09/03/10
Comments:
To Heather: Thank you. I very much appreciate what you said, and hope you feel the book is worth recommending to your friends.
09/02/10
Comments:
OK. OK. I get it.
Conservatives can be right-wing extremists for carrying out laws in a religious, capitalist society.
Marxists can be right-wing extremists for carrying out laws in an atheist, communist society.
Whomever you want can be called "right-wing extremist". I think that's a central tenant of liberals - whoever you disagree with, you can just slap a name on them, and viola they're a "RIGHT-WING EXTREMIST".
So the philosophy becomes a method deamonize the "right-wing" and call them extremists. Associate conservatives to being mentally immature - heck, they may be such sociopaths that the rational liberals may need to push for the institutionalization of these individuals.
In reality, the "left-wing extremists" are the ones to watch, as they have been responsible for the murder of about 100 million humans in the last century. But so much for reality. You're too bent on calling people "right-wing" when they should be called "left-wing" extremists.
Why not recall your entire professional study of extremists and call these people "left-wing extremists"? It's pretty simple to do a find/replace in an electronic word processing program. Substitute the word left for right... It would make just as much sense. Since you have already equated LWAs as being the same as RWAs, the research makes perfect sense. Call the authoritarians by the name "left-wing extremists" - all of them.
Then we could also re-write your questions to determine a LWA scale.
Everyone who believes in the science of climate change and the suppression of religion should be identified as LWA:
- The established authorities generally turn out to be wrong about things, while the radicals and protestors are usually just “loud mouths” showing off their intellect.
- Women should not have to promise to obey their husbands when they get married.
- Our country desperately needs to reduce government control and embrace radical new ways to improve our lives.
- Conservatives and evangelists are just as healthy and moral as anybody else.
- It is rarely better to trust the judgment of the established authorities in government and religion than to listen to the enlightened discussion of intellectuals in our society who are trying to reason.
- Evangelical Christians and fundamental Muslims who promote the inclusion of church and state are as virtuous as those who fight to separate church and state.
- The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to embrace technology, promote peace, and foster new ideas.
- There is absolutely nothing wrong with Christians forcing their teenagers to attend a month-long Bible study camp during the summer.
- Our country needs to embrace its values and thinkers who have the courage to continue traditional ways, even if this upsets many people.
- Our country will be destroyed someday if we do not embrace climate change and reduce our dependence on carbon-based energy.
- Everyone should be taught to think in the same proven scientific facts, to end debate on subjects that cause internal struggle.
- Technology and science still show the best way to live.
- You have to admire those who challenged the law and the majority’s view by protesting to include teaching controversial parts of climate science to our school children.
- What our country really needs is an engaged leader who will promote peace, and take us back to our true path.
- Some of the worst people in our country are those who are challenging our government, promoting religion, and ignoring scientific evidence.
- Current abortion, pornography and marriage laws should be modified to keep with current times, and those who break them should not be punished to the archaic standards.
- There are too many Christians in our country today, who are trying to ruin it by promoting their beliefs on us. The authorities should be allowed to restrict their radical behavior.
- A free person should be able to make decisions for himself or herself. The consumption of marijuana in my house in small amounts should be allowed.
- Our country will be great if we fully embrace technology, eliminate government, and get forbid climate skeptics who deny proven science.
- Science shows us the best way to live life; everybody should follow these best practices.
- Evangelical Christians should be praised for being brave enough to defy proven science.
- This country would work a lot better if conservatives would just shut up and accept that change is needed in society.
