Human beings have attitudes, behaviors, habits, stereotypes, and values. And somehow these mental attributes are developed or acquired in the course of normal human social life. But how, when, and with what results does this process work? And how persistent are a set of attitudes and values once established in the individual?
The topic here is a deeply interesting question — what forms us as the adult human beings with values and a moral framework that we eventually become? For the past fifty years political scientists and social psychologists have discussed a theory of the formation of political attitudes and values that emphasizes the “impressionable years”. This theory holds that children are fairly fluid in their values and political affinities, and that young people are most open to new values and ideas in the years between 17 and 25 — essentially the years of a traditional university education. And there seems to be survey evidence supporting the idea that the formative events of that period in a given person’s life become bedrock to their political identities, with relatively little change in later years.
David Sears is one of the early founders of this approach. He presented some of his ideas as early as 1975, and in 1983 he describes the “impressionable years” hypothesis in these terms:
A third view could be termed the impressionable years viewpoint, which suggests that any dispositions are unusually vulnerable in late adolescence and early adulthood, given strong enough pressure to change. In other stages of life, people are resistant to change, and of course, even in the most vulnerable life stage, they would not change in the absence of substantial pressure to change. At all ages, the content of the disposition is irrelevant. A specific and particularly interesting instance of the impressionable years hypothesis is the generational effect. This occurs when a sizable number of those in the supposedly impressionable life stage (late adolescence and earlly adulthood) are subjected to a common massive pressure to change on some particular issue, for example, when the nation is engaged in an unpopular war. It presumably yields interactions of birth cohort and dispositional content. The final viewpoint is persistence, which suggests that the residues of early (preadult) socialization are relatively immune to change in later years. This asserts a simple main effect of age, with dispositions acquired primarily in the preadult years. (“The Persistence of Early Political Predispositions: The Roles of Attitude Object and Life Stage”, Wheeler and Shaver, Review of Personality and Social Psychology, 1983: 81-82)
This theory suggests that the ambient political and cultural environment of one’s “impressionable years” (18-25) represents a powerful influence upon his or her lifetime political attitudes and values. The theory has been subjected to some rigorous quantitative efforts at empirical evaluation, with some evidence supporting its accuracy. Especially interesting is Krosnick and Alwin, “Aging and Susceptibility to Attitude Change” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology [1989] 57: 3 : 416-425). They found a reasonable level of support for the impressionable-years hypothesis. Here is their abstract:
Two hypotheses about the relation between age and susceptibility to attitude change were tested. The impressionable years hypothesis proposes that individuals are highly susceptible to attitude change during late adolescence and early adulthood and that susceptibility drops precipitously immediately thereafter and remains low throughout the rest of the life cycle. The increasing persistence hypothesis proposes that people become gradually more resistant to change throughout their lives. Structural equation models were applied to data from the 1956-1960,1972-1976, and 1980 National Election Panel Studies in order to estimate the stability of political attitudes and unreliability in measures of them. The results support the impressionable years hypothesis and disconfirm the increasing persistence hypothesis. A decrease in the over-time consistency of attitude reports among 66- to 83-year-olds was found to be due to increased random measurement error in their reports, not to increased attitude change.
For the Boomer generation (or the middle part of it anyway), the impressionable years were 1966-1974 or thereabouts. Major events during the period? Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Major unrest along racial lines occurred in dozens of cities in the US, including Chicago, Newark, and Los Angeles. The Kerner Commission report on urban unrest was released in 1968. The war in Vietnam became more and more divisive for American young people. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had been enacted in 1964 and 1965. Large demonstrations took place in Chicago in 1968 during the Democratic Convention. The first Moon landing took place in 1969. The feminist movement became a powerful national voice for equality in 1970 or so. The Watergate scandal and President Nixon’s resignation took place in 1972 and 1974. Tumult, large social protest movements, corrupt politicians, a seemingly “no-exit” war in Vietnam — the impressionable years for men and women born around 1950 were very different from those of people born fifteen years earlier or fifteen years later. With only one or two exceptions, these events helped to create habits of mind that counseled resistance, the power of public opposition to injustice, and the particular evils of American racism.
How does the impressionable-years theory contribute to the question of the rise of far-right attitudes and values (racism, xenophobia, receptivity to an authoritarian leader, male supremacy) among some young American and European men in the 2010s and forward? Were there features of life for young men and preadults in the period of roughly 1995-2010 that would explain the eruption of racist and authoritarian attitudes in the cohort coming of age during those years?
Two large factors are often mentioned. First is the prominence of racist and extremist social media influencers who have captured sizable audience of young men to subscribe to their hateful conspiracy theories. Nick Fuentes is just one example. But this isn’t entirely helpful; aren’t these right-wing entrepreneurs responding to the demand for hate created by an emerging generation rather than creating it? And second is the drumbeat of “anti-woke” impulses, trolling and “owning the libs”, and deliberately flouting norms like “don’t admire the Nazis”, “don’t deny the Holocaust”, or “don’t use the language of vile racism” in political discourse. (This is reflected in the recent scandals of encrypted chats by young GOP activists revealed in fall 2025.) Some of this extends back to the reckless language of conservative activists like Pat Buchanan and the John Birch Society (link), whose ranting took place before many of these young men were born. These “anti-woke” thrusts seen to resonate with this segment of young conservative men. Offending people is the goal, not the unfortunate side effect. And the “manosphere” is where it percolates in social media posts, game chats, Youtube videos, and encrypted Telegram chat rooms. But here again — did the John Birch Society and the Tea Party lay the ground for the radical far-right attitudes of one segment of Gen Z, or do we need to look for other causes that more directly impacted the lives of these young people?
The rise of the political attitudes of far-right extremism among young people is quite dangerous for our democracy, and dangerous for the groups who wind up being the objects of the vitriol. The language and demonstration of racist and neo-nazi social-political attitudes reflected in the “Unite the Right” riots in Charlottesville in 2017 speaks for itself: this is a movement based on white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and nostalgia for “strong leaders” who can fight for these values. And Trump, his closest allies, and his MAGA movement seem to encourage this hate-based ideological world. Stephen Miller is a true believer and Donald Trump has a long history of racist statements and ridicule.
There is another complication as well: the far-right extremist faction of this age group is virulent and uninhibited; but it is a minority of its own generation. There are other “political attitude groups” in the same generation whose values are quite different — egalitarian, anti-racist, and affirmative of the value of an inclusive multicultural democracy. And, of course, there is the large group of young people who are disaffected from existing political institutions in the United Staes, frustrated by diminished opportunities for themselves and others, but inclined to turn away from any kind of political activism at all. They are “disaffected and disinvolved”. So the “impressionable years” hypothesis has a bit of a problem here as well: how is it that the experience world of the United States for young people in the period 1995-2010 gave rise to such different families of political attitudes among its young people? Part of the answer probably lies with the fact that the experiences of daily life differ widely across social and economic classes in the United States, across regions of the country, and across racial lines. So we might hypothesize that young men in Hamtramck, Michigan whose childhood reflected persistent deprivation; who did not find opportunities in high school that led either to better-paying job opportunities or to higher education; and who developed a rising level of resentment when they visited Somerset Mall in Oakland County for the standard of living that would never be theirs might develop political attitudes that highlighted resentment, disassociation from political loyalties, and an openness to antagonism to other ethnic and racial groups.
This topic relates to the questions raised by Desante and Smith in Racial Stasis (link), who focus on whether there has been substantial generational change on the topic of racial attitudes and prejudice since the 1960s.
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