The Authoritarians

by Bob Altemeyer

Bob Altemeyer—author of Atheists and The Authoritarian Specter —gives a readable analysis of the nature of authoritarianism and its current impact on American politics.

Full text available at theauthoritarians.org.

Genres: Politics, Psychology, Nonfiction, Science, Sociology, History, Religion

261 pages, free online text

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Robert "Bob" Altemeyer is a retired Professor of Psychology at the University of Manitoba. Born in St. Louis, he earned a B.S. at Yale University in 1962 and a Ph.D at Carnegie-Mellon in 1966.

He has written extensively on authoritarianism and refined the theory into the concept (and measure) of Right Wing Authoritarianism. His first book, Right-Wing Authoritarianism, was published in 1981 and reports the results of fifteen years of research on the 'pre-Fascist personality' in North American society.

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

In this unassuming little book, Bob Altemeyer, a 60-something Canadian professor of social sciences, presents a straightforward theory explaining how authoritarian leaders arise, and what people compose their power base. He starts with the followers. What kind of person wants to support a leader like Hitler or Stalin? Altemeyer started investigating this question during the Nixon era. He developed a simple questionnaire, which he scores to produce what he calls "the Right Wing Authoritarian scale" (RWA scale). Typical questions are things like the following, where in each case the subject is asked to give a response ranging from -4 (strongly disagree) to +4 (strongly agree):

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.

Our country needs free thinkers who have the courage to defy traditional ways, even if this upsets many people.

The "old-fashioned ways" and the "old-fashioned values" still show the best way to live.

The questions seem laughably transparent, and I am indeed a little surprised when Altemeyer says that the RWA score has a great deal of predictive value. It correlates well with other ways of testing submission to established authority and also with tendency to xenophobia and bigotry. If you want to compute your own RWA score, you can find an online version here. It takes a few minutes to complete.

Most interestingly, the RWA score correlates very well with fundamentalist religious beliefs. Altemeyer has developed a second scale to measure this, based on a similar type of questionnaire. Typical questions on the Religious Fundamentalism scale look like the following:

The basic cause of evil in this world is Satan, who is still constantly and ferociously fighting against God.

When you get right down to it, there are basically only two kinds of people in the world: the Righteous, who will be rewarded by God, and the rest, who will not.

Whenever science and sacred scripture conflict, science is probably right.

You can find an online version of the Religious Fundamentalism test here.

Altemeyer's rather shocking conclusion is that the core type of person susceptible to unquestioning belief in right-wing authority is the believer in a fundamentalist faith, which in modern North American society overlaps strongly with the religious right.He presents evidence supporting his claim that these people have, on average, substantially impaired abilities to follow logical or fact-based reasoning. I liked his methodology here. Clearly, a refusal to belive in evolution or other scientific theories may be contentious, as are various political beliefs (a surprising number of members of the religious right apparently think that WMDs actually were found in Iraq).

Much more interestingly, Altemeyer shows how hard the religious right find it to reason about the Bible, which logically ought to be their home territory. The experiment I found most convincing had him showing subjects the passages from the four Gospels describing the events of Easter Morning. As is well known, the four accounts differ in many particulars, some of them quite important. Altemeyer asks students what they consider the best explanation for these internal contradictions and inconsistencies. Astonishingly, to me at least, the most common response from people with high Fundamentalist scores was that there were no inconsistencies; even after subjects were given a week to discuss the issue with other members of their community, very few changed their minds. Incidentally, I should mention that Altemeyer is focussing on the American religious right mainly because they are the group he finds easiest to study. He quotes studies carried out by Russian researchers which show very similar belief patterns among old hardline followers of Marxist-Leninism.

Altemeyer then goes on to examine the other side of the question: if religious fundamentalists make up the docile mass who can propel authoritarian leaders into power, what type of person becomes a leader? Here, he uses a third score, which he calls Social Dominance. Typical questions look like these:

It's a mistake to interfere with the "law of the jungle". Some people were meant to dominate others.

It would bother me if I intimidated people, and they worried about what I might do next.

One of the most useful skills a person should develop is how to look someone straight in the eye and lie convincingly.

Although one's first impression is that the personality types associated with high RWA and high Social Dominance are completely dissimilar, Altermeyer was surprised to discover that the intersection of the two groups does contain a small group, whom he calls Double Highs. They are, by definition, people who both believe that the citizens around them are in need of a strong leader, and want to become that leader; they are, moreover, willing to lie and dissemble to whatever extent is needed. There are obvious difficulties associated with collecting data about Double Highs, but Altemeyer has been creative. He describes some nice experiments with multi-player role playing games, where Double Highs do indeed rush to seize power in exactly the way his theory predicts, often using underhand methods.

The overall picture Altemeyer paints is disturbing. My first reaction was that his analysis was surely too simplistic: there had to be more to it than this. On the other hand, he's been doing this work for a long time and published an impressive number of books and scholarly articles. He says that only two people have made a serious attempt to prove him wrong, and that their counterarguments were not convincing. (I will try to check the papers he refers to). On the positive side, he claims many other researchers have adopted his methods. A quick search on Google Scholar shows he's widely cited; this guy is not a crank. If you're at all worried by the American religious right, you might want to download his book and check him out.

[Whitaker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Update (26 January 2017)

The Atlantic had a very troubling report on Trump that started:

During his sole press conference as president-elect, on January 11, Donald Trump seemed to promise more favorable treatment for states that had voted for him in the election. “We focused very hard in those states and they really reciprocated,” he said. “And those states are gonna have a lot of jobs and they’re gonna have a lot of security. They’re going to have a lot of good news for their veterans.”

The article goes on to note that for states that voted AGAINST him, Trump appears to be threatening that he will start investigations into voter fraud. He is, in other words, targeting ONLY states that voted Democratic for his investigation of fraud. Taken together, he is essentially threatening political retaliation for voting against him.

I am flabbergasted that there is not more outrage about this from voters of ALL sides of the political spectrum in the US. Even if you are a registered Republican, this attack on the fundamentals of US democracy should upset you. Actions, as they say, speak louder than words, and it should--if you truly believe in the premise of the US as a free democratic nation--upset you enough for you to call and threaten your congressman and senator that you WILL vote against them at the next elections if they do not stop this.

The principles of democracy that Americans claim to love should trump political affiliation. Unless, of course, you're authoritarian and you don't really believe in democracy. We shall see whether they have only been paying lip service to these principles that they have claimed to love and uphold....

Update (1 March 2016)

More on authoritarianism in "The Rise of American Authoritarianism". If this turns out to be a durable trend for, say, a decade then it seems to be only a matter of luck and time before a double high wins the American elections for president. And as for such a person's followers, well, this apparently is what they want:

Authoritarians generally and Trump voters specifically, we found, were highly likely to support five policies:
-- Using military force over diplomacy against countries that threaten the United States
-- Changing the Constitution to bar citizenship for children of illegal immigrants
-- Imposing extra airport checks on passengers who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent in order to curb terrorism
-- Requiring all citizens to carry a national ID card at all times to show to a police officer on request, to curb terrorism
-- Allowing the federal government to scan all phone calls for calls to any number linked to terrorism

It's interesting because I'm sure to some, this probably doesn't look too threatening a list. However, bear in mind, if history is any guide, that this is probably only the beginning. What first starts off as unthinkable rapidly becomes the thinkable once a tipping point is reached. If that happens, we will certainly be in for a very interesting experiment: what happens if a double high leads a world superpower with the most powerful armed forces and nuclear weapons at his command.

The article above refers to the following further reading material:
-- Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics by by Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler
-- The Authoritarian Dynamic by Karen Stenner

Update (25 February 2016)

This whole concept of authoritarianism has been popping up again with the rise of Trump. Apparently, the the best predictor of support for Trump is where a person falls on the scale for authoritarianism. The greater an authoritarian (i.e., someone who has strong needs for belonging to an in group led by a strong leader), the more likely the support:



See: "The best predictor of Trump support isn't income, education, or age. It's authoritarianism." on Vox; "The GOP’s Authoritarian Front-Runner" on Slate; "The Violence of Donald Trump" on Slate.

It might be a good time to dust off this book and reread it.

Update (24 August 2011)

An interesting study, "Cultures of the Tea Party", purports to break down the cultural attitudes of Tea Party loyalists, through a mix of polling data and interviews with tea partiers at a gathering in eastern North Carolina. The study concludes:

"American voters sympathetic to the Tea Party movement reflect four primary cultural and political beliefs more than other voters do: authoritarianism, libertarianism, fear of change, and negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration."

The study's lead author is Andrew J. Perrin, an associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, with co-authors Steven J. Tepper, an associate professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University, Neal Caren, an assistant professor of sociology at UNC, and Sally Morris, a doctoral student in sociology at UNC.

This was reported in The Atlantic Monthly, and the study itself is available on the Talking Points Memo website here.

I thought the overlap between this study and Altemeyer's work was very interesting.

Original Review

Altemeyer discusses the fruits of 20 over years of research into two types of personalities:
● Persons who have a natural bent and desire to follow authority unquestioningly (He calls them right-wing authoritarians, an appellation which I find misleading. I will refer to them as authority-dependent followers, an ugly term but which I think better encapsulates who he is talking about); and
● Persons who have a natural bent and desire to lead (social dominants).

He discusses the typical characteristics that such persons have, as well as how damaging a tie-up between such persons would be. While they might regard it as a marriage-made-in-heaven, the rest of society might regard it as marriage-made-in-hell. Regardless, this co-dependent symbiosis can pretty much become a toxic stew: sometimes dangerous only to themselves (e.g., Waco), at other times dangerous to society at large (e.g., Hitler and the Third Reich, Mao and the Red Guards).

Then there are the small percentage of persons who combine the worst traits of both the authority-dependent followers and the social dominants: a combination that tends to result in an amoral fanatic and narrow-minded zeal willing to do all that it takes to impose a singular vision on the world (think Osama bin Laden or Ferdinand and Isabella). These double-highs, as Altemeyer terms them, are the most dangerous persons out there.

Manny and Ian Foster have excellent reviews of this book, which I urge you to take a look at if you want to find out more what this is about. What I’m more interested in discussing lies elsewhere: Given the natural empathy that double highs and authority-dependent followers have for each other, one would imagine that such combinations must have arisen many times in the past. So, the question I have is, why is it that the world is not now groaning under the yoke of a tyrannical despot, dystopia-never-ending? Why is it, in other words, that the lethal combination of double highs and authority-dependent followers haven’t had greater success, both in terms of arising in societies and in maintaining dominance over others?

