I recommend this book highly, some quick points:
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It’s a free ebook that you can download here :)
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Written by Bob Altemeyer, a psychologist who extensively researches authoritarianism, whose research was the basis of the book "Conservatives without Conscience" by John Dean. (Which is another book I recommend.)
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This is a book Altemeyer wrote to summarize his research for laypeople.
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He writing uses an informal and humorous style, which is very refreshing and makes it much easier to read this book. This would be a pretty rough book if it was written in a formal style. (He writes sort of like me, except not as bad.)
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A lot the content is in the footnotes. I found this pretty annoying, but you gotta read those footnotes.
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It’s not too long but very informative. It’s a 261 page PDF (which is a lot less than a 261 page bound book). I read it in a few days.
Proper paragraphs under the fold...
I thought this was a fascinating book. It manages to teach you a lot of stuff you probably didn’t know without being difficult to read. As Altemeyer points out, the reason this book exists is because of John Dean. You might have read Dean’s book "Conservatives without Conscience." In that book, which Dean intended to co-author with the late Barry Goldwater, he takes Altemeyer’s research and uses it to explain the authoritarians who have taken over the Republican party.
It seems pretty safe to say that Altemeyer’s research is valid, as he is a peer reviewed and award-winning scientist, and John Dean, who was heavily involved in the Watergate scandal, believed his research enough to base his own book on it.
So this book is about the psychology of Authoritarianism. Now Authoritarian comes from two different kinds of people. The leaders, who have a "social dominance orientation." And the followers, who are called "Right Wing Authoritarians." There is also a third group, who is the worst of the worst. The "Double highs" score highly on tests of both social dominance orientation and right wing authoritarianism, and seem to combine the worst characteristics of both.
Now the book focuses more on the followers than the leaders, because there has been more research done on them by both Altemeyer and others. The followers are called right wing authoritarians, and they score on highly on the RWA scale Altemeyer created. (Personality tests have multiple choice test, with scales to measure different characteristics that psychologists define.) These people have three defining characteristics:
- a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in
their society;
- high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and
- a high level of conventionalism.
So basically, they are completely uncritical of their leaders and never call them on being crooks. They are very aggressive against anyone their leaders say is bad, but usually only attack in cowardly ways. And they always try to be normal, and have great contempt for people who are different.
In our society, they are political conservatives, generally of the Christian Right variety. Altemeyer points out that in Soviet Union, people of the same personality type supported the communist party. I think it would be fair to say that Islamic Fundamentalists most likely have the same personality traits. (The Power of Nightmares is a great film on the connection between Neo-conservatism and radical Islam. It’s also free on archive.org and Youtube. :) )
Here’s one of my favorite parts of the first Chapter, which I think illustrates what these people are like very well:
Here’s another one of my measures, which I call "Posse," that you may find so
ridiculous that you’d say no one would ever buy into it. Humor me, gentle reader.
Suppose the federal government, some time in the future, passed a law outlawing various religious
cults. Government officials then stated that the law would only be effective if it were vigorously enforced
at the local level and appealed to everyone to aid in the fight against these cults.
Please respond to the following statements according to the following scale:
-4 indicates the statement is extremely untrue of you.
-3 indicates the statement is very untrue of you.
etc. to:
+4 indicates the statement is extremely true of you.
- I would tell my friends and neighbors it was a good law.
- I would tell the police about any religious cults I knew.
- If asked by the police, I would help hunt down and arrest members of religious cults.
- I would participate in attacks on religious cult meeting places if organized by the proper authorities.
- I would support the use of physical force to make cult members reveal the identity of other cult members.
- I would support the execution of religious cult leaders if he government insisted it was necessary to protect the country.
I’ll assume, because I know what a fine person you are, that you would respond
to each of these statements with a 4 or a 3. Most people do. But not authoritarian
followers. They typically answer with 2s and 1s, and sometimes even say, "Yes I
would." If that shocks you, remember that the premise behind "Posse" runs right down
Main Street in the authoritarian aggression mind-set. When the authorities say, "Go
get ‘em," the high RWAs saddle up.
Who can ‘em be? Nearly everybody, it turns out. I started with a proposition to
outlaw Communists and found authoritarian followers would be relatively likely to
join that posse. Ditto for persecuting homosexuals, and ditto for religious cults,
"radicals" and journalists the government did not like. So I tried to organize a posse
that liberals would join, to go after the Ku Klux Klan. But high RWAs crowded out
everyone else for that job too. Then I offered as targets the very right-wing Canadian
Social Credit Party, the Confederation of Regions Party, and the mainstream
Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. These were the parties of choice for most
authoritarian followers at the time, yet high RWAs proved more willing to persecute
even the movements they liked than did others.
Finally, just to take this to its ludicrous extreme, I asked for reactions to a "law
to eliminate right-wing authoritarians." (I told the subjects that right-wing
authoritarians are people who are so submissive to authority, so aggressive in the
name of authority, and so conventional that they may pose a threat to democratic rule.) RWA scale scores did not connect as solidly with joining this posse as they had in the
other cases. Surely some of the high RWAs realized that if they supported this law,
they were being the very people whom the law would persecute, and the posse should
therefore put itself in jail. But not all of them realized this, for authoritarian followers
still favored, more than others did, a law to persecute themselves. You can almost hear
the circuits clanking shut in their brains: "If the government says these people are
dangerous, then they’ve got to be stopped."
