04/21/11
Comments:
It seems to me your RWA Scale tests not for Right Wing Authoritarians in what you term (Pp. 9) your "new fangled psychological sense" but for political conservatives and for religiousity which, one assumes you know, correllates with political conservatism.
I say that because you use numerous references to religion in the survey and political topics including abortion, school-prayer and gay rights where the politically liberal responses (support of abortion, gay rights, atheism & nudity and rejection of religion, school prayer, etc.) score low on authoritarianism. You then express surprise that "to extraordinary degrees" conservatives "turn out" to be authoritarians. Why would that surprise you, it's how you designed it.
You've corrupted the survey with targeted political ideology which assures that people with liberal sensibilities score low for authoritarianism. You could just as easily turn the questions inside out and make the people "challenging the law and the majority's view" people getting arrested protesting outside of abortion clinics. You could make the people "challenging government" in question 15 tax protesters instead of religious critics. Different result right?
You tested for political conservatism, pretened you were testing for authoritarianism and then pronounce the two are "extraordinarily" correlated.
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04/11/11
Comments:
Dear Mr Altemeyer;
Thank you for making your book available online. It was very readable and interesting. I read it a few days ago and haven't been able to get it out of my head since.
I was wondering if any studies had been done in the United Kingdom using your theories? It would be worth knowing where our political parties fall on the RWA scale.
Also is there any connection between high RWA scores and certain scores on the OCEAN personality scale? I was speculating to myself that they'd probably score very low for Openness to new ideas and very high for Neuroticism, since they are essentially driven by fear. But obviously that's just my opinion, is there any scientific data?
Lastly, I saw this article today: http://www.secularism.org.uk/muslim-boys-more-violent-if-piou.html
I think in some ways it confirms your theories since more pious households would probably be more authoritarian.
Thank you for your time.
04/09/11
Comments:
Thank you for the wonderful book -- there aren't too many books which I can say have had a big change in the way I view people and governments, but I wouldn't hesitate to put "The Authoritarians" in my personal top 10 -- together with others like "Myth of the Rational Voter", "Who Rules America", and Dahl's "On Democracy".
I have just one wish, though -- that you would make a version available from a publishing house! I've recommended the book to several friends, and I feel like I have to preface it with "he's really not a crackpot, even though the book is self-published; he's a respected professor". Basically, it doesn't help to spread the message. I understand and commend your decision to make it freely availble, but isn't there any way you can get a major publishing house or university press to publish it as well, instead of just self-publishing on Lula?
But regardless, my most sincere thanks for having performed all this research and having put it together in this remarkably clear and well organized book! It's difficult to present new ideas well, but this book does it.
04/03/11
Comments:
To Jon: I don’t know of any research on RWA or SDO scores among top officials in corporations. I did present a lot of data on successful politicians. My prediction would be that CEOs, Presidents, and Vice-Presidents in corporations would tend to be high on the SDO scale. I don’t think many would be high in RWA, however. To Terrance. Thank you. I think you’ve encountered our troll. He’s the only person I know who’s made this point. If you look back in this Comment section, you can see more of what he has to say. To JW: Thank you too. No, I don’t know of studies of anarchists and authoritarianism. My guess would be that “pure theoretical” anarchists (not the ones smashing windows) would score very low on the RWA scale as a group. As such they would be a subgroup of the Very Lows. But there probably aren’t very many such persons. Most Very Low RWAs, I predict, would reject anarchism as a theory because they view collective social behavior as a valid—indeed highly important—way to redress wrongs and injustice in society. You probably know such anarchists. Let me know if you want to do a study of them. (But they absolutely cannot be told what the study is about.) To Marcus: Yes, I agree. There is now increasing reason to be afraid for America’s future. A few years ago high RWAs were just a looming threat. Now they exert great influence, it seems, in the House of Representatives. That’s pretty bad. I only hope that, if they get their way on something like the budget, the moderate, Independent voters in the USA will see how extreme these people are, and many of them will not be returned to Congress next year. Yes, experiments show that High RWAs need social reinforcement much more than Lows do, and that will lead to a greater market for “arch-conservative Hate Radio” than for whatever programming Lows might prefer. To MDM: That’s an interesting idea, but I myself don’t think it took psychopathic social dominators to cement the connection we see today between authoritarian leaders and their followers. I see that connection as being millions of years old, and part of the social dominance pattern one finds in almost all animal societies. (But I’m hardly arguing that we should run our societies this way.) Unfortunately, I don’t know how we could test these two points of view to see which one is closer to the truth.
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03/30/11
Comments:
Just finished reading "The Authoritarians" and "Comment on the Tea Party Movement." Very informative. I have always felt that is what is most important is not what people do but why they do what they do. Motivation is better indicator of character than action. Knowing now, why the Tea Party/Authoritarians do what they do, what their motivation is behind their willful ignorance only makes me much more afraid as more of America become part of the in-group of ignorance and knee-jerk prejudice, hate and xenophobia.
As someone who is involved in media it also explained why 9 out of 10 hours of talk radio are Conservative/Hate Talk in the USA. There is not much of a market for low RWAs since they really don't need to hear people agreeing with them.
