If the people who are not social dominators and right-wing authoritarians want to have those same rights in the future, they, you, had better do those same things too, now. You do have the right to remain silent, but you’ll do so at everyone’s peril. You can’t sit these elections out and say “Politics is dirty; I’ll not be part of it,” or “Nothing can change the way things are done now.”The social dominators want you to be disgusted with politics, they want you to feel hopeless, they want you out of their way. They want democracy to fail, they want your freedoms stricken, they want equality destroyed as a value, they want to control everything and everybody, they want it all. And they have an army of authoritarian followers marching with the militancy of “that old-time religion” on a crusade that will make it happen, if you let them.

Research shows most people are not in this army. However Americans have, for the most part, been standing on the sidewalk quietly staring at this authoritarian parade as it marches on. You can watch it tear American democracy apart, bit by bit, bite by bite. Or you can exercise your rights too, while you still have them, and get just as concerned, active, and giving to protect yourself and your country. If you, and other liberals, other moderates, other conservatives with conscience do, then everything can turn out all right. But we have to get going. If you are the only person you know who grasps what’s happening, then you’ve got to take leadership, help inform, and organize others. One person can do so much; you’ve no idea! And two can do so much more.

But time is running out, fast, and nearly everything is at stake.

O'Donnell: Evil Scientists Are Creating Mouse-Human Hybrids

 Charles Johnson
 Sep 16, 2010 at 10:04 am PDT

In a stunningly moronic discussion about cloning on the Bill O’Reilly show in 2007, GOP candidate Christine O’Donnell warned of the dangers of mice with fully functioning human brains. cont. @ http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/37203_ODonnell-_Evil_Scientists_Are_Creating_Mouse-Human_Hybrids

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`

Needless to say, I now have a new theory about the origins of this kind of thinking

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Doug T.

09/16/10

Comments:
Another environmental activist, anti-capitalist, Che Guevara loving "progressive" who was likely attempting to murder the governor of Kansas, and almost killed a college dean after slashing his throat open with a knife.  Right-wing?  Probably not.  Left-wing?  I bet so.

More silence from Dr. Altemeyer, as he continues holding his hands over his eyes and ears.  I guess this is how he has lived his life - ignorant of the facts - convinced that the "right-wingers" are the ones who are violent.

Keep your opprobrium against the political right and Christians in general.  It has served you well to this point.  Keep agitating leftists to perform acts against the political right.  Acts which are often violence against free-loving people.  You may be rewarded to a special place, next to Goebbels, where you can spend eternity debating the finer aspects of socialism.  Just don't forget to bring something cool to drink, it can get very hot.


http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/09/leftist_assassination_attempt.html

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Doug T.

09/13/10

Comments:
Dr. Altemeyer,

You stated the only longitudinal study of the RWA scores through time are for university students.  I anticiapte this is probably only a sub-set of the students - those who are in one of your classes.  Therefore, this study would be somewhat demographically-challenged.  Have there been any samples of the general population over time?

On the bi-modality of the RWA scores in the Canadian MPs versus the spectrum of RWAs in US legislators:  It's nearly the only thing interesting I found in "Corpus Altemeyericum".  I would like to see the effects of time on this study.  I bet you a toonie that the US is just like Canada, only 35 years behind it (just like how the USA abolished slavery 35 years after Canada.)

But I digress, I realize that you study what you choose, and you choose to demonize "right-wingers".

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Doug T.

09/13/10

Comments:
Dr. Altemeyer,

Don't worry - I won't use a pseudonym.

More on along the -you may be a canary, but just in the wrong mineshaft - "vein".

Left-wing terrorist attacks in Europe in are 10-20 times higher than right-wing terrorist attacks.

http://www.europol.europa.eu/publications/EU_Terrorism_Situation_and_Trend_Report_TE-SAT/Tesat2010.pdf
http://www.europol.europa.eu/publications/EU_Terrorism_Situation_and_Trend_Report_TE-SAT/TESAT2009.pdf
http://www.europol.europa.eu/publications/EU_Terrorism_Situation_and_Trend_Report_TE-SAT/TESAT2008.pdf

 
Its just a bit more "fair and balanced" in the USA.  Where only 3/4 ths of terrorist attacks were leftists...

"Leftist extremists were responsible for three-fourths of the officially designated acts of terrorism in America in the 1980s."
 
But, as always, the socialists are a failure at controlling an economy, but they are extremely efficient at murdering their fellow human beings...