I, for one, don’t—for the life of me—believe that we have escaped such a bleak fate only because of the good luck throw of the dice. One reason, I think, is simply technological: until now, communications have not been either speedy enough nor transport fast enough to exercise control over vast global areas.

However, it is certainly the case that some countries have at some time come under double-high/authority-dependent regimes for specific periods of time. I would suggest, actually, that such regimes contain within them the seeds of their own self-destruction.

Firstly, as Altemeyer himself notes, one condition that tends to lower the tendency towards authority-dependent traits, is a tyranny that preys on its own people. The current Arab Spring is perhaps one contemporary example of that. So, double-high/authority-dependent regimes eventually end up corroding from within as its citizens gradually move towards the low end of the authority-dependent spectrum.

Some other factors worth considering could be these:
● Altemeyer’s research shows that double-high/authority-dependent regimes tend to start wars with others. One possible outcome is that such wars help to bring about the end of such regimes both because wars are costly, and because the result of such wars must surely be to kill off the followers who gleefully march into the line of fire. The remnants of the population, less fervent than their authority-dependent brethren, grow weary of war and sue for peace.
● Double-high/authority-dependent regimes are economically weak, especially in the face of strong economic competition. Characteristics of countries that succeed economically include tolerance and creativity, both of which are factors that are apt to be lacking in double-high/authority-dependent regimes. We’ve seen how European countries that were tolerant had better rates of growth: Spain’s expulsion of Jews and Moors led to a huge brain drain that benefitted those more vibrant countries that took in these exiles. The Soviet Union’s collapse from sclerosis was as much an inability to adapt to the fast-changing economic environment and the cost of maintaining a huge war-machine.

The related question is why don’t more countries become double-high/authority-dependent regimes more frequently? What, in other words, does Altemeyer’s research tell us about the kinds of conditions that are likely to give rise to a society led by a double-high, all marching in goose-step towards some pre-determined eschatological end?

I would think that a prolonged period of economic hardship is likely to create conditions suitable for double-high/authority-dependent regimes to thrive. One can imagine that other more existential threats can also result in double-high/authority-dependent regimes: plagues, or an enemy at your doorstep. A perception of the injustice of a market dominant minority might be another factor that will allow a double-high to mobilise the hatred of the population under his leadership. Possibly cultural collapse and angst arising from having your cultural certitudes threatened by the appearance of a hitherto unknown and unexpected competitor (think the Ottoman and Chinese empires faced with the European powers). What others do you think there might be?

[Trevor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not sure what to say about this book – other than I read it after reading Manny’s review, so perhaps you should do that too https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

Up until the last chapter the review I was writing in my head was going to say that this book is likely to make people (like me) feel all a bit too good about ourselves – for most of the time I was reading this book I saw that as a problem. As Manny says in his review, this book is based on a series of psychological tests that measure where you fall on a right wing authoritarian scale, but these various surveys seem so transparently obvious in what the author is up to, it is hard to imagine people not seeing through them as they were filling them out. I didn’t actually do any of the tests in this book – because as the author also makes clear, they only have a limited ability to measure anything worth saying, and having read The Cult of Personality, I find these things a bit daft – and, anyway, I could feel myself going to the opposite extreme with this stuff, that is, I could feel myself becoming even more anti-authoritarian than I probably even am.

I was, for a long time, an organiser in a trade union – so, my relationship with authority figures has always been somewhat troubled. I also feel our obsession with leadership is deeply problematic, but I do understand that a world without authority might become difficult to live in too. The most interesting part of this book was where he said something I certainly agree with – that for most of our lives we are trained to respect authority – and that that might not be a good thing in certain circumstances. The tools to criticise authority (mental, obviously, but also moral and emotional) really ought to be a key element of what is taught at school. But such is increasingly being undermined by high stakes tests that, by definition, have a single ‘right’ answer. Hardly the best training for people to learn how to challenge authority.

This book isn’t actually about authoritarians so much, as about those who enable authoritarians. That is, it is less about Hitler and more about the crowds at his Nuremberg rallies. The book says some rather obvious things. That certain forms of religious belief – mostly involving submitting to the absolute authority of God – prepare people to accept other forms of authority without question too. That people who are particularly drawn to strong authority figures are fearful. That this fear is all-consuming and is born of the uncertainty that the world presents – and so this fear is a function of someone wanting the world to stop changing. However, these are some of the nicer aspects of right wing authoritarian personality types. The author also claims that they are much less likely to consider alternative evidence, to change their minds, they are more likely to believe in absolute truth and that they have access it that truth. This makes ‘arguing with them’ more or less a waste of time, since they are impervious to reason, facts or arguments. The author found they were also more likely to want to censor the opinions of others – that they were much more likely to be book burners than other personality types. That said, the author is at pains to stress that right wing authoritarians is a psychological designation, rather than a political one. However, it becomes clear that he is much more concerned with the people in the religious right in the US who taking over the Republican party than of left wing people likely to display authoritarian tendencies. As he says at one point, there was a time when left wing authoritarians were perhaps as much of a problem in the US, but that, like John Lennon’s prophesy in Revolution, “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t going make it with anyone anyhow”.

The book ends with an extended discussion of the Milgram experiment and then basically says that although right wing authoritarians are particularly dangerous, well, we all could be Nazi prison guards so don’t be too smug. The main thing this book has gotten me to do, then, is to finally get around to reading a book that came out a few years ago reappraising the Milgram experiments. More on that when I finish it.

I often say this, but I’m going to say it again anyway. My problem with psychology is that it looks at us from the wrong end of the telescope, focused too much on the inside and so it spends a lot of time looking for inside reasons for why people might be authoritarians. Be those reasons in our genes (if you are Pinker or Haidt) or in our sexual repression (if you are Freud) and so on through the various psychological movements.

But I think many of our ideas are born out of the contexts of our lives. Years ago I read something or other that said that farmers were much more likely than people living in cities to believe in a vengeful god. Their god was much more likely to be literally a sky god, and one who could (and would) withhold rain or provide so much it would wash away crops. This would lead these farmers to develop superstitious beliefs and practices aimed at appeasing their all too capricious god.

I don’t want to say that we have no free will, not least because I don’t think that is the case – but I do want to say that what we believe is likely to respond to our lived experience – and today you don’t have to be a farmer to feel you have no control over your life. I think that sense of a lack of control has gotten worse over recent years.

A friend of mine convinced me to watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix today. It had starring roles by authors of many books I’ve read and reviewed here. At the start many of the people involved in the documentary were asked if they could say the one thing that was wrong with social media. They all struggled. But for me the real problem is something that Walter Benjamin displays in his The Arcades Project – how capitalism creates a world in arcades (shopping malls) that follow the rules of capitalism, and where, in fact, to not follow those rules in a shopping mall wouldn’t make sense, since everything about that space has been created to make those rules, in that space, have the force of ‘unwritten laws’. Cyberspace is a shopping mall on steroids. It is a space that can be (and is) constructed to the last detail to encourage the manipulation of our behaviour. It shouldn’t really surprise us that people appear to have moved towards more authoritarian visions of the world over the last few decades – these constructed worlds, these cyberworlds in particular, only allow certain and limited movements within these spaces. Once the need to make money is central to the design, all else follows.

By which I mean we should probably spend less time looking into the souls of people to understand their motivations and actions – we need to also look at the worlds they are constrained within and try to understand the degrees of freedom of movement these worlds allow.

[Jan-Maat]

Altemeyer writes Here's how I put it in 1996 at the end of what I intended to be my last book on the subject:
'I am now writing my last page in my last book about authoritarianism. So, for the last time, I do not think a fascist dictatorship lies just over our horizon. But I do not think that we are well protected against one.

The text I read now at the beginning of and already too long by half, second Trump presidency, was from 2006 yet is more prescient than the author would probably have liked.

His book is a chatty discourse based on the years he spent teaching psychology at the university of Manitoba (currently located in free Canada). Altemeyer was interested in the people who are inclined to be the followers and supporters of autocrats and tyrants, and apparently there has been a fair bit of research in to this and I suppose it is a more interesting issue as the Hitlers, Stalins, and Mussolinis of the world who have been nobodies without people to follow them and enable them. Equally however much you may dislike certain elected politicians, perhaps you might admit that the problem is that there are people who vote for them.

Anyhow Altemeyer was interested in this and using (abusing) his position of power and authority he conducted research on generations of his students, and when possible, their parents, leavened with questionnaires to legislators at state assemblies in the USA, provincial and national politicians in Canada, benefiting from similar investigations by collaborators in other countries.

Altemeyer identified a percentage of the groups that he studied as Right Wing Authoritarians (RWAs). These are people who support traditional authorities, such as the government or religious organisations uncritically and dogmatically. They tend to be cohesive, resistant to reasoning explanation or logic,and blind to incoherence or contradictions in their stance, So for instance, in the event of the government, or a religious leader doing something illegal they would see the people complaining about this as the problem rather than the illegality itself.

Altemeyer further became interested in people with a desire to become socially dominant and found surprisingly, no, shockingly, that such people could successfully appeal to RWA people to achieve leadership in political movements. This Altemeyer maps over to the Republican party in the USA in the era of George W. Bush and those who supported him and who even believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq.

If I accept Altemeyer's findings as broadly accurate and broadly applicable then there is a challenge to the idea of a democratic state and the rule of law, in that there is a percentage of citizens this a variable percentage and not fixed who want and respond well to authoritarianism and who dislike non-conformity of any kind which means that democracies are really rather fragile. You might consider that this is the observable reality that we can see in history and on the news.

I am a little hesitant to see Altemeyer maps the findings from Canadian students and their parents oon to US politics although I admit the composite picture is convincing; he does attempt to do the same with Canadian politics but since they have more than two political parties, plus both regional and national parties, it is a much more complicated system than in the USA.

I am grateful to several Goodreads reviews that alerted me to the existence of this book which is a valuable to download for free on to your electronic device of choice for free from the internet at "the authoritarians dot org".


Some time after reading I wondered if the attraction of communism to the Cambridge Five was that it represented to them an absolute authority, and maybe if a similar desire to submit to authority led others to convert to Catholicism?

[Michael Perkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short book, available as a PDF (below), does a brilliant job of explaining the psychology of the blind followers of autocrats. (I see that an update has been done just recently with Trump swapped in for George W. Bush. Review of that book below). It really gives the meat of character traits of the followers. The author has developed numerous tests to measure the attitudes of people across the spectrum, which reveals who are the most rigid in their black and white beliefs that make them susceptible to authority figures.

