How people respond to undesirable or deviant conditions such as illness or crime has always been of great interest to scientific disciplines such as sociology, social psychology, anthropology, history, or political science. Inescapably, the way these responses are studied and understood is influenced by prevailing explanatory concepts, and characteristic features of social control in the society in which scientists happen to live. Thus in modern Western society, the common and social psychological vocabulary used to describe responses to deviance strongly favors terms such as stereotype, prejudice, labeling, stigmatization, or discrimination to emphasize that these responses are primarily derived from mental constructions and malicious motives, and that deviant conditions themselves rarely pose objective problems for society and hence demand behavioral responses. These descriptions also reflect the fact that current Western society basically values tolerance or self-control as the major way of responding to deviance, while delegating the actual work of prevention, conflict resolution, punishment, or healing to formal institutions such as the police, court rooms, or centers for disease control and health promotion.

Although we believe that tolerance is a great good in our modern individualistic society, we have become increasingly concerned with certain theoretical and practical disadvantages when responses to deviance or social control are primarily analyzed in terms of modern forms of tolerance and its psychological aspects.