Right-wing authoritarianism
In psychology, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) is a set of attitudes, describing somebody who is highly submissive to their authority figures, acts aggressively in the name of said authorities, and is conformist in thought and behavior.[1] The prevalence of this attitude in a population varies from culture to culture, as a person's upbringing and education play a strong role in determining whether somebody develops this sort of worldview.[2]
This article is about the personality type. For the form of government, see Right-wing dictatorship.
The right-wing authoritarian was defined by Bob Altemeyer as a refinement of the research of Theodor Adorno. Adorno was the first to propose the existence of an authoritarian personality as part of an attempt to explain the rise of fascism and the Holocaust, but his theory fell into disfavor because it was associated with Freudian psychoanalysis. Altemeyer nonetheless felt that Adorno was on to something, and so developed a more scientifically rigorous theory.
The RWA scale was designed to measure authoritarianism in North America. It has proven to be similarly reliable in English-speaking countries such as Australia, but less effective in other countries such as France due to cultural differences and translation issues.[3]
Prevalence[edit]
Western countries[edit]
In 2021, Morning Consult (an American data intelligence company) published the results of a survey measuring the levels of authoritarianism in adults in America and seven other Western countries. The study used Bob Altemeyer's right-wing authoritarianism scale, but they omitted the following two statements from Altemeyer's scale: (1) "The established authorities generally turn out to be right about things, while the radicals and protestors are usually just “loud mouths” showing off their ignorance."; and (2) "Women should have to promise to obey their husbands when they get married." Morning Consult's scale thus had just 20 items, with a score range of 20 to 180 points. Morning Consult found that 25.6% of American adults qualify as "high RWA" (scoring between 111 and 180 points), while 13.4% of American adults qualify as "low RWA" (scoring 20 to 63 points).[23] Altemeyer praised the Morning Consult survey as "the best study ever done on authoritarianism".[3]
Relationship with social dominators[edit]
Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto created the social dominance orientation (SDO) scale, which describes people who crave power over others. Bob Altemeyer has used the SDO scale to study the relationship between authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders.
Authoritarian followers are attracted to domineering leaders. This is measured in one of the items on 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." They are more likely to obey and approve of the leader's unethical actions than a low-RWA.[31] And likewise, social dominators seeking power like to appeal to authoritarians because their loyalty is easy to acquire and hold if the SD just tells them what they want to hear, and they are gullible and will turn a blind eye to his indiscretions.[32][33]
Social dominators differ from authoritarian followers in several important ways. Both personality types demand loyalty from others, but RWAs usually reciprocate that loyalty whereas SDs have a tendency to betray their followers when it suits them.[34]
Social dominators lack the irrational thinking patterns common to RWAs, such as compartmentalized thinking and hypocrisy. They might often spout contradictory and illogical things in order to manipulate their RWA followers, but they are usually aware of the bad logic in their arguments, they don't care as long as it gets them what they want. Social dominators are also more self-aware than RWAs. For instance, RWAs often do not realize how abnormally prejudiced they are, whereas SDs often do (and are comfortable with that).[35][36]
The aggression of RWAs is mainly motivated by fear and by sanction by authorities, whereas the aggression of social dominators is motivated by a general desire to dominate others. Altemeyer has found that today in America, SDs are more hostile to racial minorities than RWAs, because racism has become less socially acceptable and even illegal, and RWAs to an extent want to conform to this norm even if it clashes with their natural ethnocentrism.[37]
Altemeyer believes this relationship explains why autocratic countries tend to have oppressive, highly hierarchical societies, where women, homosexuals, and religious minorities are oppressed; and higher levels of corruption. Generally speaking, autocratic rulers hold power through the support of a smaller fraction of their citizens than leaders in democratic countries do. Under these circumstances, appealing to RWAs is an effective strategy because their loyalty is easy to acquire and hold. By contrast, leaders in democratic countries (such as France and Canada) need to build a broader support base among the citizens to hold onto power, and RWAs are too few in number to form a sufficient base. The democratic leader is forced to consider the desires of centrists and liberals, and such citizens demand tolerance, liberty, and low corruption.