I should mention I am not a "liberal" outsider on this topic. I was raised in a conservative Roman Catholic home and got involved with Christian fundamentalists in college and went on to earn an M.A. in Biblical Studies. Today I'm an agnostic-skeptic, but still in touch with some fundamentalists. I understand the subculture. What this book clarifies is why and how could such people blindly support Trump when so much of what that means apparently violates Christian ethics. Given that these folks don't read the Bible or care about its ethical and moral teachings, and prefer the certitude of black and white, it's not so surprising after all. But how this all came to be is a fascinating story.

Chapter 1 Who Are the Authoritarian Followers?
Chapter 2 The Roots of Authoritarian Aggression, and Authoritarianism Itself
Chapter 3 How Authoritarian Followers Think
Chapter 4 Authoritarian Followers and Religious Fundamentalism
Chapter 5 Authoritarian Leaders
Chapter 6 Authoritarianism and Politics
Chapter 7 What's To Be Done?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxxy...

======

Review of a companion volume.....

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

========

And I commend Manny Rayner's excellent review, providing pertinent details.....

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

First things first, if you haven't yet read this book you need to read it, or at least you need to read Manny's excellent summary of this book's contents. Right now.

Ok. Now that you have the gist, I have a few comments:

First, I know the people this book describes. Intimately. I used to be one. I still have lots of friends who fit, for the most part, the high-RWA description. My wife's entire family are high RWA's, to a tee. They're (usually) good people and good friends. But they'll support discrimination against all kinds of people who don't look, talk, think, or smell like them; they'll support (indeed they have supported) authoritarian and un-egalitarian laws.

Second, unless you assume that Altemeyer has completely falsified (or at least significantly fudged) the data, his research and conclusions cannot simply be dismissed as liberal propaganda. The data show what the data show, and in this case they show that a certain personality type needs to get out of their damn fundy-right bubble and meet some different kinds of people, before they put more crackpots into office.

The single biggest different between my life and the lives of my friends who are still high-RWA's is that I got out of my bubble, met different kinds of people, exposed myself to different kinds of ideas and different ways of thinking. I was willing to honestly challenged my own preconceptions and prejudices. And I really believe I'm a better person for it.

[notgettingenough · Rating 1 out of 5]

Warning: I could only bear to read about the first 50 pages of this in depth. The rest I skimmed through. Far be it for me to say that merely because something is a belligerent ranting diatribe, it doesn't have merit. After all, I have written this....

Permit me, if you will, to counterpoise the RWA with the HPA. That is the Harry Potter authoritarian. It suddenly and obviously struck me yesterday, that it is a perfect example of how you can’t actually talk about the RWA like it is some special breed. It isn’t, and nothing makes that more blatantly clear than watching the belligerent, hostile, illogical and irrational behaviour of Harry Potter devotees, as witnessed on this site. Some of the comments I’ve received illustrate the point, though I dare say they are scattered about.

So we have this group of people, who I wouldn’t mind betting all think they are small ‘l’ liberals behaving like thugs. Equally we see probably small l liberal scientists behaving in the same hostile angry way when faced with people who don’t share their beliefs. This book carries on the tradition and I, for one, find it offensive. I’m disappointed that nobody else on goodreads has this issue and equally disappointed that part of the justification for excusing the author’s abusive proselytsing is that he uses statistics.

p55 What did the high RWAs say? Nothing very logical, I’m afraid. Nearly half (48 percent) said they’d return the Golan Heights if the odds for peace were 3-1 against. Increasing the odds for a successful outcome to 50-50 made highs less willing (41 percent) to make the gesture. When the odds got to 3-1 in favor of peace, 60 percent said “Go for it.” The authoritarian followers thus didn’t seem to pay much attention to the odds for success, and they proved to be the ones who’d take a foolish chance for peace in this situation. So who’s the peacenik?

Never mind the language, which is straight from the worst type of let’s get ‘em media, I keep thinking Fox TV news shows, the stats are completely meaningless without at the very least being told what the sample is and who and how they are measured. What does ‘nearly half’ mean? One? Two? This gentleman’s an academic, which makes me really nervous. He may be able to put on another hat, but I don’t know if I trust the idea that he can be an impartial observer of the facts when he has such an ax to grind.

He reminds me more than anything of Sarah Palin on a bad hair day. I bet they both like magic and wands. And really short people.

p.15 We would expect authoritarian followers especially to submit to corrupt authorities in their lives: to believe them when there is little reason to do so, to trust them when huge grounds for suspicion exist, and to hold them blameless when they do something wrong.

How hilarious is this. I’ve spent so many years now trying to tell small ‘l’ liberals that they can’t keep voting for politicians whose practices in power bear such passing resemblance to their campaign promises. Either small ‘l’ liberals have the IQs of lemmings or they are pretty much happy to vote for people who are, not to beat about the bush, liars. They are then willing to spend a lot of time either apologising for their leaders’ post victory turnabouts or do a lot of mea culping how were they to know.

If I may paraphrase Chomsky: question them, about everything all the time. Small ‘l’ liberals are quite diligent at this when the other side is in power. Otherwise, they are incredibly similar to the accusation levelled above of their political and social foes.

I can’t think of anything which doesn’t come out as an English understatement to describe how I am about this book, but let’s say incandescent with rage.

p. 16 High RWAs also say they would bow more to show respect for their fathers, the president of companies where they worked, and so on, than most people indicate.

Huh? Does this guy not understand that bowing is an act of great cultural significance in much of the world? He makes it sound like it is something to be disgusted by. If I may speak in the measured way this book inspires what the fuck is he thinking of, putting this word in italics? Don’t answer that. If you know to ask the question, then you know what the answer is and it isn’t pretty. If you don’t know to ask the question...well, you probably think this book is great. People who aren’t RWA are easily led to water and made to drink, you just have to do it in a slightly different way.

p.30 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.

Oh, my aren’t we preaching to the very converted. Or otherwise intending to influence them to answer in particular ways. This is what one is supposed to answer and, like every such questionnaire in this book to the point I stopped reading, is – oh, let me borrow the author’s word – ridiculous. I’m pretty sure that in saying as I wish to, that I want detailed information on the cults before deciding this, I would be considered to be a right wing fascist pig. So be it:

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.
1. I would tell my friends and neighbors it was a good law.
2. I would tell the police about any religious cults I knew.
3. If asked by the police, I would help hunt down and arrest members of religious cults.
4. I would participate in attacks on religious cult meeting places if organized by the proper authorities.
5. I would support the use of physical force to make cult members reveal the identity of other cult members.
6. I would support the execution of religious cult leaders if he government insisted it was necessary to protect the country.

And this:

p.61 For them, gay marriage is not just unthinkable on religious grounds, and unnerving because it means making the “abnormal” acceptable. It’s yet one more sign that perversion is corrupting society from the inside-out, leading to total chaos. Many things, from stem cell research to right-to-die legislation, say to them, “This is the last straw; soon we’ll be plunged into the abyss.” So probably did, in earlier times, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, sex education and Sunday shopping.

There are such obvious reasons to be doubtful at the very least, about stem cell research and legalised euthenasia, that to read such a dogmatic opinion that these things are ‘right’ because – what? Small ‘l’ liberals think they are right??? I know. RWA think these things are wrong, THEREFORE, if you are a HPA (do you mind: generic term for people who think they are really different from RWA), you think they are right. Nothing to do with the research you have done, the academic studies you have immersed yourself in.

This is straightforwardly hilarious in that context:

p.98 But the leaders don’t have to worry, because their followers are also quite dogmatic. By dogmatism I mean relatively unchangeable, unjustified certainty. And I’m certain that is right, beyond a doubt. So that establishes how dogmatic I am. If you want a hint as to how dogmatic you are, simply answer the items below—completely ignoring the fact that if you strongly agree with them it means you are a rigid, dogmatic, and totally bad, bad, bad person… It’s easy to see why authoritarian followers would be dogmatic, isn’t it? When you haven’t figured out your beliefs, but instead absorbed them from other people, you’re really in no position to defend them from attack. Simply put, you don’t know why the things you believe are true. Somebody else decided they were, and you’re taking their word for it. So what do you do when challenged? Well first of all you avoid challenges by sticking with your own kind as much as possible, because they’re hardly likely to ask pointed questions about your beliefs. But if you meet someone who does, you’ll probably defend your ideas as best you can, parrying thrusts with whatever answers your authorities have pre-loaded into your head. If these defenses crumble, you may go back to the trusted sources.

I’ve never read anything as blindly dogmatic as this book in my life – yeah, sheltered upbringing. The author isn’t a chance to ever change his mind about anything is my impression from reading this book.

So when he pops in this bit:

p. 95 Before I close this chapter I want to remind us that none of the shortcomings we have discussed is some mysterious illness that only afflicts high RWAs. They just have extra portions of quite common human frailties. The difference in their inability to discover a conclusion is false, in the inconsistency of their ideas, in their use of double standards, and so on are all relative, not absolute. Almost everyone rationalizes, thinks he’s superior, etcetera. When high RWAs condemn “political correctness” and we say they are “kettles calling the pot black,” we should bear in mind the darkness of our own kettle.

it has all the gravitas of a rice bubble for me. He has made it an illness, he has made a mountain out of it.

I came across this today:

Lubos Motl
I have also tried to reverse-engineer their thinking a little bit. In my guess, they decided that there were "circles" in the WMAP picture at the beginning, and then they were trying to find them by slightly more quantitative methods described in the article. http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/11/wha...

It seems to me this is a case in point. This author has a bunch of very fixed ideas which he wanted to measure so that he could convince small ‘l’ liberals, who have a faith in statistics that is mind-boggling – I mean, statistics that suit their beliefs – of the correctness of them. It reminds me of discussing abortion with a couple of people close to me recently. Small ‘l’ liberals, who made some decisions about their beliefs sometime and have never changed. We were looking at pictures that came out a couple of years ago of foetuses at a legally abortionable age: they were doing very live human things, I can’t recall what, exactly. Smiling maybe? Point is that was fuel for the pro-lifers. Quite clearly, in killing these foetuses one is killing something that is a living human being. Now, I can quite see that abortion will continue to be as well as a necessity, a convenience in our society, irrespective of how one defines these foetuses. There’s no getting around the elevation of convenience in a world where we have life styles, not lives.

