This is another excerpt from drclay's book (for which this forum exists.)[b]

8. I'm pure, others are evil. The authoritarian represses his/her aggressive and sexual feelings, then projects those traits on to stereotyped persons in the outgroup (see defense mechanisms in chapter 5). For example, it was Larry King's and other white men's dishonesty, laziness, hatred, and sexual urges that got projected to the black man (see quote above). The authoritarian, therefore, feels surrounded by people preoccupied with sex and/or violence. The psychoanalysts who wrote The Authoritarian Personality say the sexual fears come from an unresolved Oedipus or Electra complex. The hostility comes from childhood (see #2 & #3 above) too and throughout their lives authoritarians expect criminal acts nearby and terrorists' attacks around the world. They become paranoid, believing many people want to hurt them (which justify their aggression?).

9. Ethnocentrism: Everything of mine is better than yours--my country, my religion, my kind of people, my family, and my self. Research has also shown the authoritarian is more prejudiced and more prone to punish people (including their own children) to get them to work harder or to do "right" (Byrne & Kelley, 1981).

This picture of an authoritarian isn't pretty. How many of these people are there? Zimbardo's "prison study" suggests that the potential for authoritarianism may be quite high, given the right circumstances. It is estimated that at least 80% of us have prejudices. Hostility (especially the you-are-not-my-equal and I-don't-care-about-your-type) abounds in the world. Milgram's study of obedience (in chapter 8) suggests 65% of us would physically hurt someone if told to do so by an authority. Also, in that chapter we will see that most of us conform to social pressures in dress, in opinions, in behavior. Maybe there are parts of an authoritarian personality inside all of us.

Like all behavior, prejudice has multiple causes Duckitt (1992) summarized the causes of prejudice: (1) universal psychological processes in all of us, such as displacement of anger, projection of our undesirable personality traits to others, disliking people who are "different," etc., (2) dynamics between groups, such as competition for jobs, exploitation of one group by another, etc., (3) passing on of prejudiced attitudes, such as family-subgroup pressures to favor and discriminate against certain types of people, explanations of behavior (crime, desertion of family, drug use) are handed down to young people, etc., and (4) certain individual tendencies to be critical and unfair, such as authoritarians, angry people looking for someone to attack, persons with low self-esteem, etc.

Since the causes are complex, the solutions may be complex too.