Now that would be interesting... A LWA profile to determine who supports the real extremists, who believe in murder - the liberals. Is religion any different than a belief in an unproven science - like global warming er. I mean "climate change". Am I supposed to not understand that most of N. America was under a half km of ice 12,000 years ago and before that it was much warmer... Is the promotion of a central ideology of atheism any different than promoting a book of fairy tales about Chairman Mao, or Christianity? I have found it humorous that the proper English seem to treat Darwinism with near-religious fervor. The absence of religion has not stopped extremism, as proven by the Soviets and Maoists. The left-wing atheist extremists have prevailed, showing their bigoted ways in human history with disastrous consequences. Lastly, I find it humorous and a bit revealing that you opine that wiretaps are bad and therefore Bush is bad. You also note the RWEs may allow the torture and even execution of their fellow citizens. Wow. I'm glad Bush didn't authorize the execution of a fellow citizen, without trial, only for executing their freedom of speech. Obama has issued just such an order to execute an American citizen, after extending the wiretap issue. That must make Obama worse than Bush on your scale. The LWEs are the group to fear. Socialism has a much higher coincidence with totalitarianism authoritarian rule. Capitalism supports democracy and freedom. Alas, my argument falls on deaf ears, as I realize that old liberals like to debate, and continue their bias against conservatives. The association of "right-wing" and extremist must continue, even though the left-wingers are the ones to fear. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/07/assassinations
09/02/10
Comments:
Your history of the Tea Party movement is incorrect.
The founding of the Tea Party was with the Ticker Forum and FedUpUSA protesting in April 2008. These Conservatives were protesting the Bush bailouts. But, hey for a liberal, you're only off by about a year, so that's at least a start.
The Tea Party activists were formed to protest Bush and financial bailouts of corporations using tax dollars..... http://fedupusa.org/2010/03/09/fedupusa-the-original-tea-partiers/
http://tickerforum.org/cgi-ticker/akcs-www?post=62255
http://fedupusa.org/about-us/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_protests
1) The group protesting here, in April 25, 2008:
2) The group was named FedUpUSA. Their website is here:
http://fedupusa.org/2010/03/09/fedupusa-the-original-tea-partiers/ 3) The FedUpUSA group was founded by members of the Ticker Forum, as discussed here:
http://fedupusa.org/about-us/ 4) The Ticker Forum, discussed the protest against Wall Street bailouts here:
http://tickerforum.org/cgi-ticker/akcs-www?post=62255
There you have it...
The Ticker Forum conservatives against Bush's bailout of Wall Street banks founded FedUpUSA, which founded the Tea Party protests. 1) Conservatives against Bush --> 2) Ticker Forum --> 3) FedUpUSA --> 4) Tea Party.
-------------------
I realize that logic and informed reason is too much to ask most liberals, but the truth is presented for those who want the facts.
Do you think that liberals have a hard time understand history, as their viewpoint is skewed their authoritarian submission to you? Is it their fear, self-righteousness, hostility, lack of critical thinking, compartmentalized thinking, herd mentality, dogmatism, ethnocentrism, or prejudice which skews the liberal to post here believing that your inaccurate information is factual?
Are you researching the mentality of liberals, when posting lies and mis-information only to judge how liberals will react?
08/31/10
Comments:
Thanks for putting your book up, Bob. You've given me a lot to think about, and explained a few things that have been bothering me lately.
08/22/10
Comments:
To Tom C: Thank you very much for recommending this website to so many people. I hope your friends find it worth their time. Or, have they stopped talking to you because of this?
As for Newt Gingrich, I'm hesitant to call politicians "sick" based on their public statements, because they may have spoken for purely political reasons of gathering support. But (to argue against my hesitancy) I was amazed by the results of my "mirror-image" study of USA-USSR relations among American lawmakers (mentioned on P. 202). I gave legislators two lists of things that the American or Soviet government might do (e.g. launch a nuclear attack if it knew it could not be hit back) or has done (invade a neighboring country to keep it from becoming aligned with the other side). I thought that high RWA politicians would not show the pronounced double standard about these judgments when answering anonymously in private that they show when making public statements, like Gingrich's. But they were quite jingoistic, xenophobic and fearful on the survey, and showed a marked double-standard. So a lot of the politicians out whipping up anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican emotions now may be saying what they truly believe. Which is even scarier than just being politically opportunistic.