He gives many examples of the poor reasoning and problems RWA’s have with critical thinking. At first you laugh, and then you grow to feel sorry for them. They tend to accept any argument that leads to a conclusion they like or believe, even if it’s on a rather mundane and non-political matter. They also have general trouble dealing with empirical evidence, so they are more likely to believe in things such as biorhythms. And they don’t seek out evidence that disproves their beliefs. If something they believe is called into question, they simply seek out reassurance that their beliefs are right and cling tightly. If they are challenged on their beliefs on evolution, or something similar, they’ll give you a stock answer that they received from an authority figure. They don’t think critically about the answer or even try to understand it really. They seem to think anyone who challenges them is a trickster or sophist while they themselves are merely engaging in sophistry.
Here’s another passage I like a lot:
When I asked another group if the destruction of the family was our most serious problem, the great majority of authoritarians in that group said it was. When I asked a third group if our most serious problem was the loss of religion and commitment to God, a solid majority of those authoritarians said yes. And a solid majority of the high RWAs in a fourth group agreed the destruction of the environment was our biggest problem. We’ve apparently got a truck load of "biggest" problems.
It’s much harder to catch low RWAs doing this sort of thing. When someone
says one of their favorite issues is our biggest problem (e.g. the destruction of
individual freedom, or poverty), they seem to ask themselves, "Is it?"--whereas
authoritarian followers usually respond, "It is!" So what happens when a demagogue
asserts "The Jews are our biggest problem" (or feminists or the liberal press or the
United Nations or Iraq--you name it)? Are high RWAs likely to make an independent,
thoughtful evaluation of that statement? Or are they going to get riled up and demand
repression or censorship or a war?
He also shows that they have highly compartmentalized minds and don’t show a lot of consistency in their thinking:
It’s easy to find authoritarians endorsing inconsistent ideas. Just present slogans
and appeals to homey values, and then present slogans and bromides that invoke
opposite values. The yea-saying authoritarian follower is likely to agree with all of
them. Thus I asked both students and their parents to respond to, "When it comes to
love, men and women with opposite points of view are attracted to each other." Soon
afterwards, in the same booklet, I pitched "Birds of a feather flock together when it
comes to love." High RWAs typically agreed with both statements, even though they
responded to the two items within a minute of each other.
In my opinion, that seems to show why the conservatives love slogans. Just keep it simple. People on the opposite end of the spectrum always tend to make things more complicated.
He goes on to extend that and show that they apply double standards on application of law and are very hypocritical. They are also very self-righteous, and highly ethnocentric, disliking anyone dissimilar from themselves, and, of course, they are highly dogmatic. This is all a recipe for the perfect group of followers for crooks. The RWA’s are not at all suspicious of people like themselves. They trust their leaders implicitly even when it is should clear that they shouldn't. They’ll believe any explanation from their leaders about anything.
Of course these people are generally religious fundamentalists. Indeed, the longest chapter in the book is Authoritarian Followers and Religious Fundamentalism. He talks about his Religious Fundamentalism scale, and points out that Religious Fundamentalism is strongly correlated to RWA. He points out the two characteristics feed into each other, but it seems that authoritarianism is the more fundamental characteristic. He shows the same reasoning faults that occur in RWA’s occur in the fundamentalists.
Now, we only get one measly chapter on the authoritarian leaders, the social dominators.
Well, we really only get half a chapter, because then we move on to the Double Highs, who score high on both the RWA and the Social Dominance Orientation scale.
The Social Dominators are a lot like they sound like they are. They are basically very manipulative people who really want power over others. They sound a lot like sociopaths or narcissists to me. I’ll email the author to ask for a clarification.
So it looks like one of their most important characteristics is that they hate the idea of equality. They think life is a jungle and they are out to control people. They are even more prejudiced than RWAs. They have little empathy for others, and are far less religious than RWAs. They also think more clearly.
A social dominator tends to be more conservative than average, particularly on economic issues. That being said, they don’t have to be conservative. A Social Dominator would be perfectly happy to control a socialist organization, or be an elected to public office as a Democrat.
Okay, so anyway then we get to the "Double highs;" people who score highly on both scales. Altemeyer points out that they actually seem to combine the worst characteristics of both groups:
Thus they could have low Exploitive-MAD scores the way most right-wing
authoritarians do, but instead they pile up big numbers the way social dominators
usually do. And they could have the low religious fundamentalism and low religious
ethnocentrism scores of other social dominators, but instead they look much more like
the fundamentalist, ethnocentric RWAs. The same goes for dogmatism. They could
have low self-righteousness scores as most social dominators do, but instead they are
as highly self-righteous as the rest of the high RWAs. They could have the cool, calm,
collected responses to the Dangerous World scale that ordinary social dominators
have, but instead they see the world as much more dangerous, the way most high
RWAs do.
They are more prejudiced than either of those groups and those two groups are both pretty prejudiced. They apparently aren’t religious, but pretend they are to manipulate others. They tend to agree with these statements:
"The best reason for belonging to a church is to project a good image and have contact
with some of the important people in your community." And,
"It is more important to create a good image of yourself in the minds of others than
to actually be the person others think you are."
If you want to learn more about Double Highs, read John Dean’s book. He’s run across more double highs in his life than anyone should have to. They are indeed the most atrocious people you could meet.
So what do you think? How can we use our new found understanding of Right Wing Authoritarians to make a better world?