Enforcing Social Conformity: A Theory of Authoritarianism

Fifty years after the publication of The Authoritarian Personality, the empirical literature on authoritarianism continues to grow even though there is no widely accepted theory to account for the phenomenon. The absence of a secure theoretical grounding severely limits our understanding of authoritarianism. This paper offers a new conceptualization in which authoritarian predispositions originate in the conflict between the values of social conformity and personal autonomy. Prejudice and intolerance should be observed among those who value social conformity and perceive a threat to social cohesion. These hypotheses were tested with a sample of undergraduate students; the questionnaire included new measures of the dimension of social conformity–autonomy as well as items from Altemeyer's RWA (right–wing authoritarianism) scale.     

Fighting and Flying: Archival Analysis of Threat, Authoritarianism, and the North American Comic Book

In this archival study, themes of authoritarianism ( Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950 ) were content coded in American comic books. Comic books produced during years of relatively high social and economic threat (1978–82 and 1991–92) contained more aggressive imagery, more conventional themes, less intraception, and fewer spoken lines by women characters relative to comic books produced during years of relatively low threat (1983–90). Unexpectedly, speaking roles for characters of color did not differ due to the influence of threat. Discussion focused on the theoretical relationship between threat and manifestations of authoritarianism at the societal and individual levels.     

Collective Rights and Personal Freedoms: A Discursive Analysis of Participant Accounts of Authoritarianism

This article presents a discursive analysis of participant accounts of authoritarianism, with the aim of understanding how participants construct accounts about authority, when, and for what purposes. Participants completed a 30‐item Right‐Wing Authoritarianism scale and were then interviewed about how they went about this task. Analyses revealed that, despite an overall consistency when answering items on an authoritarianism scale, participants in this study did not consistently choose to produce authoritarian responses in contrast to the nonauthoritarian alternative. Instead, the construction and expression of authoritarian ideas was found to be directly related to two rhetorical features of conversing about authoritarianism: (1) the ideological dilemma of society versus individual and (2) the mobilization of arguments about social and personal threat that allowed participants to construct accounts about collective rights or personal freedoms. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for current debates about how authoritarianism should be theorized and studied.     

National Threat and Political Culture: Authoritarianism, Antiauthoritarianism, and the September 11 Attacks

This paper uses published letters to the editor of major U.S. newspapers to investigate the cultural effects of a major national threat: the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It is based on a hand-coded, stratified random sample of 1,100 letters to the editor published in 17 major papers in the United States (544 pre-September 11, 556 post-September 11). The letters are drawn from a population of 8,101 published letters. Degrees of both authoritarianism and antiauthoritarianism, as well as the general salience of questions of authoritarianism, rose significantly in the post-attack period. The paper suggests that, instead of a simple threat-authoritarianism causal link, authoritarianism and antiauthoritarianism are paired elements of political culture that are invoked together in the face of a national threat.     

Authoritarianism,Cognitive Rigidity,and the Processing of Ambiguous Visual Information

Intolerance of ambiguity and cognitive rigidity are unifying aspects of authoritarianism as defined by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1982/1950), who hypothesized that authoritarians view the world in absolute terms (e.g., good or evil). Past studies have documented the relationship between authoritarianism and intolerance of ambiguity and rigidity. Frenkel-Brunswik (1949) hypothesized that this desire for absolutism was rooted in perceptual processes. We present a study with three samples that directly tests the relationship between right wing authoritarianism (RWA) and the processing of ideologically neutral but ambiguous visual stimuli. As hypothesized, in all three samples we found that RWA was related to the slower processing of visual information that required participants to recategorize objects. In a fourth sample, RWA was unrelated to speed of processing visual information that did not require recategorization. Overall, results suggest a relationship between RWA and rigidity in categorization.     

Authoritarianism,Anger, and Hostile Attribution Bias: A Test of Affect Displacement

Past research has supported the hypothesis that the relationship between harsh childhood punishment and adult political attitudes is due to the displacement of negative emotions that arise onto punitive public policies, e.g., support for the death penalty (Milburn, Conrad, Sala, & Carberry, 1995). Cognitions associated with childhood punishment may also impact adult political attitudes, yet their effects have not yet been examined, despite research that shows that punitive childhood experiences increase the tendency to attribute hostility to others. Thus, we investigated whether the tendency to make hostile attributions about others' behavior influences a person's authoritarianism, controlling for their parents' political orientation. Respondents completed an online survey concerning their childhood punishment experiences, their parents' political orientation, their trait anger, their level of hostile attribution bias (HAB), and their authoritarianism. Multiple regression analyses and structural equation modeling (SEM) found that higher childhood punishment has a significant direct effect on higher levels of authoritarianism, even after controlling for parents' political orientation, and that trait anger and HAB appear to mediate the effects of childhood punishment experiences on authoritarianism,. These results support the process of affect displacement as an important influence on adult punitiveness and political orientation.     