To Gary Williams: You may be right, but I still hesitate. I'm not sure of the evidence that humans became more fearful when they adopted a more sedentary life. Moving from hunter-gatherers to farmers could, I think, have made them feel safer, since agriculture proved a more trustworthy source of food and made possible defended communities. This may be wrong, but how does one prove that it is?
By the way, I wouldn't invest a lot in the Jost et al. summary of what conservative political outlook has been connected to. Psych. Bulletin articles often lump together good studies with badly flawed studies, and treat weak relationships as major finds, and ignore "negative" results which found the opposite of what was expected.
To Z. K. Thompson: You raise a question I've been asking myself since I was an undergraduate administrative studies major a long, long time ago. I see, as you do, the natural tendency for hierarchies to increase authoritarianism, at least on the job, and perhaps away from work too. There are styles and forms of leadership that weaken that tendency, by opening up genuine two-way communication, giving the "led" a real say in where the unit is going and how it's going to operate, institute protections against abuse of power, and so on. And on the broadest scale, democracy is a form of government that ultimately places power in the hands of the voters. So the effect can be mitigated. Your story of the woman who quit her job when her consciousness was raised over the evil she was helping her boss do shows another (and very brave) mitigation.
Is there research that shows people will look to authority when threatened by terrorists? Yes On P. 58 I mention a series of role-playing experiments in which I asked people to imagine a certain scenario in the future and then fill out the RWA scale according to how they felt they would feel then. The studies showed people have a marked, "spring-loaded" tendency to become more authoritarian submissive when they think society is being threatened by extremists on either the left or the right. (You can see whom this favors, can't you?) And in Canada when it appeared Quebec was on the verge of splitting off from the rest of the country, people in my central Canada location became increasingly hostile toward Quebecers. And it wasn't the High RWAs who did this; they were already pretty hostile. It was the middles and the Lows who reacted more hostilely. The bell-shaped curve didn't shift, it became less bell-shaped.
The ultimate test of your premise in Canada happened in 1970, when a terrorist group in Quebec kidnapped several officials hoping to trigger a revolution among Quebec separatists, and the federal government invoked the War Measures Act which took away almost all our democratic freedoms. Polls showed 85-90% of the citizens supported this. I did. (But I don't think I would now.)
Do LWAs become RWAs when they succeed? As you point out, it's hard to find that scenario and do research in it. I wouldn't be surprised if some did. But I think the surer prediction is that if SDOs are leading the revolution, you can count on them becoming dictators when they gain power. That, I think, fits your example of Lenin better.
To Theresa McBeyan: You must have had quite an experience in the Anglican faith, if fundamentalist Muslims remind you of them. The Anglicans in my studies have always been rather low RWA, low Fundamentalist, low prejudice, low dogmatism scorers.
And yes, SOME American Evangelicals remind me of the Taliban, and as I said at the end of the book, we would have Taliban America if they ever came into power. But I don't think most American Evangelicals are nearly that extreme. Still, I think they can rather easily be led to support such radicals, and call murder righteous.
To Arno Michaels: As I wrote you, you have traveled a remarkable path, and many people would want to know how you made the transition in your life. I hope you find the book on this web site relevant and helpful.
To Ben Martinez: Thank you for your comment. Others have said the same thing, which I mention in the blurb on the home page.
It's all sort of ironic, because I didn't realize how good a package the findings made of why authoritarian followers think the way they do until I put them together when writing Chapter 3. Then I found I could look at all the bizarre things that George Bush's supporters were believing and saying and connect each of them to research I had done earlier for "basic, pure research" reasons with no thought of applying them to that situation.
08/20/10
Comments:
After reading your book, I was finally able to understand, at least partially, why people on the right believe as they do. Previously, I had been unable to determine why people, even my own kinfolk, believed in a completely different form of politics from my own. This involved educated as well as uneducated kin or others. Thank you very much for enlightening me about this misunderstood reason for the actions of people. Ben Martinez
08/15/10
Comments:
Hi Bob,
I found your site after googling "authoritarian" for a piece I'm working on about restorative justice vs authoritarianism. I write for and publish an online peace education magazine called Life After Hate.
