To Rod L. No, I don’t know of any attempt to develop indices of authoritarian follower behavior in the United States since WWI. People have tried to show a relationship between some economic indices and “authoritarianism” over shorter periods of time, but the measurement of the latter has been vague and unconvincing in my view. There weren’t any scales for measuring “authoritarianism” until the mid-1940s, and the first ones were highly flawed.

The closest I can come to answering your question in my own research is a study I did every year involving the “Continuous Twelve.” These were 12 RWA scale items (six pro-trait and six con-trait) that were included each year in my big U. of Manitoba intro psych student studies from 1973 to 2006. These studies have the methodological advantage of using exactly the same measure in the same testing circumstances and format collected by the same researcher in the same population year after year. The mean scores on these 12 items were pretty low in the 1970s, but rose (more or less) steadily, peaking in the mid 80s. Then they dropped down to a level about half-way between the low point and the high point. This conforms pretty well to a popular impression of “the times,” I think, in Canada at least.

As to how many people have been “RWAs” and high RWAs over time in the United States, that’s also hard to answer. It’s like asking how many Americans have been tall. My stated estimate that between 20 and 25% of the American population are high authoritarian followers is based on various polls that show something like a fifth to a quarter of the population reacts in an authoritarian submissive way no matter what evidence piles up against this. I would also add the point I tried to make in the last chapter of the book, that almost all of us are liable to act in authoritarian ways if the situational pressure is strong enough. So even low RWAs have to watch out about themselves.

To Gary W. For those who do not know the circumstances, Gary is referring to an incident in Alberta in 2005 in which a “cop-hater” killed four RCMP officers who were trying to arrest him on his farm. The man then killed himself.

The problem I have with this analysis is that we don’t know that the RCMP officer who said the force was not to blame for the shootings, and tried to cast blame elsewhere, was a high RWA or a high SDO. It may be that this organization has more than its fair share of authoritarian personalities, particularly in the upper ranks. But we don’t have any evidence of this that I know of.

We have had several incidents in the past few years in which the Mounties have denied responsibility for various bad things they have done, and it has undermined public opinion of the force. But I’m not sure this is one of those times. A witness to the events testified that the officers were quite vigilant when he saw them.

On the broader point of authoritarianism being based on blame-avoidance (for the followers), you have independently developed the same insight that Erich Fromm did into how the Nazi’s came to power, as developed in Escape From Freedom. I would agree. One of the things you get when you adopt the position that you have to follow orders, no matter what, is a Get Out of Jail Free card for your conscience. And I think that really appeals to some people; it lets them do blameworthy things they want to do, with “no personal consequences.” But I don’t think this is the primary reason for the submission, which I suspect is more likely to be fear. Blame-avoidance is “gravy.”

To Jesse D. I. Let me praise you for checking against your own possible biases when you found The Authoritarians was confirming what you’d already figured out. If there’s someone in your past who taught you to be careful about “pleasing facts,” buy them a cup of coffee.

If there’s one thing I would add to the assessments of my research program posted on the website you visited, it’s that The Authoritarians is probably fairly unique among such books in the number of times the author tried to warn the reader against overgeneralizing the results, exaggerating the differences between lows and highs, and ignoring the other factors (i.e. situational ones) that can affect behavior besides one’s personality. (Chalk it up to my own level of blame avoidance.)

To Marcia: I’ve always profited from talking to people with a philosophical bent. And you’re right, I do not like authoritarian behavior, although I hope I disdain that of the leaders much more than that of the followers.

As for what happened among my students when I lectured on authoritarianism (which only occurred in one class in the Intro Psych course, when the topic was personality), I studied that and so can answer with some data. Low RWAs knew I wasn’t talking about them. So did Moderates. But High RWAs also thought I was talking about someone else. So most of them did not “push back” against me or condemn themselves. They just missed the connection. And we know they’re pretty good at missing connections, they're unable to face threatening information about themselves, and they're unusually blind to themselves in many ways. So this fits in.