From Stigmatized Immigrants to Radical Right Voting: A Multilevel Study on the Role of Threat and Contact

This study examines the interplay between presence of stigmatized immigrants, threat, and intergroup contact that underlies radical right voting (voting propensity and actual district‐level vote results). On the one hand, low‐status immigrants are often stigmatized and depicted as threats. Thus, presence of stigmatized immigrants should heighten threat perceptions, thereby increasing radical right voting. On the other hand, as positive contact with stigmatized immigrants is known to reduce anti‐immigrant prejudice, it should also attenuate radical right voting. As predicted, multilevel path analyses with the Swiss Election Studies 2011 data (N = 1,736 respondents in 136 districts) revealed that the proportion of stigmatized immigrants (from former Yugoslavia and Albania) in districts heightened perceived threat. Threat perceptions, in turn, increased propensity to vote for the Swiss People's Party, the major radical right party. In contrast, experiencing positive, everyday contact with former Yugoslav and Albanian immigrants reduced voting propensity through attenuated threat perceptions. Contact and threat perceptions were also related to the actual vote through voting propensity.     

The Dimensionality of Right-Wing Authoritarianism: Lessons from the Dilemma between Theory and Measurement

The RWA Scale ( Altemeyer, 1981 , 1988 , 1996 ) is commonly regarded as the best measure of right-wing authoritarianism. The one-dimensional instrument assesses the covariation of three attitudinal clusters: authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism. The incongruence between the implicit conceptual dimensionality on the one hand and methodological operationalization on the other makes room for discussion about whether it would be advantageous to measure the 3 facets of RWA separately. I rely on three arguments: (1) confirmatory factor analyses showing that three-dimensional scales fit the data better than the conventional one-dimensional practice; (2) the dimensions showing a considerable interdimension discrepancy in their capability to explain validation criteria; and (3) the dimensions showing an intradimensional discrepancy which is dependent upon the research question. The argumentation is illustrated by empirical evidence from several Web-based studies among German Internet users.     

To Love or Hate Thy Neighbor: The Role of Authoritarianism and Traditionalism in Explaining the Link Between Fundamentalism and Racial Prejudice

Fundamentalism is consistently related to racial prejudice (Hall, Matz, & Wood, 2010), yet the mechanisms for this relationship are unclear. We identify two core values of fundamentalism, authoritarianism and traditionalism, that independently contribute to the fundamentalism‐racial prejudice relationship. We also contextualize the fundamentalism‐racial prejudice relationship by suggesting that fundamentalists may show prejudice based on conceptions of African Americans as violating values but show tolerance when prejudice is less justifiable. These ideas are tested and confirmed using three data sets from the American National Election Studies. Across all three samples, fundamentalism is related to increases in symbolic racism but decreases in negative affect towards African Americans, and these relationships are mediated by both authoritarianism and traditionalism.     

The Ideological Foundations of Economic Protectionism: Authoritarianism,Social Dominance Orientation,and the Moderating Role of Political Involvement

Even though economic globalization and foreign trade are major topics in the political discourse of most societies and negative attitudes toward international trade are prevalent, there is a lack of research investigating the ideological roots of protectionist preferences from a psychological perspective. In the present research, we examined the implications of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) for trade attitudes. Using data from two nationally representative samples from the United States (Study 1) and Germany (Study 2), we found that RWA predicted protectionist attitudes above and beyond economic self-interest. Furthermore, we found that the relationship between RWA and opposition to international trade was moderated by political involvement. The association of SDO with protectionist attitudes was inconsistent across the two studies and was not moderated by political involvement. Taken together, these results emphasize the importance of basic ideological orientations and the psychological dispositions they reflect in explaining public attitudes toward international trade.     

Flight into Security: A New Approach and Measure of the Authoritarian Personality

A basic pattern of human response to stressful and uncertain situations which provoke anxiety and insecurity is to seek security and shelter. Those who provide support become by a process of psychological attribution authorities. Therefore the mechanism of seeking support and shelter under strained conditions might be called an "authoritarian reaction." Socialization involves a negotiation with this basic reaction of flight in situations of uncertainty. As individuals develop, they learn to overcome the authoritarian reaction by formulating their own strategies to cope with reality. The authoritarian personality emerges out of an inability to generate such individual coping strategies. Authoritarian personalities defer to the dictates and control of others who offer them the certainty and comfort they cannot provide for themselves. Extensions of this basic authoritarian response are the rejection of the new and the unfamiliar, rigid adherence to norms and value systems, an anxious and inflexible response to new situations, suppressed hostility, and passive aggression. A new measure based on items on one's own behavior, feelings, motivation, and the individual's concept of the self was developed and tested in several empirical studies. It obtained a good reliability and proved to be valid by correlating to measures of right-wing extremism, negative attitudes toward immigrants and women.     