Our perhaps-too-long-winded mission statement:
"Brought into being as an apology to the world on behalf of former white power skinheads, Life After Hate has blossomed to become a collective peace engine fueled by basic human goodness, which is the innate desire of all human beings to give and receive kindness and respect. Publishing a monthly online magazine found at lifeafterhate.org, Life After Hate reveals and creates connections between human beings at levels ranging from interpersonal to international that serve as a foundation for peace and compassion. Combining thought from the magazine with creative expressions of art, music, literature, theatre, and fitness results in workshops and outreach programs that help young people realize and celebrate their interdependence and ability to resolve conflicts in nonviolent ways."
I've read your "Comment on the Tea Party Movement" and found it a powerful examination and exposé of a very dangerous trend. I look forward to reading The Authoritarians as soon as I get a chance.
Please consider allowing Life After Hate to re-print "Comment on the Tea Party Movement", as I believe that our readers would find it as worthwhile as I did. Not a bad way to help promote your book either.
In any event, I truly appreciate the work you've done and wish you all the best in the future.
peace, -arno http://lifeafterhate.org
08/11/10
Comments:
Very interesting read. Have always found American religiosity rather extreme. This book made it make more sense.
Spent some time in Kashmir talking to very secular Muslims, good match for my Canadian C and E kind of Christianity.
Made me think that the Taliban and other fundamentalist Muslims are also a very good match for American Evangelicals, easiest to hate or love someone most like yourself.
08/10/10
Comments:
I hope you don't mind some further thoughts....
It strikes me that when you become part of a hierarchic organisation, you in a way, have compartmentalisation thrust upon you, as with the example of the manager in the Govt department in my previous post. She compartmentalised her world into work and her 'real life'. It took the exposure of the cognitive dissonance between her system of beliefs i.e. killing children is wrong and the actions of her employer i.e. killing children, to break the enforced compartmentalisation, she eventually resigned her post because of this realisation.
Has any study been designed to measure the effect of being part of a hierarchic organisation (which all are) and the RWA score?
08/03/10
Comments:
Hi Dr Bob!
Thanks very much for your work.
I'm currently researching the function of hierarchy in Corporate and State power structures.
Isn't it true that as soon as you accept a job in a hierarchically structured organisation (as most are)
then you automatically move towards a more authoritarian outlook, failure to follow orders from higher in the hierarchy might mean losing your job etc, and you tow the line, If as is currently the case it might be difficult to find another job, this further increases the chances of you doing something which is against your values outside of work, debt also plays a big role I think.
As an example, I recently came across a manager who worked in the bureaucracy of the UK govt. When confronted with the number of dead Iraqi children (300,000) that the organisation she worked for were partially responsible for and when presented with the case that there was a distinct possibility that the leader of the organisation she worked for was a war criminal, she said that she was opposed to the war, but when she put her name badge on and started her work day she left her conscience at the door.
I don't think that this is uncommon, hierarchies do this to people, hierarchies depend on people being more RWA than they naturally might be.
Do you know of any research that shows that humans will look to authority when threatened by say terrorism? From Maslow's hierarchy of needs, safety comes before liberty. So if safety is threatened by a force only a state authority can deal with won't the normal bell curve of RWA distribution in the population be shifted further towards the high RWA end.
Finally if there are LWAs as you describe how do they change as a personality type if their revolution succeeds. I'm thinking of Lenin for example who was an authoritarian both before and after the Russian revolution so he must have switched from LWA to RWA, how?.
Cases of LWA succeeding are rare I know, but the distinction LWA and RWA is in a way false isn't it?
Best Regards
Z.K. Thompson.
07/31/10
Comments:
As for the Garrido comments, that it was written by a troll fishing for outraged reactions to the piece was also my first thought about why it was written.
But it appeared as just one of thousands of other angry comments on Garridos old blog (https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=4751151745311616135&postID=8123069408507170406). It seems to me that if the author was simply going for a reaction then he could have done it with far fewer words and without the many well-constructed, albeit faulty rationalizations the author of that remark found the time to put into it.