But boy, were these two viputeratively hostile and belligerent at the idea that these foetuses were ‘human’ or that killing them was the same as if they were a few weeks older…or a few weeks older again. Me, I don’t really understand why we think there is any difference between the high tech convenience of killing them early, compared with the low tech solution in China of killing them (girl thems, I mean in that case) when they are born. We are only quibbling about what makes us feel cozy with what we are doing. But tell that to somebody who is convinced that abortion is different in one week from another and they get pretty mean about it. I sat there listening to them telling me what a great thing abortion was and how much better it would be for children who were orphans and became adopted. Ummm. Huh? I asked a few of my friends who were adopted if it would have been better for them not to have been born and, how’s this for a statistic, 100% of them, even the one who had a childhood he didn’t like, would prefer not to have been aborted.

Which brings me, now that I think of it, to Freaking Economics….review coming a little later in the evening.

In brief: think for yourself. That is the very opposite of what this guy wants you to do.

[Michael P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I spent a year and a half studying why politics in the US has become so divisive that one side no longer speaks meaningfully to the other. I could have saved my self a year and 25 weeks if I’d found this book first. It took everything I learned and set it into a bigger context, the context of statistical psychology. Altemeyer has been surveying authoritarian personalities for decades, and really puts his finger on authoritarian leaders and those who blindly follow them. He understands their aggressiveness and judgmental natures. He wrote a scholarly version of this book a few years ago then wrote this one for a popular audience and published it on line. It maybe found here: http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/...
This is one of the few truly important books I have read in the past decade.

[Jennifer (formerly Eccentric Muse) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A random set of notes on this book, in descending date order. And everyone must read this book. Resistance is NOT futile. I may be low RWA, but I'll be damned if I'll go down without a fight.

I have to stop reading now. Now, it's personal. Now, it's my country, my democracy that is under direct attack by Double High Religious Right-wingers who -- incidentally -- have been insidiously, directly, deliberately advised by GW Bush strategists.

Less than 40% of less than 60% elected the current government in Canada. But the mandate, as Altemeyer noted with Bush, doesn't matter to a Double High elected leader. It's power and domination at all costs.

I MUST MOVE TO NORWAY. NOWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!


______________

June 11/11:

OH. MY. GOD. Canadian politics, in 2006 when Altemeyer published (likely, the RWA scores and party affiliation stuff remains true, it's just who's in power that has changed and the INCREDIBLE polarization that has emerged - both on party and RWA lines, it is clear - out of the 2011 federal election. This is INCREDIBLE. (my emphases):

"If you look at just the New Democrats’ and the conservatives’ scores on the RWA scale, party affiliation correlated .82 on the average with authoritarianism, which is one of the strongest relationships ever found in the social sciences. The RWA scale divides these two groups almost as cleanly as a vote in the legislature would. Nothing else, so far as I know, correlates so highly with left-wing versus right-wing politics, anywhere. In Canada at least, when you are talking about the “left-to-right” political dimension among politicians, you are talking about the personality trait measured by the RWA scale."

And NOW what we have is that polarization all the clearer and more oppositional, now that there is no centrist party remaining in Canada. The Liberals are gone. It is left against right; low RWA versus high RWA in Canada. To me, the only question is - will the NDP be strong enough (esp. since they've *never* been in official Opposition power before) to exert a moderating influence? Or, will their lack of experience and, frankly, credibility enable the RWA/Right to stomp all over them - and the rest of us?

____________________


June 10/11: Aye, and now we come to it. The key differences between authoritarian despots and their followers:

"huge differences exist between these two parts of an authoritarian system in (1) their desire for power, (2) their religiousness, (3) the roots of their aggression, and (4) their thinking processes." (p. 162)

******

The Exploitive Manipulative Amoral Dishonesty Scale (p. 166) (hey! I had three, count 'em, three bosses like that!) -- still not sure what the difference is here with psychopathy.

******

"social dominators might incite authoritarian followers to commit a hate crime, but the dominators and followers probably launch the attack for different reasons: the dominator out of meanness, as an act of intimidation and control; the follower out of fear and self-righteousness in the name of authority." (p. 169)

Police-reported hate crimes up 42% in 2009, Toronto Star, June 8, 2011.

Correlation is not causation. But it doesn't have to be the direct influence of a dominator that inspires hate crimes. I think it can happen almost by osmosis - by a general loosening up of the constraints on intolerance that leak out from, in this case, Parliament Hill. This is not a stat to be taken lightly.

*****

He just missed an opportunity to explore the role of bullying in producing high social dominators. He's not a clinical or personality psychologist, so I forgive him. But I would have liked a quick detour into the research on how being bullied turns one into a bully within the context of his "social dominance" construct.

*****

And there's my answer on the relationship between psychopathy (which he calls sociopathy - the two notions are commonly treated as synonyms, but there are differences in the clinical definitions) and high social dominator authoritarians:

"There even seems to be a whiff of the sociopath about the social dominator. Somebody do the studies and see if any of these hunches is right." (p. 180)

_____________________

June 9/11: Religious fundamentalism correlates highly with authoritarianism - but its chicken-and-egg. On the diffs between US & Cdn religious fundamentalists:

"... how much [do] Christian fundamentalists in Canada differ from American fundamentalists.... Both modern nations were founded by Christian immigrants from Western Europe. But Protestants settled almost all of the thirteen original colonies, whereas in Canada two Christianities took root from the start, Catholicism and Protestantism. Some Christian fundamentalists came directly to Canada from Europe ... but a lot also came up from the United States, and the biggest difference between fundamentalists in the two countries today may not involve theology or brand names, but strength. A much greater percentage of Americans than Canadians could be called Christian fundamentalists." (p. 143)

******

This is only marginally comforting to me. Most of them live and/or are from the western provinces - AB, SK, MB, including our illustrious PM Harper, who is a card-carryin', gun-totin', bible-thumpin' member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance.

See: Stephen Harper and the Theo-Cons, The Walrus, Oct 2006
______________________

June 8/11: "No other group comes close to being as zealous [as religious fundamentalists]. Feminists usually come in second in my studies, but way behind the religious fundamentalists, and one finds far, far fewer of them." (p. 132)

I don't know whether I should be more upset that there are far, far fewer feminists than fundamentalists, or that they come in second in the zealotry sweepstakes.
______________________

June 7/11: Explaining why high RWAs are so easily led because they do not evaluate ulterior motives if they already agree with the person:

"So (to foreshadow later chapters a little) suppose you are a completely unethical, dishonest, power-hungry, dirt-bag, scum-bucket politician who will say whatever he has to say to get elected. (I apologize for putting you in this role, but it will only last for one more sentence.) Whom are you going to try to lead, high RWAs or low RWAs? Isn’t it obvious? The easy-sell high RWAs will open up their arms and wallets to you if you just sing their song, however poor your credibility."

Right - and this is what makes the high RWAs - even though they are a very small minority - such a powerful (and threatening) political force. Probably also explains to some extent the Liberal implosion in Canada's May 2011 federal election. (although obviously there was much more to it than that.)
_______________________

June 6/11: I'm going to capture some bits and pieces here that particularly resonate with me. Doing it in the status updates seems cumbersome.

So, logical reasoning capacity of RWAs:

"In both studies high RWAs went down in flames more than others did. They particularly had trouble figuring out that an inference or deduction was wrong. To illustrate, suppose they had gotten the following syllogism:

All fish live in the sea.
Sharks live in the sea.
Therefore, sharks are fish.

The conclusion does not follow, but high RWAs would be more likely to say the reasoning is correct than most people would. If you ask them why it seems right, they would likely tell you, “Because sharks are fish.” In other words, they thought the reasoning was sound because they agreed with the last statement. If the conclusion is right, they figure, then the reasoning must have been right. Or to put it another way, they don’t “get it” that the reasoning matters--especially on a reasoning test."

******

I just keep gasping out loud at this stuff, thinking of high RWAs I know and how this explains exactly how their minds work. You know it, when you talk to them. But it's nice to have it confirmed with empirical data.

I'm still not sure having an explanation for it is ultimately going to make me feel any better or make my brain less likely to explode while engaged in these conversations, though.

[John Purcell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometime last year I read a book by John Dean called "Conservatives Without Conscience". That book relied heavily on Robert Altemeyer's studies involving authoritarian personalities. This book, "The Authoritarians" is the resulting synopsis of his research that John Dean relied on.

One of the things that often perplexes me while observing current politics, especially the struggle between the Democrats and Republicans, is the experience of such extreme bouts of cognitive dissonance watching the Republicans say and do things that don't make any sense, are irrational, often times are just outright lies, and seem to be said or done for the purpose of affecting a response in the populace, or gaining some sort of power advantage, rather than in imparting relevant and important information for the electorate to contemplate. The Debt Ceiling Debacle of last year is a good example. I kept thinking to myself that there must be something wrong with me, that all these people, elected by so many people, with important positions, apparently smart men and women, couldn't be taking those positions unless there was some validity behind them. I was obviously missing something.

It turns out I wasn't.

Altemeyer's been doing research on the subject since the 1960s, and publishing his results since the 1980s. This book is extremely persuasive in convincing anyone that reads it that the authoritarian mindset is the main reason why we have such polarization of thought and politics in this country.

Altemeyer defines an authoritarian as someone with 1) a high degree of submission to the established legitimate authorities in their society; 2) high levels of aggression in the name of their authority and 3) a high level of conventionalism. He created a scale, essentially a questionnaire, that sorts people into a high or low tendency towards or against authoritarianism. Those at the high end of the scale he calls "right wing authoritarians" or RWAs. These people tend to be highly religious, accepting of any authority, and prone to aggression against those who are not in their group. They are difficult to rationalize with, are capable of compartmentalizing and believing often opposing and hypocritical positions, and stick with those they believe are reliable authority even when they are shown to be wrong. It's a personality attribute ( I would call it a personality disorder) that is difficult to overcome with logic, reason or any degree of critical thinking.

I find his research and conclusions to be highly explanatory of that which previously befuddled me. There is science behind his conclusion, as the scales are repeatable, testable and relatively consistent in their results. RWAs are followers, but when combined with what he calls "Double Highs" (essentially amoral authoritarian leaders) the results can be potentially lethal or catastrophic. Read about the Global Change Game he has conducted repeatedly for a chilling look at our possible future.

The book is free on his website in PDF format. It is written in a breezy, laid back style with very little in the way of statistical jargon, essentially written for the layman. This is a must read for anyone who sees the fascistic tendencies of our politicians ("wrapped in the flag carrying a cross") and can't figure out the attraction they hold to a sizable percentage of the country.

[Charlie Crummer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable study. It investigated and quantifies the phenomena we have been witnessing for years, the rise of authoritarianism in the US. We have seen this before in European, African and South American countries but we haven't noticed it, or maybe just not taken it seriously in the US. It's becoming more and more evident that it *can* happen here. Being a liberal like Altemeyer is, I engage in introspection and I am afraid of my own role in this. This book is a must read. It is all too prophetic.

