Authoritarianism Revisited: A Kuhnian Analysis of Research on Psychological Authoritarianism (original) (raw)
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This dissertation answers the question: “What is psychological authoritarianism?” It examines over eighty years of research on psychological authoritarianism, with special emphasis on Adomo et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality and Robert Altemeyer’s work on “right-wing authoritarianism”. It explains why Adomo et al. developed the theoretical framework underlying the F Scale, and how it undergirds Altemeyer’s much more recent and methodologically sophisticated work on the RWA Scale. Both Adomo et al. and Altemeyer understand psychological authoritarianism as the commonalty of three dimensions: authoritarian aggression, conventionality, and authoritarian submission. The dissertation argues that their data indicate that “authoritarian aggression” constitutes the central dimension of “general” psychological authoritarianism, independent of specific ideological leanings. It concludes that psychological authoritarian is authoritarian aggression, nothing more, nothing less. The dissertation rebuts the claim that psychological authoritarianism and conservatism are the same phenomenon. Wilson et al.’s C Scale is the most influential measure of conservatism. Their formulation of “psychological conservatism” parallels key features of Adomo et al.’s theory. Measures of “authoritarianism” relate well to “conservatism” because they are conceptualized and operationalized in similar ways. However, sixty years of empirical findings strongly suggest that these are related but different phenomena. Jost et al.’s efforts to “explain” “revolutionary conservatism” highlight the intellectual contradictions that arise when the two are conflated. The work identifies their common characteristics, and also why they are different. It also provides detailed arguments for why they should be conceptualized as related but distinct attitudes. This dissertation is an exercise in “conceptual clarification” via “psychometrical hermeneutics”. This entails evaluating the degree to which attitudinal phenomena measured by scales correspond to the concepts being operationalized via the careful examination of scale attributes and item wordings. “Psychometrical hermeneutics” also constructs reconceptualizations where the measured phenomenon and concept diverge. This work argues that, in many instances, discrepancies between the conceptualizations underlying scales and the psychometric implications of their operationalizations resulted in conceptual confusion that prevented scholars from properly understanding psychological authoritarianism for much of the past half century.
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used the Global Change Game (GCG) to examine leadership tactics among those scoring high on authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. His innovative approach to studying the global consequences of following such leaders produced results consistent with years of research on both variables. As the world becomes more interconnected through globalization, future simulations such as the GCG may provide insight into how authoritarianism and social dominance orientation might manifest in different regions of the world.
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My thesis for a B.A. degree at the University of Iceland. It is a critical analysis of the RWA (Right Wing Authoritarianism) theory by Altemeyer and more recent iterations of it. Its strengths, its weaknesses and how it has been used and applied in research. Through this analysis the aim was to get a clearer understanding of the nature of authoritarianism as a feature of personality rather than ideology and the efficacy of Altemeyer's theory as a psychological metric to measure authoritarianism as a variable.
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the FPÖ in Austria, to name but a few, has prompted renewed interest in the original study and reinvigorated intense debate about it, not least following historian Peter E. Gordon's republication of the study and Special Issues of South Atlantic Quarterly and Polity organized by Robyn Marasco and others. 1 From the point of view of the history of the social sciences, the reevaluation of The Authoritarian Personality falls into a period that we might term the "twilight of the idols." Landmark social psychological projects of the mid-20 th century, most prominently the experiments by Stanley Milgram and Philipp Zimbardo, have been part of a public academic discourse for decades. In recent years, there has been a trend to reevaluate these studies by way of archival research. In both the cases of the Milgram Experiment (Perry 2013; Reicher et al. 2012) and Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment (Le Texier 2018; 2019; Blum 2018), the opening of the archives has led researchers to believe that crucial methodological shortcomings question the validity of the results. In the first case, the Yale Archives revealed that the experimenters in Stanley Milgram's famous experiment had induced the participants to give electro shocks to the unwilling "learners" to a far greater extent than previously thought (see Smeulers 2020, 222-225). "Induction" and acting were far more of a topic in the
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Over the past two decades, citizens' political rights and civil liberties have declined globally. Psychological science can play an instrumental role in both explaining and combating the authoritarian impulses that underlie these attacks on personal autonomy. In this Review, we describe the psychological processes and situational factors that foster authoritarianism, as well as the societal consequences of its apparent resurgence within the general population. First, we summarize the dual process motivational model of ideology and prejudice, which suggests that viewing the world as a dangerous, but not necessarily competitive, place plants the psychological seeds of authoritarianism. Next, we discuss the evolutionary, genetic, personality and developmental antecedents to authoritarianism and explain how contextual threats to safety and security activate authoritarian predispositions. After examining the harmful consequences of authoritarianism for intergroup relations and broader societal attitudes, we discuss the need to expand the ideological boundaries of authoritarianism and encourage future research to investigate both right-wing and left-wing variants of authoritarianism.