social–cognitive developmental perspective, the progression from intolerance in childhood to increasingly tolerant attitudes in adolescence can be explained by the age-related increases in perspective taking and reasoning. Tolerance might require an ability to see things from various points of view and require more complex forms of reasoning that are underdeveloped in childhood, such as understanding that beliefs are constructs open to different interpretations or that people do not necessarily act on their beliefs. In contrast, the domain-specific approach doubts a universal, age-related trend altogether. It claims that tolerance and intolerance coexist at all ages and depend on the type of beliefs individuals are asked to tolerate. This view, however, does not preclude the possibility of age differences in some dimensions of tolerance. Tolerance of the public expression of dissenting beliefs increases with age, whereas willingness to interact with the proponents of dissenting beliefs remains low in all ages.

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