[Sally · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love it when experienced academics let loose with a for the public version of their work. This is extremely informative - but very disturbing. I recommend it to all of my US friends who have any interest in politics at all.

It'd be interesting to see an addendum following the first Obama term, as if anything the Tea Party and Co. have become even more fearful and excited, though thankfully unable to act upon their radical agenda. It'd be fascinating to see the response of the US public if the religious right did gain power of the Presidency (on top of their current power over the Republican Party) and attempt to introduce their agenda, however it's something I hope to never have the opportunity to observe.

This is a fascinating, horrifying and very important set of findings about what's driving the Religious Right of US politics and the impact it's having on the country and by extension the world. It's presented very accessibly, factually and the statistical relationships will shock and astonish anyone with any understanding of stats in the social sciences. I found it engaging enough that I read it right through when I had planned just to have a peep at it and start my next urban fantasy.

Addendum: I just read "Comment on the Tea Party Movement" written April 20, 2010 and available on the same site. It's enlightening. I do hope further updates become available.

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is regarding psychological data on a particular personality type, which is Authoritarian. Some data books can be boring, but Bob is a funny guy and he makes the reading fun. The reason I enjoyed this book as much as I did was that it dealt with the difference between a leader and a follower in authoritarian circles. We all meet people that are truly genuine and believe any made up story with passion. We have also met the leaders of lies and can see how different and fake they are. It seems like the same personality because they profess to believe the same things, but they aren't the same types of people.
I would recommend anyone to read this, just like I suggest everyone read "Don't think of an Elephant"

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Before I start, I would like to say that I really, really wanted to like this book. At first, it held up to my expectations: Altemeyer seems like a nice, honest and fun guy to me, even now, and his research is innovative, enlightening and appears to have some seriously strong backing. I looked for refutations, I couldn't find any, so I can assume he's mostly spot-on with his observations on the right-wing authoritarian mindset, the personality of the social dominator and the double highs, who combine the worst traits of these two types. Altemeyer is very aware of the limitations of his research (and psychology in general), and consistently points out that you cannot reduce individual personalities to one of his idealtypes even if they get a certain score on a test. That was nice of him. If there's one thing I value, it's scientists that don't suffer from methodological blindness.

What surprises me, then, is that Altemeyer, who is so innovative and self-aware, becomes the complete opposite when he turns to politics - and there's a lot of that in here. While he makes some pretenses earlier in this book about how he's not talking of specific political ideologies, but of a general mindset, this gradually flies out the window until it's all gone by the end of the book. To name one example of his bias, here are two items from one of his tests:

There are no discoveries or facts that could possibly make me change my mind about the things that matter most in life.
I am absolutely certain that my ideas about the fundamental issues in life are correct.

The idea is that these two items (among others), when answered in the affirmative, are an indicator that you're a narrow-minded, paranoid right-wing authoritarian (this term is less political than it sounds). The problem with the first question is that it's likely to be affirmed by even the most authoritarian, most insular empiricist, while a rationalist like me who values logic higher than scientific evidence in the positivistic sense will have his reservations, simply because of how the question is phrased. The second question, meanwhile, is worded in such a way that a nonrelativist fallibilist might answer in the affirmative, but a relativist dogmatist wouldn't. So a more philosophical type who is open to question his beliefs, but is convinced of them as long as they are not disproven, would be graded as more authoritarian than a radical positivist or relativist, or a certain interrogator from 1984. Remember when I said that Altemeyer is just mostly spot-on? This is why.

It goes on like that, really. To name another example, after being skeptical of his own scientific field for most of the book, Altemeyer then goes on, on page 122, to drop the following bomb on the difference between faith and science:

This view is three players short of a trio. First, it does not grasp that future theories in science will be accepted because they make superior explanations and predictions--which is progress you could not make if you insisted the old theory was perfect. As well, science energetically corrects itself. If a finding is misleading, say due to methodological error, other scientists will discover that and set things straight. Every year a new batch of scientists graduates, and many of them take dead aim--as they were trained to do--on the scientific Establishment. In religion you might get branded a heretic, or worse, for challenging dogma. In science you’ll get promoted and gather research grants as ye may if you knock an established explanation off its perch. Orthodoxy has a big bulls-eye painted on it in science. A scientist who can come up with a better account of things than evolution will become immortal.

As someone studying Austrian economics, I can say that scientific progress does not work that way. Both intellectuals themselves as well as policymakers are invested in specific results. They don't want to embarassed, they don't want to lose their status as the foremost authority on the phlogiston-theory or whatever you have, and they don't want to cut their projects off while they're right in the middle of it. The essay Ludwig von Mises and the Paradigm for our Age (the link includes a source) describes the process of paradigm-change quite nicely. As I said, Altemeyer seemed to have a healthy skepticism about his own scientific field earlier, so why is that completely gone once he starts talking about creationists?

At this point, the book rapidly went down. By page 124, he presents the zealot-scale, which basically describes how much people care about their own life philosophy, and while I don't take issue with the scale itself, this passage reads like another crusade against people who have an opinion, a sense of right and wrong and who actually care about it. His attacks against specific American politicians also increase, and they just aren't a good read. They are the same crap liberals always spout, and while liberals are mostly right about how much Bush sucks, it's no fun to listen to them rant about it when their own politicians have become almost as bad. I would mind neither the zealot-scale and the writing surrounding it nor the snarky "Who am I?"-games that Altemeyer plays with Bush and co., if he hadn't crossed so hard into pop-politics territory already.

Another highlight that I remember from this book is Altemeyer being absolutely astonished that anyone would be against the welfare state and still have the audacity to pretend to care about fairness! Nevermind the large amount of literature on the topic which proves that the welfare state is actively harmful. Nevermind that the ideals of egalitarianism and fairness are themselves not undisputed. What, exactly, does Altemeyer think he's doing here? I would really like to know that. Has he simply not done a lot of research on economics? Is he unaware of libertarian ideas? Does he think that debates and interviews with politicians are the be-all and end-all of ethical controversies? Either way, his hit-and-run comment really isn't worth much.

The last concrete issue I want to touch on is the Global Change Game, a simulation of global politics in which the third world colllectively starves to death unless the rich westerners send them endless amounts of money and legalize contraceptives. We're talking about a massive famine that would cause hundreds of millions of deaths. You know, like the ones we saw in socialist countries, no matter how much foreign aid they got. Predictably, the right-wing authoritarians ended up with half the world dead from famine. I'm not surprised, considering that Altemeyer decided that all their economic policies would lead to death on a global scale. He rigged the game, then gloated about its results. And I know, the right-wing authoritarians were also dumb enough to start a nuclear war, but that was not the sole reason for their failure. If they had not been authoritarian at all, just libertarian, they would still have fared very badly. This one experiment exemplifies perfectly everything that's good and bad about this book: Good, the innovative and strong research; bad, this research (or rather its interpretation) being so heavily politically tainted. If Altemeyer had cut down on the unqualified moralizing, The Authoritarians could've been a four-star or maybe even five-star book. But no, he absolutely had to pretend to be the next Bill Maher, when we already have one Bill Maher too much.

Addendum: Revised Rating
After some deliberation, I have decided to lower my rating to two stars. There are two main reasons for that.

The first reason is that, now that I am religious myself, I realize just how unfairly Altemeyer treated them. His questionaire was pretty much designed to make Christians fail, and his "credential" of having heard or read most of the Bible, probably, at some point in his life, is really not that impressive. There are thousands of cradle Catholics who apostatize. It's nothing special, and it doesn't qualify you as a theologian.

The second reason, and actually the more important one, is that I have never, in my life, found any of the lessons in this book applicable. I never had to consult it, I never had a realization it contained the missing puzzle piece to some question I just stumbled upon, nothing. His questionaires are even worse in hindsight, they rate how liberal you are and nothing more, and his Global Change Game, one of the stars of this book, is set up to make conservatives and libertarians fail. The psychology behind The Authoritarians just isn't that good, and without it, you have another simplistic liberal pop-politics book.

[Ben Labe · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this portentous account of the degrading state of political discourse in the United States, Bob Altemeyer provides a pedestrian overview of his career studying the psychology of "authoritarians". In particular, he identifies the perfect storm which can result when authoritarian leaders and authoritarian followers join forces. The willingness of authoritarian leaders to manipulate and connive their way into power, combined with authoritarian followers' willingness to accept those who profess to hold beliefs similar to theirs, regardless of whether those people have obvious ulterior motives, has resulted in a Republican party that is dominated by self-righteousness, intolerance and even belligerence toward outsiders, and a lack of concern for equality or due process. Of course, Altemeyer was preaching to the converted on this point. However, for me the book provided a useful explanation of both how our democracy may have reached this point and especially how such a large faction of the general public has willfully been duped into defending those who would, and do, betray their most beloved interests on an almost pathologically routine basis.

[Lithodid-man · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe this book is one of the most import things I have read in a very log time. Dr. Altemeyer has presented a very engaging yet thorough analysis of his research into authoritarian personalities.

I have been studying and attempting to understand the evangelical mindset for a long time. Throughout this book he presents insights into a personality type that transcends evangelicals, making the claim that there is a personality profile that is attracted to authority. Fundamentalism would be just one of many beliefs that would be attractive to this personality type.

It is tempting to dismiss this work as a possibly engaging idea but little more (In fact it would have been more comforting if it were just a collection of anecdotes loosely tied together by a notion). But searching his references and reading some of the actual research show that, whatever else you may think, this is not sloppy science. Even if one dismisses his conclusions the data still stands and requires some explanation.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is nothing less than spectacular. Robert Altemeyer, a renowned social scientist in the field of authoritarian followers and leaders, shares his life's work and the implications it has for modern society. If you ever wondered why certain people continue to do "stupid things" while holding a collection of erroneous and often contradicting ideas, but these people do not all consistently fit into one category, then this book will reveal that category in a scientific manner. For example, Altemeyer was able to test and measure the level of authoritarianism and social dominance (tendency to be an authoritarian leader) of thousands of American politicians (from state to federal). Aren't you curious as to what he found out?

This book is freely available online, but make no mistake, he could have easily published this book in a traditional manner and made quite a bit of money. Altemeyer feels this book is important enough that it should be freely distributed. An audiobook version is also available.

[Todd Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

As Professor of Psychology at the University of Manitoba (now retired) Bob Altemeyer studied the psychological characteristics of right wing authoritarians for more than 30 years. He’s summarized the results of this research in the highly readable book The Authoritarians and has generously made it available for free download on his website at:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

Go get it! The book is fascinating, highly entertaining and explains so much about what is wrong in the US.