As I've mentioned here before, I spend a great deal of time reading and replying to comments I find on right-wing blogs. This doesn't look anything like the countless others I've read. As I was telling one of the journalists who voiced similar thoughts about it over on the journalism e-list I've called home for the last decade (Newsroom-L), this piece was of such length and careful construction that it just doesn't seem likely that anyone other than someone voicing their own beliefs would have penned it, and nothing at all like that of a troll seeking quick thrills to some outrageous comment they've made.
07/31/10
Comments:
No, of course evolution doesn't "foresee" problems, but in this instance what I was getting at was the chronic fear which seems to underlie so many high-RWA traits......a heightened level of fear that seems to have arisen concurrent to our adoption of a sedentary lifestyle. There has been no precedent for sedentarism, which is a lifestyle so widespread and complete that should it be the case that an entirely normal but genetically predisposed behavioral minority* (eg. for taking chances, being socially gregarious - or not) has a reaction to some element now inherent to that lifestyle, then nature will not have had any previous opportunity to select either for or against that reaction......in this case *fear*.
It's true that civilization and the technology that allows widespread sedentarism arose naturally; that socialization of the species arose naturally, and that fear and anger are all natural reactions to naturally occurring situations. So too then is it natural to expect that a behavioral subset will react quite differently to any radical change in their environment...including the one we all now find ourselves in.
Just as it's quite natural to expect that certain animal species -- and subsets within that species! - will react differently to being kept in a zoo or any other environment that species did not evolve in, I don't know of any reason why we should expect Homo sapiens sapiens to be excluded from this assumption as well. Do you?
* "The current state of evidence warrants the conclusion that
(at least in the general population) right-wing conservatism is
positively related to dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity;
uncertainty avoidance; fear of threat, loss, and death; system
instability; and epistemic needs to achieve order, structure, and
closure, as well as negatively related to openness to experience,
integrative complexity, and (to a lesser extent) self-esteem." (Jost et al. Psychological Bulletin, 2003, Vol. 129, No. 3, 383–393)
Virtually every one of these traits are things we can also expect from low-RWAs working under conditions of fear and/or anger. To operate under these conditions 24 - 7 I don't believe to be any great leap to assume bestows dysfunctional attributes to both the person and the culture such people are found in.
07/30/10
Comments:
Hello Bob,
I continue to recommend your web site to everyone I can. The information is more timely than ever.
I was flabbergasted to see the latest by Newt Gingrich .... attack Iran and North Korea, Kagan is a Muslim supporter, and on and on.
I believe that he is a very disturbed individual. I'm not sure that
Authoritarian Leader adequately describes him. I have to believe there is some additional pathology at work here.
07/24/10
Comments:
To Dave J. Others have made the same suggestion about Social Dominance and sociopathy. I keep hoping someone is doing a study.
Yes, the authoritarian right could cause a lot more damage if things get worse. And while I doubt the Republican Party sees itself as making things get worse, it seems to be following a strategy of keeping things from getting better because that will restore them to power. (Fortunately, the Tea Party elements will probably prove a millstone around the GOP's neck in enough races to leave the Dems in control of Congress, even in a populace determined to "throw the bums out.") So like you, I am not fearful now, but I do see the need for lots of low RWA canvassing and campaigning this fall in various key races.
To Tom. What does it say about society that fear works so well? That we're never that far from the Panic Button. And the low and middle RWAs can be moved to the right too through fear. That happened in my study of the effect of Quebec's threatened separation in Canada some years ago. So everybody needs to get better at remaining calm and collected and rational.
To David Kostel. I can easily agree that authoritarian child-rearing is more likely to produce high RWA offspring than other approaches (my "Hugh" in the book). But it is not the final decider, which is the child's experiences in life, within the family and without. The Experiences scale (Ch. 2) correlates very highly with RWA, much, much higher than children's recollections, or parent's recollections of how the child was raised, and much higher than the correlation between children's RWA and their parents' RWA. We need to realize that some children eventually resent authoritarian parents. And other factors such as higher education can have significant impacts on students from a high RWA background--just as becoming parents can raise scores.
