The Need to Be Liked and the Anxious College Liberal

Abstract

From the material in twenty-four autobiographi cal student accounts of their political beliefs, a particular mo tivational syndrome is isolated consisting of: (1) a strong need to be liked as a person, (2) frustration induced by certain feel ings of inferiority and self-consciousness, (3) a flight into intel lectuality and drives for rational mastery. The consequent social anxiety and impaired interpersonal relations seem to produce a kind of anxious liberalism through the following mechanisms: the drive for rational mastery encourages prob lem-solving reformism; interpersonal discomfort with dominant elite figures encourages a kind of compensating identification, but not necessarily empathy, with underdogs; the need to be liked makes an ingratiating approach to distant, and often only symbolic, others attractive; and personified government is en couraged to behave, like the subjects themselves, in an ingrati ating manner.