Politics[edit]
United States[edit]
Research has shown that, since the 1960s, voters who prefer authoritarian leadership styles are more likely to support Republican candidates. Supporters of former U.S. president Donald Trump were more likely than non-Trump-supporting Republicans to score highly on authoritarian aggression and group-based dominance. Furthermore, many left-leaning authoritarians have become less engaged with politics and voting.[45]
A study by Monmouth University found that 40% of people who voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election scored in the highest quartile on the RWA scale. By contrast, only a negligible number of Joe Biden supporters scored that highly. The same study found that those Trump supporters who scored highly on the RWA scale were more likely than other Trump supporters to endorse conspiracy theories, such as the idea that the election was rigged by the Democratic Party.[46]
According to Karen Stenner, an Australian professor who specializes in authoritarianism, authoritarianism is different from conservatism because authoritarianism reflects aversion to difference across space (i.e. diversity of people and beliefs at a given moment) while conservatism reflects aversion to difference over time (i.e. change). Stenner argues that conservatives will embrace racial diversity, civil liberties and moral freedom to the extent they are already institutionalized authoritatively-supported traditions and are therefore supportive of social stability. Conservatives tend to be drawn to authoritarianism when public opinion is fractious and there is a loss of confidence in public institutions, but in general they value stability and certainty over increased uniformity. However, Stenner says that authoritarians also want difference restricted even when so doing would require significant social change and instability.[47]
Causes of RWA personality[edit]
The roots of the right-wing authoritarian personality are mostly down to genetics, a conclusion that comes from twin studies.[61]
Education levels are also a factor, with a four-year undergraduate education found to lower RWA scores
by approximately 10%.[62]
Criticism and development[edit]
A recent refinement to this body of research was presented in Karen Stenner's 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic. Stenner argues that RWA is best understood as expressing a dynamic response to external threat, not a static disposition based only on the traits of submission, aggression and conventionalism. Stenner is critical of Altemeyer's social learning interpretation and argues that it cannot account for how levels of authoritarianism fluctuate with social conditions. She argues that the RWA Scale can be viewed as a measure of expressed authoritarianism, but that other measures are needed to assess authoritarian predispositions which interact with threatening circumstances to produce the authoritarian response.[63]
Recent criticism has also come as a result of treating RWA as uni-dimensional even in contexts where it makes no sense to do so. This include RWA being used in regression analyses with fundamentalism as another predictor and attitudes to homosexuality and racism as the outcomes.[64] This research seemed to show that fundamentalism would be associated with reduced racism once the authoritarian component was removed and this was summarized in a recent review of the field.[65] However, since the RWA scale has items that also measure fundamentalist religiosity and attitudes to homosexuality, this undermines the interpretation of such analyses.[66][67] Even worse is the possibility that the unrecognised dimensionality in RWA can cause a statistical artifact to arise in such regressions which can reduce or even reverse some of the relationships. Mavor and colleagues have argued that this artifact eliminates or even reverses any apparent tendency for fundamentalism to reduce racism once RWA is controlled. The implication is that in some domains such as the social psychology of religion it is not only preferable to think of RWA as consisting of at least two components, but it is essential in order to avoid statistical errors and incorrect conclusions.[67] Several options currently exist for scales that acknowledge at least the two main underlying components in the scale (aggression/submission and conventionalism).[19][21][22][67][68][69][70]
Altemeyer's research on authoritarianism has been challenged by psychologist John J. Ray, who questions the sampling methods used and the ability of the RWA Scale to predict authoritarian behavior and provides evidence that the RWA Scale measures conservatism rather than "directiveness", a construct that John J. Ray invented and that he relates to authoritarianism.[71][72] However, Ray's approach is a minority position among researchers[73] and other psychologists have found that both the RWA scale and the original F-scale are good predictors of both attitudes and behavior.[74]
In 2012, the American Journal of Political Science[75] published an article discussing the correlation between conservatism and psychoticism which they associated with authoritarianism, among other traits. In 2015, they released an erratum showing mixed correlations.[76]
In 2017, the new regality theory suggested a reinterpretation of RWA in the light of evolutionary psychology. Regality theory agrees that authoritarianism is a dynamic response to external threats, but rather than seeing it as a psychological aberration, regality theory posits that authoritarianism is an evolved response to perceived collective danger. The tendency to support a strong leader when faced with common existential threats has contributed to Darwinian fitness in human prehistory because it helped solve the collective action problem in war and suppress free riders. It is argued that regality theory adds a deeper level of analysis to our understanding of authoritarianism and avoids the political bias that the research in the authoritarian personality and RWA is often criticized for.[77]
In 2019, Ronald Inglehart combined RWA with his theory of postmaterialism, arguing that both reflected the tendency of insecure environments to produce individuals whose worldview values conformism over self-expression.[78]
Although some earlier scholars had claimed that a comparable construct of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) on the political left does not exist and compared the search for LWA to trying to find the Loch Ness monster, more recent work suggests the possibility that LWA does exist and that it predicts similar outcomes as RWA.[79] This has spurred debate about whether liberals might be similarly authoritarian as conservatives.[80]
Honeycutt et al argue that RWA scores may be misrepresented by distribution as high-scorers on the scale may actually have moderate scores and are only "high" relative to lower scorers, rather than scoring high on the scale in any absolute sense. Thus differences between "high" and "low" scorers may be exaggerated.[44] Sibley et al reported in a New Zealand sample that most differences in RWA scores are in the low to moderate range and that true high scoring authoritarians (5 or above on the RWA scale and 1-2 the SDO scale) likely represent only a small percentage of the population, estimated at around 7.6%. The research also found no evidence of Altemeyer's "double-highs" (people scoring 5 or more in both SDO and RWA), though it did find evidence of individuals who scored high in SDO and moderately in RWA, making up an estimated 1.2% of the population. Sibley et al concluded that while they could not rule out the existence of "double-highs", such individuals are likely extremely rare.[81] Individuals uniquely high in RWA may be uncommon due to RWA representing an evolutionary strategy with concomitant fitness trade-offs, resulting in variation in RWA levels. In addition, RWA is subject to behavioural plasticity and thus can be altered due to an individual's life experiences and environmental contexts.[82]
History[edit]
The theoretical concept of right-wing authoritarianism was introduced in 1981 by the Canadian-American social psychologist Bob Altemeyer[1] as a refinement of the authoritarian personality theory originally pioneered by University of California, Berkeley, researchers Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford.[83]
After extensive questionnaire research and statistical analysis, Altemeyer found that only three of the original nine hypothesized components of the model correlated together: authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression and conventionalism. Researchers have traditionally assumed that there was just one kind of authoritarian personality, who could be either a follower or a leader. The discovery that followers and leaders are usually different types of authoritarians is based on research done by Sam McFarland.[59] Altemeyer describes another scale called "Social Dominance" which measures how domineering a person is. Altemeyer calls people who score highly on both his "Right-Wing Authoritarian" and "Social Dominance" scales as "Double Highs".[59]