To Gary Williams: The "defense" of Philip Garrido is so silly, my first reaction is that it's a send-up. If the writer really means what he says, then he's significantly out of touch with reality.
To Gary Williams again: Is RWA due to the incomplete development of the nervous system? I know of no evidence that high RWAs have incomplete nervous systems. I'd bet they've got all the neurons everybody else has, etc. (I would also bet they have low thresholds for fear responses, but that's not an incomplete NS.)
Good luck finding the "third variable." If you can make a more complete explanation of authoritarianism, you should get a major prize of some sort. But I would look elsewhere for clues than the two sources you cited.
One last thing: I don't think evolution "forsees" anything. The process seems reactive, not contemplative.
07/22/10
Comments:
Regarding where it is that authoritarianism comes from, I was browsing through .... I think it was Maslow's theories on childhood development wherein I saw something saying that we all are born with an authoritarian template (hard to call it a "worldview" at that point) that serves the infants relationship with it's primary caregivers very well. The extreme dependence we have on others for virtually everything necessary for life itself is a circumstance wherein extreme deference and obedience by the infant toward the parent serves both parties very well. It's only later on once the child starts interacting with other children that this kind of relationship with others poses a problem. And its this process of socialization that stirs the development of a whole host of intellectual-cognitive skills that we - as a social species or animal - go on to use as fully functioning and well socialized adults able to take care of our own needs while at the same time adding to, or at least not detracting from the well-being of the larger clan or tribe we were born into.
Now...I don't know how much of this is just stuff that I inferred from the quick scan I made while looking for things that made sense to me. So maybe he didn't mean or even suggest any of the above. But the decreased cognitive complexity, lowered empathy, fearfulness and hierarchical worldview are all things that suggest to me there's much more going on with the RWA than what can normally be expected from growing up in particular household. That argument may have seemed okay before when the differences seemed largely one of opinion and education. But the utterly delusional extremes they are now revealed as being capable of adopting looks more like the result of incomplete development of ones nervous system OR an involuntary response by the minds of a subset of our species whose behavioral predisposition toward carefulness and slow-going came with other elements that were benign when found in small, hunter-gatherer societies whose mobility and kinship made hoarding and violent competitiveness non-issues.
But the post-hunter-gatherer environment we now all find ourselves in provides them with abilities that evolution could never have foreseen and thus offered no genetic restrictions on the runaway expression of some of our more primitive and basic instincts.
Or not......I really have no way of knowing for sure. But with respect to the good Dr here, I just can't shake the feeling that there's some third variable going on that hasn't yet been plumbed...something that draws the many observations made by Adorno, the empirical data revealed by Altemeyer as well as those noted recently by Jost, Kruglanski et al in their meta-study advancing a theory of motivated cognition. It seems there's got to be something that draws the many observed strands together into a more simple explanation of the entirety.
Now I know that D. Atemeyer has forgotten more psychology than I've managed to teach myself since my recent fascination with them came about. It was only when the internet came along and made it possible for me to see that they really do say and think these things that my curiosity was piqued. Prior to then, it seemed more likely that it was media exaggerations or hidden and self-serving agendas by pundits that accounted for the few references I heard about this pre-internet. In an effort to be a critical consumer of the popular media, I had pretty much convinced myself that there must be two sides to this story as well, and that the reports of widespread birther-esque behavior must surely be spin.
But as time went on after the Iraq invasion and no WMDs were being found, yet the conservatives became even more belligerent and forceful in their defense of Bush and his policies that it suddenly became obvious that something else was going on here, and that it bore little resemblance to the way I had always assumed we all made our decisions about what was important in our lives. And learned authoritarianism just doesn't seem likely as a way to account for the diversity of symptoms were all now witness to.
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