"From an international perspective, of the 13,858 people who died between 1988 and 1998 in attacks committed by the 10 most active terrorist groups in the world, 74 percent were killed by leftist organizations."

http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/780410-SHVVvq/native/780410.PDF

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Bob Altemeyer

Email

09/11/10

Comments:
To Joshua Z. You have written me describing how you came to this website and assuring me that you are not Doug T. in disguise. So you are most welcome to our ongoing party here, and I'm sure our discussion will be richer for having your sharp questions before us.

Now to your points:

1.Yes, one could have put the phrase "must be strictly followed" in a sentence such as "Karl Marx's teachings must be strictly followed," and agreement would be an example of authoritarian submission. In the Soviet Union it would have been an example of rwa, and in the USA it would be an example of left-wing authoritarianism.

 It's in a statement about God's laws on the RWA scale because (as I said) it seemed to me some years ago that right-wing authoritarianism was increasingly being expressed in religious terms. This was always true to a certain extent, since conventionalism (one of the defining characteristics of rwa) is often expressed in religious terms. But as the religious right emerged, with its insistence that the country obey its heavenly and earthly authorities, and its hostility toward those who had other ideas, it seemed the three-part rwa syndrome was alive and well and forming ranks behind Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and others.

If this was wrong, then responses to the item would not have correlated very well with items on the RWA scale that do not mention religion, such as "The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas" and "Our country needs free thinkers who have the courage to defy traditional ways, even if this upsets many people." But the correlations were solid.

[By the way, I don't think you want to say the item targets conservatives and Christians. Elements in other religious groups also oppose abortion, pornography, and threats to the institution of marriage. Indeed, the idea behind the religious right was to unite these multi-faith elements. And saying I was out to capture Christians ignores the fact that many, many Christians support abortion, would not censor pornography, and support (say) granting divorces and gay marriage. It's not "Christians" who are particularly likely to show the right-wing authoritarian behaviors presented in the book. It's religious fundamentalists. As I say at the bottom of p. 111, almost all the findings accumulated on the RWA scale also show up if you use the Religious Fundamentalism scale. (But not necessarily, and never as strongly, if you use a measure of religious belief such as the Christian Orthodoxy scale, as I mentioned in a previous posting, and certainly not if you use a measure of religious identity, as you proposed.)]

2. I understand that you do not expect me to comment on the just vs unjust authority business. You do quote me accurately in your posting. I would just add, for the sake of avoiding misunderstanding, that I have defined authoritarian submission as a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in their society. If these perceived established, legitimate authorities are just and fair, submitting to them in particular poses no more social danger than stopping at stop signs. But if they are unjust and unfair, such as Hitler was, and the Communist dictators were in East Germany when a remarkably high percentage of the population was spying on the rest and filing reports with the secret police, then society has problems. That was why I focused the discussion the way I did in the passages you quoted.

3) I think you are misrepresenting my "underlying definition of prejudice." Prejudice is unfair prejudging, and I do not measure it with the RWA scale. The racial/ethnic prejudice measure I was referring to is described on p. 23, and you can see from the items there that it is not a matter of simply opposing homosexuality, sinfulness, abortion and pornography, and nudist camps. It's about endorsing unfair/misleading stereotypes about various minorities and a desire to exclude them from our society and even harm them. Do you really think agreement with "Black people are, by their nature, more violent and 'primitive' than others" is a "decidedly liberal definition of prejudice"?

4) Is the RWA scale also testing, possibly more so, things like Christian identity and conservatism? I take it from your "also" that you agree the scale does measure the co-occurrence of authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism (i.e. rwa). (The evidence is pretty overwhelming on this point.)

There is a way to test this, with the RWA scale and any other multi-item test. It is called factor analysis, which is a little technical but also pretty intuitive. A factor analysis looks at all the correlations among the responses to the various items on a test, and determines how many underlying things ("factors") are being tapped. It then tells you which items are particularly tapping one thing, and which items are particularly tapping another thing, and so on--for as many factors as the analysis pulls out. One looks at the items and figures out what the underlying factors are.

If you are right, then a factor analysis of RWA scale responses is going to find a religion factor, or a conservatism factor, that is different from other factors on the test.