03/19/11
Comments:
Bob,
Great book! A lot of this I was already aware of from my studies into political theory and anecdotal evidence from my own personal experiences; I just didn't have the studies to back it up. Your experiments make one of the best cases I have ever seen for the political ideology of Anarchism; although, I'm sure that was not your intent. I mean of course the actual political philosophy expounded by Michael Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and (most recently) Noam Chomsky - not necessarily the same thing as whatever motivates some teenagers in black hoodies. So, I would love to know if you think a rock bottom score on the RWA scale of 20 is desirable (also, rock bottom score on SD) and if you have done studies of RWA and Social Dominators distinguished by social class/income/wealth and clarification on the percent of the U.S. population that is:
1) Double Highs
2) Low RWA / High SD
3) Double Lows
Thanks!
- Joseph
03/19/11
Comments:
Dear Bob..
Thank you for such a brilliant book and the Comment on the Tea Party
I have referred to it many times in some postings on various web sites praising its brilliance. A few times I get a comment back challenging the Tea Party essay on a the date you said the first meeting took place in January I told that its lies as the date is inaccurate; the comments claim the date was actually a different date from that and refer me to a facebook page proving their claims. it is only a few weeks different but as you know by the mentality of those people, they dismiss the entire thing because of that one issue i do not recall the date they said was correct but just wanted to pass that along
keep up the brilliant pieces!!!
terence
03/18/11
Comments:
Dr. Altemayer,
Thank you so much for 'The Authoritarians'. I love it. Aside from the research and reasoning in the text (which is excellent), you should be applauded for providing one of the most interesting free book-length reads on the internet.
The link to the .pdf of 'The Authoritarians' does not seem to be working today. I hope it is just because so many people are trying to read your work.
-Paul
03/17/11
Comments:
Thanks for the wonderful article. I was wondering if you know of any research being done on the make up of Private corporations and Politics and what percentage of the TOP officials fit the descriptions. I was wondering if these fields attract and actually reward the different types of authoritarian personalities. My concern is that many (not all but the majority) that hold power over others are of a sociopathic nature due to the structure of such institutions (Top down management and well politically its a rather obvious that politics is more about image and than substance, at least in this country).
03/07/11
Comments:
To Walter: I'm in no position to comment on the behavior of "string theorists," except to say that like most quantum mechanics theories and the phenomena they try to explain, I am easily baffled. My own version of "string theory," which I recommend to anyone like me who gets angry easily when hoses, electrical cords, clotheslines, etc. get caught, is that the First Law of String is that it wants to get tangled on something, and will use itself if nothing else is at hand.
To Gary W. The supposed Palin Freudian slip about "what they know" may not be a slip at all, just some ambiguous use of a pronoun. She may have meant that officials have not let the American people know what the officials know...which of course officials very often keep to themselves.
To Walter: Yes, as I've said before, Escape from Freedom was a real eye-opener when it was written. But Fromm's explanation of why some people want to escape from freedom is very hard to test and has been pretty much ignored for decades.
To Dave: No, I don't know anything about Paul Ray and his three-part division of American society. My first question would be, how general are these generalizations? And my second question would be, with this and other such typologies, how many people don't fit in any of these three categories?
To Rob L. I'm not sure what your question means, so forgive me if I go off on a wrong tact here. If we take a Middle East dictatorship, such as in Libya now, (understand that I'm making vast overgeneralizations in the interest of giving you some sort of an answer) then SDOs will like it, and try to rise in the power structure. This is their kind of gov't. High RWAs will also tend to like it if they grew up in it. It's the established, "legitimate" authority. The people fighting the regime now would be, by and large, low RWAs and moderates.
Exceptions will inevitably exist. Some SDOs may decide, for example, that the dictatorship is going to fall, and they may spring to the reformers' cause. This is always a danger in revolutions: that they end up being led by the same sort of people whom the people were revolting against. That certainly happened in Iran. And some high RWAs may oppose the dictatorship if the tyrant makes the fatal mistake of alienating other leaders to whom the high RWAs are also loyal and submissive, such as religious leaders.
To Mike B. This is a very interesting idea, and makes me wish I were still a prof and still collecting data. (So here's another thesis topic for a grad student in psych.) Coincidentally, another person wrote me recently with the same proposition. If two people see something, it must be true!
My guess is that high SDOs will have been bullies as children much more than most people were. And high RWAs will have tried to join their ranks, because that was the safest place to be. (Of course, if the bully was picking on kids because of a high RWA feature of the victims, such as their religion, as Hitler did to the Jehovah's Witnesses, then the high RWAs will not join the gang. But I doubt they'd resist rather than submit to the bullying.)
Thanks for mentioning this book on Democratic Underground. There's always a spurt of readers coming from that site whenever you do.
03/06/11
Comments:
I think I may have written you before via email. But just wanted to add my 2 cents here with these great comments with a guarantee it to be worth every penny.
When talking to or bloging with RWA, I find they dont comprehend the definition of RWA as mentioned in previous comments above. Therefor I make it simpler for them to understand.
I prefer to call these people (RWA) “bullies”. It’s like in Jr. High when you saw the aggressive bullies (IMO a Cheney type) lead the follower bullies around. The follower bullies would hang on every word spoken by the leader, even when he lies (Fox Noise). Bullies are cowards and pretend to be tough by picking on smaller kids, the handicaped, and minorities. The leaders do the damage while their follower bullies egg them on.
Your book is important and I mention it frequently on Democratic Underground.
And the comments here are great.
Mike
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