Through behavioral surveys, Professor Altemeyer has developed a personality profile of authoritarians, and the picture the research paints is not a pretty one. Before summarizing his conclusions it’s important to point out that authoritarianism correlates with a series of traits such as say ... religious fundamentalism. However, just because, someone scores high on the authoritarian scale does not necessarily mean that they possess each (or any) of these traits. It only means that authoritarians as a whole are more likely to possess these characteristics.

There is a quiz in the book that measures your authoritarian tendencies. However, the reality is that if you are reading this book, your score is likely to be on the low side since High RWAs (right wing authoritarians) are highly motivated to avoid information that disconfirms their beliefs (confirmation bias).

Authoritarians tend to exhibit the following personality traits:
1) A high degree of submission to the established authorities in their society.
2) High levels of aggression in the name of their authorities.
3) A high level of conventionalism (they are subservient to established norms and customs).

So what does this mean? They are more prejudiced against other races and sexual orientations, but also against anyone who believes or acts differently from themselves. They are more religious that most people and these tendencies correlate strongly with fundamentalist and dogmatic beliefs. They tolerate corruption in those they follow, while are intolerant of this behavior in others. They strongly support tough criminal penalties for crimes and activities of which they disapprove, but are forgiving when these acts are committed in support of a cherished belief. They compartmentalize their thinking and often express opinions that are internally inconsistent. This also manifests itself in the form of double standards and hypocritical behaviors. They feel morally superior to others, which expresses itself in self-righteous behavior. They are more fearful and tend to feel more endangered in a potentially threatening situation than most people do, often responding aggressively. They also hold firmly to preconceived notions and beliefs, refusing to re-evaluate their position even when presented with evidence to the contrary. Oh ... and they make up about 20-25% of the population.

Does that remind you of anyone in particular? Authoritarian individuals are inflexible, hypocritical, self-righteous, prejudiced, aggressive and closed to new information and ideas ... and there’s a decent chance that one of them currently represents you in congress. Is there any wonder politics has become so dysfunctional?

It should be noted that the above characterization, while unflattering, is not mere opinion. The list comprises a series of behaviors that have been strongly correlated through decades of peer reviewed psychological studies. You can get a feel for these studies and the evidence for yourself by reading the book.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating and alarming look at the authoritarian mindset, both among authoritarian leaders and authoritarian followers, based mostly (but not entirely) on the author's own research.

I have only two complaints. I wish the author had spent more time discussing effective ways to counteract this mindset, or at least mitigate its effect on our world today. He does address this at the end, but briefly and with a slightly hopeless air.

I also had problems with the use of the phrase "right-wing authoritarian." Although the author repeatedly says that he is not using "right-wing" to refer to political leanings and that, in different times or countries, this mindset could also apply to people who are the left wing of the political spectrum, and does in fact make a point that extreme Communists in the USS rated as highly as right-wing authoritarians as their counterparts in the United States, I think it would have been better to differentiate more clearly between authoritarians and political conservatives. Since the phrase right-wing is primarily used today as a political adjective, and since there is so much overlap between the two, it was somewhat confusing.

Still, well worth the read. In fact, I wish every American would read it, as it is so relevant to the current political and social climate in the United States.

This book is available for free in PDF form at the author's web site (I used calibre to convert it to Kindle, which made the formatting wonky but still readable.): http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

[Lukasz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Świetna książka, podsumowuje pracę naukową Boba Altmeyera, która skupiała się na badaniu zjawiska autorytaryzmu.

*******************************************

Książkę "The Authoritatians" Boba Altmeyera przeczytałem ponad rok temu.
Trwało to ponad rok zanim uporałem się z "poukładaniem" w głowie wiedzy zawartej w tej książce.

I nagle właśnie całkiem niedawno w głowie mi "zaskoczyło". Doszło do "umeblowania" zagadnień związanych z autoryraryzmem.

W zasadzie spowodował to przypadek.

Podczas czytania książki "Silva Rerum" natrafiłem na postać, a w zasadzie "fenomen" Mariana Dowgiałły. Na pierwszy rzut oka ta barwna postać wydawała się być dość niepozorna, komiczna, karykaturalna. Do większej refleksji nad tą postacią zostałem zmotywowany przez kogoś kto też w szczególny sposób zwrócił uwagę na tą postać. Ponieważ jestem jeszcze w trakcie czytania "Silva Rerum" zamykam teraz temat tej książki i koncentruję się na "The Authoritarians" Boba Altmeyera.

Najpierw kilka słów o samym autorze. Bob Altmeyer to Amerykanin, emerytowany profesor kanadyjskiego Uniwersytetu w Manitobie, który poświęcił całą karierę naukową na badanie zjawiska autorytaryzmu. Książka "The Authoritatians" to podsumowanie jego całej, ponad czterdziestoletniej kariery badawczej. Książka Altmazeyera dostępna jest tak a propos w internecie w formie PDF.
http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/...

Ja natomiast kupiłem i wysłuchałem audiobooka, którego lektorem jest sam autor.

Bob Altmeyer ze zrozumiałych dla mnie powodów ma wielu wrogów i pewnie są powody dla których wiele lat temu postanowił osiedlić się na stałe w Kanadzie i tam kontynuować swoją karierę naukową. Jednak muszę zaznaczyć, że jego dokonania naukowe zostały dostrzeżone i prestiżowa organizacja American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) już w 1986 dostrzegła jego wkład w naukę i przyznała mu nagrodę za badania na ludzkim zachowaniem.

To co mnie zadziwiło i zaskoczyło na samym początku książki Altmeyera, że zaczyna on opisywanie zjawisko autorytaryzmu nie od zjawiska autorytarnych, despotycznych przywódców, lecz od ich zwolenników. Większość książki w zasadzie poświęcona jest zwolennikom autorytarnych despotów. (4 na 7 rozdziałów są im poświęcone). Jasne staje się, i Altmeyer wysuwa jasne argumenty, że to nie Hilter, Stalin i inni despoci są niebezpieczni. Prawdziwym zagrożeniem dla ludzkości są tłumy zwolenników, które są w stanie iść za despotami.

W pierwszym rozdziale Altmeyer definiuje profil przeciętnego autorytarnego zwolennika.
Autorytarny zwolennik ma trzy podstawowe cechy:
1) Wysoki stopień podporządkowania się formalnym autorytetom
2) Wysoki stopień agresji który jest wyzwalany w kontekście posłuszeństwa względem formalnego autorytetu
3) Wysoki stopień tzw. "konwencjonalizmu", czyli podporządkowania się konwencjonalnym zasadom


Altmayer opracował odpowiedni test psychologiczny i skalę RWA (Right Wing Authoritarian scale), ale podkreśla, że skala RWA niekoniecznie musi służyć do określania autorytaryzmu opartego na prawicowej ideologi, tak samo może służyć do tłumaczenia autorytaryzmy opartego na ideologii komunistycznej, maoistycznej, ideologii jakiejkolwiek.

W drugi rozdział poświęcony jest zjawisku agresji autorytarnej. Agresja autorytarna jednak ma niewiele wspólnego z tym, że autorytarni zwolennicy mają tendencje do przemocy fizycznej. Chodzi o to, że raczej mają tendencję do agresji instytucjonalnej, sankcjonowanej przez instytucje na czele której stoi autorytarny przywódca. Autorytarni zwolennicy cechują się bardzo niskim poziomem empatii wobec obcych, "innych" ludzi, wręcz są zdania, że z urzędu zasługują na gorsze traktowanie, wykluczenie, czasem likwidację, wręcz masową eksterminację.

Trzeci rozdział traktuje o ogólnych schematach zachowań zwolenników autorytarnych. Tutaj autor przytacza kilka utartych schematów które cechują tych ludzi, jak na przykład, brak samorefleksji , stosowanie podwójnych standartów, hipokryzja, szufladkowanie rzeczywistości, nielogiczny sposób myślenia, etnocentryzm.

W czwratym rozdziale autor porusza kwestię fundamentalizmu religijnego. Autorytarni zwolennicy w zasadzie zawsze są fanatycznymi, fundamentalnymi wyznawcami jakiejś religii, lub ideologii.

Autor zamyka książkę refleksją na temat: co robić?
Przede wszystkim trzeba jednak pamiętać, że nawet zwolennicy autorytarni to ludzie. Autor szacuje, że na przykład w społeczeństwie USA stanowią nawet ok. 25-30% społeczeństwa.
Autor odradza jakiejkąkolwiek debatę, wchodzenie w bezpośrednią dyskusję z tymi ludzmi -- przecież nie potrafią nawet myśleć logicznie, stosują podwójne standarty, ludzi nie należacy do ich "grupy" traktują jako innych, z którymi trzeba walczyć.
Autor podkreśla, że ogólny strach zwiększa agresję. Także celem ogólnym jest redukcja strachu i bodzców społecznych wywołujących strach u autorytarnych zwolenników. Dlatego na przykład bardzo ważną rolę spełniają tutaj media. To co pojawia się w mediach może redukować, lub wręcz odwrotnie, zwiększać strach autorytarnych zwolenników.
Edukacja, wykształcenie jest według autora kluczowe. Przede wszystkich wykształcenie powinno koncentrować się na uczeniu krytycznego myślenia i kwestionowania autoreyteru, oraz szacunku dla inności.
Autor podczas badań zauważył również, że autorytarni zwolennicy kiedy już zrozumieli to kim naprawdę są, sami sobie zaprzeczali, że należa do grupy autorytarnych zwolenników, bo intuicyjnie czują, że jest to nieakceptowalne społecznie. W tym kontekście autor wysuwa kontrowersyjną tezę, że jeśli w bardziej widoczny sposób obnaży się schemat działania autorytaryzmu, wielu autorytarnych zwolenników, zaprzeczy temu i wręcz nawet zmieni sposób zachowania. Sztuka jednak polega na tym jak to zrobić, aby być wiarygodnym względem autorytarnego zwolennika. Są oni wyczuleni na "propagandę" przeciwnego obozu. Ale autor uważa, że jest to możliwe. Jednak, należy pamiętać, że zmiana sposobu myślenia jest po prostu niemożliwa, chodzi tutaj raczej o wpływ polegający na "wymuszeniu" zmiany zachowania. Może polityczna poprawność ma w sobie jakąś zaletę? Trzyma w szachu pewne zapędy i tłamsi pewne zachowania, które bez poprawności politycznej byłyby bardziej widoczne?
Tworzenie odpowiednich wzorców przywódczych jest kluczowe.