As to the Global Change Game, there is no version for  children, although it was used in high schools (Grades 10-12) often as well as at universities. My understanding was that younger participants played a less sophisticated version of the game, and it quite often ended up in a nuclear holocaust caused by one batch of boys playing “tough guys” against another group.

As to when RWA traits develop, I tried to give my explanation in Ch. 2. I think that, in general, most of us start out pretty steeped in following established authority. And I think, as you do, that the crucible is encountered during adolescence. But it’s clear from the Undergraduate studies and the Alumni studies that one’s level of RWA can change substantially during adulthood as well, all the way up to middle age.

I can understand that the items on the RWA scale will frustrate someone with a “relativistic rather than an absolutist” way of seeing things. I did try to accommodate the relativists (for I am one myself) by providing a 9-point response scale, so one didn’t have to simply agree or disagree with the items. But I do apologize to your brain if this was not enough. (The more common complaint is that the meaning of the items is too ambiguous.)

To Victoria H: I’m happy the book has spoken so meaningfully to you, and I’m sorry you find yourself in such an inhospitable circumstance. Others have written here before with the same lament, and I think the best advice I can give is to seek out others who may also feel alone and bewildered and need support. Two or three such people can help each other a lot. Being able to laugh together at goofiness is a great elixir.

To John R: Thank you for your observations. It’s an interesting question about how much an authoritarian leader can violate orthodoxy and still retain support. You mentioned Vatican II, which occurred when I was a deeply committed Catholic. I remember thinking, “Wow! Look at all the changes.” But my underlying attitude was that the Church made the rules for me, and it could change them. (Maybe if they’d changed in the other direction, like two meatless days per week, I’d have questioned their authority.) That was, I believe, pretty much the attitude of my Catholic friends. After all, we weren’t Catholics basically because of the traditions or teachings of the Church, but because we had been raised Catholics and our families and friends expected us to be Catholics.

But you’re right, I’m sure, about people who derive great comfort from the “eternal truth” of Catholic teaching. When the teachings change, it throws the whole kit and caboodle into question. So for such people, any bit of unorthodoxy is intolerable. (I tried to talk about this in the section on dogmatism.) You can see this in how quickly some Tea Partiers will abandon a leader who takes a pro-choice stand. Those leaders are no longer considered “proper, established” leaders.

I think you’ll find my experiments on double standards over teaching religion in public schools reinforce your point about supporting religions unequally.

Intemperate rhetoric may be one way of identifying authoritarian leaders (demagoguery) and followers (more likely frustration at not being able to cite facts or reasons, and their characteristic aggressiveness). But we may also find it coming from people who are not authoritarian, but who are deeply committed to their point of view. For example, the active atheists I studied and described in Atheists are probably among the least authoritarian people you could find, but some of them at least were pretty intemperate when describing believers, especially fundamentalists.

To Gary W: On “truthers,” we need some studies, don’t we.

To Patrice T: Thank you for your very nice comments. And yes, living in Minnesota’s famed 6^th District must give you many opportunities to study authoritarian followers’ reactions to flip-flops by their leaders, etc. But my impression is that there are lots of people in that district who are not high RWAs, and they are appreciably mobilized. Is this wrong?

To Leon B and Miguel: The “amygdala” MRI study gives me a good chance to critically examine something I want to believe in—which is the sort of thing we are apt to accept too quickly. The conclusion that conservatives have more active fear centers in their brains may turn out to be valid, but it’s pretty far from established by this study, in my opinion.

First, we know almost nothing about the study from the reports I’ve seen. (If anyone knows of a detailed report, please let us know here.) We don’t know how the student sample was drawn, how their political orientation was determined, how many conservatives there were, and so on. We also don’t know what the correlation was between size of amygdala and political orientation. We don’t even know if the relationship was statistically significant.

