In Bob Altemeyer's book, The Authoritarian Specter (1996), the author devotes one chapter to a series of attitude change experiments that he conducted during the early to mid 1990s. For those of you unfamiliar with how social psychologists conceptualize the term "attitude", the following definition will help: an attitude is basically a judgment or evaluation of some person, product, or idea. That judgment may be positive, negative, or indifferent (think along the lines of good/bad, favorable/unfavorable, agree/disagree).

Altemeyer's series of attitude change experiments followed a basic pre-test/post-test design. Participants were first asked to complete a questionnaire on their attitudes toward some particular group or idea (e.g., homosexuals, feminists, the validity of the Nazi Holocaust that led to the deaths of millions of Jews) and also were asked to complete Altemeyer's Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) Scale. A few weeks later, the same participants would be randomly assigned to either a hate speech condition (where they would read some tract or pamphlet containing hate speech) or a neutral condition, and were subsequently asked to complete the same attitude questionnaire that they had completed a few weeks earlier.

Altemeyer then compared pre and post test attitudes toward the specific target (see above) in order to determine if either of the treatment conditions led to a change in attitudes toward the target. The basic upshot of Altemeyer's experiments can be summed up as follows: as a general rule, exposure to hate literature led to a significantly less favorable attitude toward the target of that literature, whereas participants in the neutral conditions typically showed no significant change in attitudes. What I find especially interesting (and troubling) is that this effect was found regardless of participants' level of RWA. Low RWA participants were affected just as strongly by hate literature as high RWA participants.

One can see readily why hate propaganda is so effective. People, regardless of ideology, seem to be easily suckered by hate propaganda - even when they should know better. Hitler's observation in Mein Kampf that, "[t]he receptivity of the great masses is extremely limited, their intelligence is small, and their forgetfulness is enormous," appears to have some empirical validity.