I mógłbym tutaj dalej wymieniać wnioski autora.

To ważna pozycja. W świetle fali strachu i populizmu która zaczyna ogarniać świat wydaje się być na czasie.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recommended to everyone. A psychologist shares the results of his psychological studies examining the specific personality trait of authoritarianism. This work is grounded in science as much as possible, and in the process we learn a great deal about how social scientists quantify and define psychological factors. As a result, this isn't simply a polemic or opinion piece about "authoritarianism" in the abstract, but a study about a specific mental trait and its attendant politics.

Rarely these days do I read something that I think is truly eye-opening, but that is how I'm forced to describe this book. It feels like a skeleton key to politics.

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

I struggled to understand what has happened in American politics over the last 30 years until I read this book. Reading it I no longer get so angry in discussions with my friends on the right who I have split between simply uninformed and willfully partisan uninformed

I still practice my written and verbal skills on the willful group but don't get frustrated at how easily they ignore facts. Facts don't matter.

[Leftymathprof]

A fifth of our society is crazy: they are people who do not question authority, and who attack anyone that does question authority. Bush's approval rating will never drop below 20 percent NO MATTER WHAT HE DOES. We all need to understand these people better. Altemeyer is a brilliant psychologist who has done real experiments; I think he knows what he's talking about.

[Liaan Booysen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read book if you want to understand the rise of Authoritarianism especially Trump.

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading in the age of Trump.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not exactly sure what it was that didn't catch me about this book. On the surface, you'd think that it was liberal catnip. A book about how the people I don't personally like and think are probably the greatest danger to American democracy at the moment--namely, right wing evangelicals--are hypocritical idiots who blindly accept whatever is spoonfed their way be leaders who think they're useful stooges and are willing to say anything to get in power. Then, once in power, the followers are so willing to believe anything that their leaders say that they'll paper over even blatant contradictions using the awesome power of cognitive dissonance. Not only that, but they're more bigoted, less discerning, more dogmatic, less interested in equal rights, and believe that, to quote Nixon, "when the president does it, that means it's not illegal."

In the Global Change Game experiment run by Altemeyer, pretty much every experiment involving authoritarians ended in tears, either from simple neglect of the world's problems or through global thermonuclear war that killed everyone. Meanwhile, the non-authoritarian group was able to pull together and solve or at least mitigate most every difficulty that came there way.

There's a lot more, but I won't repeat it all here because it'd bloat this review unnecessarily, and also it's all available in the wikipedia article if you want an easy list.

So why don't I just bow down to the data? Well...it's too easy, for one. You mean that science reveals that a group of people I don't tend to have a high opinion of are flawed in dozens of ways, and much worse than non-authoritarians? One of the main tenets of skepticism is that it's almost more important to cast a skeptical eye on evidence that agrees with you than it is with evidence that disagrees with you, because confirmation bias means you're more likely to uncritically accept information that supports your beliefs than information that contradicts it.

That and Altemeyer does say that these are all tendencies, not an iron law as old as the earth and sky, but then he makes statements like these:

Because authoritarians depend so much on their in-group to support their beliefs (whereas other people depend more on independent evidence and logic)

Reason and logic? Don't make me laugh. Humans only use reason and logic as a last resort and at extreme difficulty, and we constantly resort to well-worn mental heuristics if they even remotely come close to fitting the situation.

And it's not like Altemeyer is unaware of this. Half of the last chapter of The Authoritarians is about the Milgram Experiment, which is one of the most famous psychological experiments and also show how incredibly easy it is for the average person to fall back on familiar behavior patterns--"obey authority figures," say--instead of really reasoning things out in some kind of impartial cost-benefit analysis or in the spirit of universal compassion.

The terminology also kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Altemeyer repeatedly uses RWA, meaning "Right-Wing Authoritarian," to refer to all authoritarians. He even says at one point that a Stalinist would obviously be a left-wing authoritarian, but since they would have the same personality type as the other RWAs they all fit under the same banner. I can accept that if you live in America or Canada, left-wing authoritarians are really only a problem in the paranoid fantasies of the far right, but this still seems imprecise. In fact, almost all of the research takes place in the US or Canada, which makes me wonder how much it can be generalized to the rest of the world. It's a problem I had with The Republican Brain, thought it didn't bother me there as much as it did here.

Finally, I didn't like the tone. The Authoritarians is written in a kind of breezy conversational tone, filled with jokes and colloquialisms. I suppose that helps a bit in a book that's essentially condemning a quarter of the population as unfit for democracy, but I would have preferred a more clinical tone. Maybe then I wouldn't have felt quite like I was reading a screed even though I often agreed with it.

On the other hand, I can't deny that his work does explain a lot, from the crazification factor to why the supposedly economic and policy-focused Tea Party is appealing to racists to the anecdata of Republican politicians preaching "family values" and then getting caught in affairs or being revealed to be gay.

Altemeyer claims that his RWA scale has a high predictive value, and if you want to find out your own RWA-coefficient you can take an online test here. Though remember that merely by knowing about what you've read in this review, your results are contaminated and it doesn't have the same value as it would if you took it unknowingly.

I'm a bit torn. I think the information here is valuable, but I don't like the presentation. Basically, I want the same book with the same information but written by someone else in a difference style, so I split that into three stars. If the problems I mentioned above wouldn't bother you, then you should absolutely read it. You can do so for free here.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you would like to understand why ordinary people and evangelicals support the Party of Trump, look no further. There's also an explanation for Trump and the other people motivated to follow him, based on assessment of authoritarian traits and dominance traits. The book is available for free download by the author, who self-published it to make his ideas more widely read.

Some years ago I sat next to David Lykken, one of the primary psychologists in the famous Univ. of Minnesota Twin Studies. One of the findings we discussed at length was authoritarian personality, and how the twin studies were showing it was hereditary. The characteristics he described for this personality were pretty much identifcal to Dr. Altemeyer's assessments.

Lykken speculated that this personality style was actually a survival mechanism, based on the long and trouble history of monarchy, tyranny, and religious oppressions such as the Inquisition. Thinking for yourself, questioning authority got you killed. Accepting it blindly might save your life, no matter if it made any sense. This trait of accepting authority is hard-wired into a large number of people. Lykken thought it could be the majority.

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can't figure out why some people continue to follow the absolute worst kinds of people as leaders? This book should give you the answers you are looking for. It certainly clarified human psychology behind this action for me.

[Daniel Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

I absolutely love how this book is written and the idea behind its release. The world would be a much better place if more academics did this (writing and releasing their ideas in a way to actually engage with the public).

In terms of the actual book - I don't think the research is either descriptive nor predictive and therefore, not very insightful.

[Jurij Fedorov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduction
Who Am I?
What is Authoritarianism?

Chapter One: Who Are the Authoritarian Followers?
Right-Wing and Left-Wing Authoritarian Followers
The RWA Scale
Is the RWA Scale Valid?
Unauthoritarians and Authoritarians: Worlds of Difference
The Low RWA Game
The High RWA Game
Summary
8/10

Very strong chapter. Highly recommended for social scientists. The intro to the audiobook is a progressive left-winger praising Obama and attacking McCain. The book itself starts with an attack on Bush. Actually the attacks on Bush never stop. The author says he supported the war in Afghanistan and was against the Iraq war. Personally I'm totally the opposite. I think both wars were rather stupid. But the Iraq war was 100 times more wise. Saddam was a psychopath and hanging him was great even though Iraqis are not exactly high IQ people who can create a functional democracy. Meanwhile Afghanistan is a giant mistake. USSR was destroyed there. USA stood no chance whatsoever at "winning" this war. They are very, very low IQ people who have a strong culture of extreme Islam and tribe fighting and implemented a US style democracy there is hopeless. The point is that the author is not far-left it seems. He's center for a professor and left-wing for a regular person. He hates the right-wing overall, but he doesn't like fascist communism and points out that it functions like a right-wing party/country in such a case. So he practically avoids saying anything negative about the left overall.

His scale also illustrates his bias. Especially how he totally ignores any left-wing authoritarians and largely criticises any right-wing or conservative view. The scale itself contains a ton of questions about conservative views on gays, abortion, religion. For example, one of the questions to find out if you are authoritarian or not is this:

21. Homosexuals and feminists should be praised for being brave enough to defy “traditional family values.

What has praise of homosexuals and feminists have to do with someone being authoritarian or not? Quite the opposite, if you demand praise for certain groups that is being authoritarian. What about praising atheists, robbers, people who smell, short people, fat women, poor people. Just because they break societal norms doesn't mean you are required to praise them to make them feel good. Of course this doesn't show if the scale is good or not. It just looks totally off to me and clearly is about conservative values not authoritarian values here. Other questions used in his survey example could also be seen as weird:

19. Our country will be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the “rotten apples” who are ruining everything.

20. There is no “ONE right way” to live life; everybody has to create their own way.

Many sane centrists would agree that a country could become great if you honor its history and get rid of criminals. That's how you can understand question 19 which makes it quite innocent. Notice also how praise for authorities and forefathers is clearly seen as a negative as it doesn't get to stand alone. So we are required to praise homosexuals and feminists, but if we like our country culture that gives us a higher score on the scale and means we have a ton of negative traits.

Question 20 also pertains to post-modernism. Can a human be anything whatsoever? No, happiness does have universal factors applying to all groups and cultures: not being sick, being respected and loved, having influence, having a good partner, having good friends, having enough money. Sure you can create your own life to some degree, the question doesn't tell you what degree it's asking about so you can interpret it in any way I figure.

A lot of questions are about God and religion. Not politics.

But the left-wing authoritarians on my campus disappeared long ago. Similarly in America “the Weathermen” blew away in the wind. I’m sure one can find left-wing authoritarians here and there, but they hardly exist in sufficient numbers now to threaten democracy in North America. However I have found bucketfuls of right-wing authoritarians in nearly every sample I have drawn in Canada and the United States for the past three decades. So when I speak of “authoritarian followers” in this book I mean right-wing authoritarian followers, as identified by the RWA scale.

Note how he just avoids the topic of left-wing authoritarians. He doesn't tackle it. He claims his own university lost these radical left-wingers. Which is hard to believe. There are way more communists at universities today and some fields of study have 20-25% of professors claim they are Marxists and even more claim they are progressive left-wingers and radical left-wingers. He must be implying that authoritarian left-wingers are something much different from just radical left-wingers.