Dozens of factor analyses of the RWA scale have revealed either:

a) just one factor, or b) two factors.

a) Finding just one factor is very rare for a psychological test. It means the test is "unidimensional," it is basically measuring one factor or trait, contaminated (always) by a certain amount of noise (measurement error). In this case, the swarth of findings in the book on acceptance of government injustices, Posse, electric shocking, etc. makes it clear that one thing is right-wing authoritarianism.

b) When two factors emerged, the two factors were always a pro-trait factor and a con-trait factor. That is, the items where agreement is scored as indicating authoritarianism tend to load on one factor, and the items where disagreement is scored as indicating authoritarianism load on the other factor. This has nothing to do with religion or conservatism, which appear on both pro-trait and con-trait items. It is called a direction-of-wording effect, and is sometimes pretty powerful on personality tests. But not on the RWA scale, as a rule. On the RWA scale, the pro-trait and con-trait factors usually correlate about .60-.70 in a standard factor analysis, which means that even with the direction-of-wording effect, the underlying connections among the items still rule.

As I leave this topic, which I hope is understandable (see pp. 52-54 of The Authoritarian Specter for a little more elaborate discussion) I feel compelled again to wonder if you really want to make the point you're after. IF the RWA scale is tapping Christian identity or conservatism to some substantial degree, as well as rwa, then that means all the findings in the book e.g. dogmatism, prejudice, hypocrisy, and so on) probably apply to Christians in general or conservatives in general. The best you could hope for is that the connections are just due to the "rwa factor" while the other factor has a negative relationship with these rather undesirable behaviors. Or at least no relationship. (IF there were such another factor, which there is not.)

However, the relationships are so strong in so many cases--much stronger than one usually finds in the behavioral sciences--that this can't be true.



3. I did not respond to your "simple rewording" of the items in your earlier posting because it involves too much speculation (on my part at least). But since you brought it up again:

The problem I anticipate with your alternative wordings is that they are likely to add mud, not clarity to the issue. Take "It is wrong to oppose radical new changes and sinfulness." This is going to fetch a lot of disagreements from those who think it's a good thing to oppose both radical new changes and sinfulness, but confusing responses from those who want to oppose one but not the other. I don't think you'll get much agreement, and a truncated set of responses means lower correlations and less predictive power. (The problem is not as great with the original item from the RWA scale, "Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us" because the phrase "radical new ways and sinfulness" is embedded in a broader context that makes it less ambiguous. Responses to this item range over the whole response scale, and are quite interconnecting and predictive.)

Now I may be wrong about your rewordings. I don't know your circumstances, but if you or someone else wants to actually test your items and see how well they interconnect and predict, that would take us from speculation to empiricism.

I do sympathize with your task. About 40 years ago research on authoritarianism was mired in a controversy about whether direction-of-wording effects played a big role on a scale consisting entirely of pro-trait items. Settling the matter required writing items that said the same thing as the original ones, only in the opposite way so that a person who strongly agreed with the original would strongly disagree with the "reversal," and so on. It took me ten studies to find enough reversals to balance the test properly. I never could reverse some of the items. Table 2 in Chapter 2 of Right-Wing Authoritarianism lists 15 different failures to say the semantic opposite of "Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn." It's not as easy as it looks. It's seldom a matter of just stating a logical opposite.

In fact, the single most common flaw in personality tests is the lack of good con-trait items. It's much easier to think of what a trait is than to select among all the things it is not.

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Doug T.

09/11/10

Comments:
Don.

Bravo to you. It's an unlikely event to meet a candidate for President of the USA. Of course most people won't recognize your name, as you failed to get the candidacy of your party. The Socialist Party must be so proud of their leaders who use the "n*-word" in public forums.

Submussion to unjust authority comes in many forms. Yes, the good Dr. Altemayer may be accurate in his findings, but omission in the study of the democidal Left is stark. What are these contributing factors. Is a submission to "junk science" because it has the word science in it a measure of authoritarianism?

Ok. Sure. Yep. Breaking into offices is bad. But is breaking into offices bad when your goal is to release animals which are being used to develop toxicology profiles for chemical companies? How about if you develop a maniacal obsession with a cable TV station not carrying enough climate change programming - have you submitted to an unjust "scientific" authority?

Your answer will be that these answers don't exist because there is no study to prove a relationship. Ok. Sure. Yep. My point is why? Why have the experts focused to associate the American political right to authoritarians.

History has proven time and time again that the real murdeous tyrrants we need to rid humanity from are socialists. Socialism is evil. The left wing should be studied to understand and eliminate the socialists murderous and enslaving tendancies.