Second, the amygdala is a very old and complex structure in the brain. It has been identified as involved in “primitive emotions,” as the report says. But there are more primitive emotions than fear, such as anger and joy. And it plays various roles in memory. So if conservatives have horking big amygdalas, one could argue that proves they are more joyful (which my RWA evidence suggest) or have better memories. The connection to fear is just one possibility.

Third, the size of some part of the brain is only loosely connected to how "powerfully" it works. A lot of the brain consists of glial cells, which are not neurons but “supporting” structures. Maybe conservatives just have more, or bigger glial cells in their amygdalas. As well, how quickly some part of the brain gets set off is determined a lot more by the thresholds for its activation and the connections it has with other parts of the brain, than with the number of neurons in it.

The bottom line: I think we know from replicated studies that high RWA parents teach their children to be fearful, and high RWA students agree that their parents taught them to be fearful of a dangerous world. There may be an underlying genetic factor that produces a lower than normal threshold for fear responses in these people, which leads to the socialization above and interacts with it. The “amygdala study” would show us, if it is right, that these nature-nurture factors have produced a measurable effect in a relevant brain structure. But we already know that the followers are easily frightened, and so do their leaders.

To Gary W: I don’t have any new answers to your questions of what is behind High RWAs’ denial of so much that they do, and why they look past the errors of their leaders. The denial, I would say, is part of a general defensiveness (as shown in the “Self-Esteem” experiment), aided by the ease with which they get rid of guilt (as found in the survey about that) that boosts their self-righteousness. We also know from surveys that they are grossly unaware of themselves, and how they stack up compared with others, which is probably rooted in their strong belief that they are normal and anyone who is different is abnormal. Which goes back to their ethnocentrism, which seems to be rooted in early childhood experiences, particularly those in religion. And so on.

Maybe you could get a better answer from me if you told me more why you don’t “see a connection” among a lowered fear response, etc.

To Gary W: Thank you for the lovely blurb you posted on OpEdNews. It caused a 3x bump in hits on the website, which still (amazingly) gets over a hundred new visitors every day. (I know, Facebook gets that in a microsecond.)

Hello Dr. Altemeyer,

I would like to thank you for the present you gave me with your book. More than a year ago I found your book on-line and I have used it as reference for my book (whose title hasn’t been resolved yet but it has to do with spirituality towards the individual and collective fulfillment). Specifically, I used it for chapter 6 in which I dare to describe the true nature of a leader from a spiritual point of view. This is my foot note describing your work:

Dr. Bob (Robert) Altemeyer is a professor of Psychology at University of Manitoba, Canada. I found his work The Authoritarians completely free on line (http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ ) while I was doing my research for this chapter. He published the PDF version of his work in 2006 during George Bush’s second term as president and he decided to make it available for everyone at no charge because “a great deal was wrong with America by then” (see his website above) and the book could explain why it was so.  Dr. Altemeyer has researched intensively on the psychology behind authoritarian personalities and his research has been referenced by John W. Dean in his book Conservatives Without Conscience (John W. Dean cooperated with the prosecution during the infamous Nixon’s Watergate case). In his research, Dr. Altemeyer conducted innumerable experiments applying well established social science methods to support all his findings with data, just as he wrote: “Anyone who has watched, or been a liberal arguing with a conservative (or vice versa) knows that personal opinion and rhetoric can be had a penny a pound. But arguing never seems to get anywhere. Whereas if you set up a fair and square experiment in which people can act nobly, fairly, and with integrity, and you find that most of one group does, and most of another group does not, that’s a fact, not an opinion.”

I know most of the effort in your book is about the followers, not the leaders, but I believe that authoritarian followers and leaders have a common trunk of traits, that a follower might become a leader if the right circumstances arise. In anyhow, I am very appreciative of your revealing  work.

JAL

I see this just went up at OpEdNews yesterday.

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The Authoritarians Among Us

by Gary Williams

[excerpts]