Luckily his ideas are not just blindly attacking the right-wing or conservatives. The intro to the book does. The author is not at a NYT level of blind bias. Yet he calls his scale The Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale, but omits "right-wing" from his book title and in most examples of the book. So this scale of stupidity and evilness implies that nearly only right-wingers fit into it. He vagule explains that left-wing authoritarians also exist, but never explains how they look like. I wish he would ALWAYS use "right-wing" before authoritarian to remain more neutral. Of course the scale itself being weird is another issue. He and the intro both claim the scale is scientifically proven yet he only refers to his own studies on this which makes him hard to trust.

Chapter Two: The Roots of Authoritarian Aggression, and Authoritarianism Itself
A Psychoanalytic Explanation
Bandura’s Social Learning Theory of Aggression
The Personal Origins of Right-Wing Authoritarianism
A Tale of Two High School Seniors
The “Middles”
Then There’s The Rest of Life
4/10

Explains how authoritarians are Christian fundamentalists. He claims RWA must be largely environmental then tries to support this point by just mentioning random invented stories about people and some hypothetical influence. In social science this is worth nothing. He needs twin studies to look into this not just take a standpoint with no evidence. This doesn't belong in a scientific book. His guesswork is shoddy and outdated. He only lightly mentions studies going into heritability as they seem to not be of any interest to him whatsoever.

Chapter Three: How Authoritarian Followers Think
1. Illogical Thinking
2. Highly Compartmentalized Minds
3. Double Standards
4. Hypocrisy
5. Blindness To Themselves
6. A Profound Ethnocentrism
7. Dogmatism: The Authoritarian’s Last Ditch Defense
A Little Application
5/10

Bit confusing. He tries to explain how these right-wing authoritarians think, but it's not clear how good his evidence is. It's a bunch of forced conclusions. He also very clearly in this chapter makes biased errors. There are plenty of points and survey questions he claims mean one thing, but then clearly say something else:

Should a university professor be allowed to teach an anthropology course in which he argues that men are naturally superior to women, so women should resign themselves to inferior roles in our society?
Should a book be assigned in a Grade 12 English course that presents homosexual relationships in a positive light?
Should books be allowed to be sold that attack “being patriotic” and “being religious”?
Should a racist speaker be allowed to give a public talk preaching his views?
Should someone be allowed to teach a Grade 10 sex education course who strongly believes that all premarital sex is a sin?
Should commercials for “telephone sex” be allowed to be shown after 11 PM on television?
Should a professor who has argued in the past that black people are less intelligent than white people be given a research grant to continue studies of this issue?
Should a book be allowed to be published that argues the Holocaust never occurred, but was made up by Jews to create sympathy for their cause?
Should sexually explicit material that describes intercourse through words and medical diagrams be used in sex education classes in Grade 10?
Should a university professor be allowed to teach a philosophy course in which he tries to convince his students there is no God?
Should an openly white supremist movie such as “The Birth of a Nation” (which glorifies the Ku Klux Klan) be shown in a Grade 12 social studies class?
Should “Pro-Choice” counselors and abortion clinics be allowed to advertise their services in public health clinics if “Pro-Life” counselors can?

I hope you’ll agree that half of the situations would particularly alarm liberals, and the other half would raise the hackles on right-wingers. Would low RWAs want to censor the things they thought dangerous as much as high RWAs would in their areas of concern? It turned out to be “no contest,” because in both studies authoritarian followers wanted to impose more censorship in all of these cases—save the one involving the sex education teacher who strongly believed all premarital sex was a sin. How can this be?

Notice his questions and then his argument. "I hope you'll agree that... ". Well, I don't. In my view only 1 question pertains to conservative values and that's the thing RWA didn't want restricted. For example, right-wing colleges in USA don't have a single professor anywhere teaching about Black-White IQ differences. It's just not a conservative value no matter how much he claims that these right-wingers are mean racists. It's no surprise they want it banned as it's a controversial scientific question totally unrelated to the authoritarian right-wing.

He claims that RWA just wants to ban everything to a higher degree not matter what political leaning the idea has while asking about either neutral or left-wing ideas. It's fishy. And when he lists a bunch of survey questions and claims they are politically neutral and only about authority and they refer to gay people, Christianity, Jesus, wars, school education and other such stuff I start to question if he even understands what he is talking about. Which is a shame as I actually think his theories are really curious and would love to see a proper survey created. Or he could rewrite his explanation and admit the questions are not neutral. Just because the survey is bad now doesn't mean his theory is bad. It just needs to be tested properly by someone else using proper questions.

I do think he kinda proves his point that RWA are more dogmatic and harder to convince with evidence. But since RWA in my eyes is not defined that well I'm not sure what this implies.

Chapter Four: Authoritarian Followers and Religious Fundamentalism
The Plan for This Chapter
1. Fundamentalists and Evangelicals in America
2. Fundamentalism and Right-Wing Authoritarianism
3. Fundamentalism as a Template for Prejudice
4. The Mental Life of Fundamentalists
5. Happiness, Joy and Comfort
6. Keeping the Faith, Not
7. Shortfalls in Fundamentalists’ Behavior: Hypocrisy
Summary: So What Does All This Amount To?
6/10

Largely about Republicans and Christians. It's a shame he doesn't use left-wing leaders or Muslims in his examples. It's all about how evil those Republicans are. The book would be way better if he tried to generalize his findings more broadly. But I guess he mostly has studied either his own students or politicians in USA. Which then leads to this conclusion about Republicans always having more negative values than Democrats while Democrats who are from the South can be negative too. His theory just seems to only apply to USA and maye Canada. At least that's how he uses it.

Chapter Five: Authoritarian Leaders
Similarities and Differences Between Social Dominators and Authoritarian Followers
Personal Origins of the Social Domination Orientation
An Experiment Combining Social Dominators and Right-Wing Authoritarians
Double Highs: The Dominating Authoritarian Personality
An Experiment Testing the Interaction of Authoritarian Leaders and Followers
Perspective and Application
7/10

I like this chapter for the philosophy about leadership. He talks about RWA who just love dictators/top leadership and then RWA's who want to be leaders. He describes them as greedy leaders. They "fail" in his country games where groups get together as countries and then agree on politics. All his RWA groups always fail on global warming. The RWA leaders start wars and nearly always try to lead. The followers are eagerly following them. RWA leaders love developing atomic bombs. Again not sure how scientific this is.

Chapter Six: Authoritarianism and Politics
Authoritarianism among American State Legislators
Other Issues
Average RWA Scale Scores of American State Legislators, by State and Party
Double Highs in the Legislatures?
Canadian Legislators
Religious Conservatives and the Republican Party
The 2006 Mid-Term Election
A Bit of Modest Speculation
7/10

Goes into how evil Bush is. Explains Canada's political parties. He has statements like this:

... evidence was piling up that the Republicans had stolen the 2004 presidential election through voter fraud and dirty tricks in Ohio ...

Did Republicans steal the 2004 election through voter fraud? I know that most social media outright bans accounts claiming voter fraud caused Biden to win as there is no proof for this claim. I also know Democrats accuse Republicans of voter fraud too when they lose. So how valid are these accusations and would he be able to fairly compare both voter fraud claims? Since he doesn't criticise Democrats in the book but constantly attacks Republicans I'm not sure I can believe his claims about Republicans to be fair and neutral.

Chapter Seven: What’s To Be Done?
Self-Righteousness Begins at Home
Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience
Why, then?
The “Teaching Team” Conditions and Social Psychology’s Great Discovery Ordinary Men
So What’s Your Point?
What’s To Be Done?
Long-term Reductions in Authoritarianism: Wishing for the Moon
Long-term Reductions in Authoritarianism: More Practical Solutions
The Short Run Imperative: Speak Out Now or Forever, Perhaps, Be Silenced
6/10

Quite shallow for me as someone who knows the field. Milgram is old news. He does make some interesting connections. He also leans heavily into suggestions and ideas again without clear academic sources. I have the book in front of me. It doesn't use sources like you do in scientific articles. I have read a ton of such "right-wingers are evil" books, and they always fear sources, science, and evidence. Which is a shame.

Postscript on the 2008 Election
Part I–Written Right After the Republican Convention
Postscript—Part II
Part III–Written on November 5, 2008

Comment on the Tea Party Movement
A Brief History of the Movement
Are Tea Partiers Ordinary Citizens? Three Recent Polls
Authoritarian Followers
The Other Authoritarian Personality
Summary
What will the future bring?
7/10

He's talking about elections wishing Obama to win and McCain to lose. Then in a later written part celebrates with a very overexcited note at the very end where he proclaims that now that Obama has defeated the evil we can all be hopeful and proud of USA. He says several times he's not a Democrat as he's not registered as one and doesn't like political parties. But the book is one big attack on Republicans. He mentions 20 of so Republicans he takes apart largely because they are overly religious and authoritarian. Yet he avoids picking Democrats to criticise. He also is rooting for Obama and other Democrats in a very explicit way. It's completely clear he is a Democrat and would never vote Republican. He does mention his wife is very much to the left of him, but that doesn't mean he can't be center-left. It's a shame he accuses many people who didn't vote for Obama at being "racist" and "ignorant". I do like a good election chapter though.

My final opinion on the book

Hard to judge the audiobook. On one hand he's a great writer with a lot of cool ideas. He also uses humor in his book making it a way easier read. Overall his arguments are quite clear and he uses actual research in many cases.

On the other hand this is not great science. He says he started in the 1960's and that's very noticeable. This wouldn't cut it today and his theory has also been criticized a lot by better and bigger researchers who are more focused on data and facts over theories. In the 1960's it was all about invented or finding the best ideas and theories as Freud did. We had a ton of philosophical psychology back then that's still used in textbooks as it's classic by now. Doesn't mean it's valid. Similarly this RWA theory is quite outdated. Firstly he claims he is studying all authoritarians, but as mainly right-wingers are authoritarian/bad he calls his theory Right-wing Authoritarians and fully ignores all other authoritarians while explaining that he only ignores them as they are irrelevant.

First order of business would be to fully rename the theory to make it neutral. Even after reading the book I feel like the theory and book is an attack on the right-wing and not just a small outlier right-wing group. In psychology we rename controversial terms like: retard, idiot, psychopath. You use a new word if the word you used before becomes a pop-word that covers too wide a range of topics or is offensive. And "right-wing" should never have been used as a scientific term unless it's counter to left-wing. Don't use the term about a survey meant to find negative and stupid people. It would be like a right-winger creating a survey called "Liberal Weaklings". Secondly there needs to be a left-wing theory too getting exactly as many pages. You can't just bash one side while claiming that the other side is just too boring and small to even study at all. Find out what the other side is mistaken about and make that half of the book. If not it's just not scientific. It's too one-sided.