On the Multilevel Nature of Meta-Analysis: A Tutorial,Comparison of Software Programs,and Discussion of Analytic Choices

The term “multilevel meta-analysis” is encountered not only in applied research studies, but in multilevel resources comparing traditional meta-analysis to multilevel meta-analysis. In this tutorial, we argue that the term “multilevel meta-analysis” is redundant since all meta-analysis can be formulated as a special kind of multilevel model. To clarify the multilevel nature of meta-analysis the four standard meta-analytic models are presented using multilevel equations and fit to an example data set using four software programs: two specific to meta-analysis (metafor in R and SPSS macros) and two specific to multilevel modeling (PROC MIXED in SAS and HLM). The same parameter estimates are obtained across programs underscoring that all meta-analyses are multilevel in nature. Despite the equivalent results, not all software programs are alike and differences are noted in the output provided and estimators available. This tutorial also recasts distinctions made in the literature between traditional and multilevel meta-analysis as differences between meta-analytic choices, not between meta-analytic models, and provides guidance to inform choices in estimators, significance tests, moderator analyses, and modeling sequence. The extent to which the software programs allow flexibility with respect to these decisions is noted, with metafor emerging as the most favorable program reviewed.     

Living in a Non‐Communist Versus in a Post‐Communist European Country Moderates the Relation Between Conservative Values and Political Orientation: A Multilevel Study

We performed a multilevel, multinational analysis using the 2012 European Social Survey dataset (N = 41 080, nested in 20 countries) to study how living in a non‐communist versus in a post‐communist country moderates the link between individual conservative values (drawn on Schwartz's theory of basic human values) and political orientation (assessed as self‐placement on the left–right axis and attitude towards economic redistribution). The results supported the moderating role of living in a non‐communist versus in a post‐communist country in the case both of political self‐placement and of attitude towards economic redistribution, even controlling for the countries' degree of individualism, power distance and democracy. Specifically, conservative values were positively related to a rightist political self‐placement among participants living in countries without a communist past, and to a favourable attitude towards economic redistribution in countries with a communist past. The limitations, implications and future directions of this study are discussed. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology     

心率变异性与人格的神经质之间关系研究

本研究探讨心率变异性（HRV）特征在高水平应激条件下对神经质水平的区分力。研究选取200名被试以大五人格量表测量情绪稳定性,实施了应激诱发实验,利用光体积扫描传感器采集被试者HRV指标;利用LASSO回归分析筛选参数构建对神经质的预测模型。结果显示：模型的预测数据与神经质得分高低显著正相关;不同阶段内预测数据与神经质得分显著正相关;两两比较中实验条件阶段与其他阶段预测值差异显著。研究表明,在高应激条件下,HRV是人格神经质较好的预测指标。     

Human values and ideological beliefs as predictors of attitudes toward immigrants across 20 countries: The country-level moderating role of threat

Immigration is a worldwide subject of interest, and studies about attitudes toward immigrants have been frequent due to immigration crises in different locations across the globe. We aimed at understanding individual-level effects of human values and ideological beliefs (Right-Wing Authoritarianism—RWA, and Social Dominance Orientation—SDO) on attitudes toward immigrants, and whether country-level variables (perception of Islamic fundamentalism as a threat, perception of immigrants as a threat, and international migrant stock) moderate these relations. With representative samples from 20 countries (N = 21,362; the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Oceania), and using Multilevel Bayesian regressions, results showed the negative effect of RWA, SDO, and existence values on attitudes toward immigrants, and the positive effects of suprapersonal and interactive values. Cross-level interactions indicated that the effects of RWA, SDO, and suprapersonal and existence values were intensified in countries with societally high levels of perceiving Islamic fundamentalism as a threat. International migrant stock served as a country-level moderator for the effects of SDO and RWA only. When country-level moderators were included simultaneously, Islamic fundamentalism as a threat was the most consistent moderator. Framing theory is offered as a plausible explanation of these results.     

Cultivating the Opinionated: The Need to Evaluate Moderates the Relationship Between Crime Drama Viewing and Scary World Evaluations

The literature on cultivation processes assumes that second‐order judgments (e.g., attitudes) are repeatedly updated during viewing (i.e., on‐line) and can be reported when asked. In this article, we propose this reasoning only holds for people high in their need to evaluate (NTE). Low‐NTE individuals do not update their opinions on‐line and have to construct their attitudes memory‐based, limiting the likelihood of finding second‐order relationships. Results from a cross‐sectional survey among 226 adolescents indicate that crime drama viewing and scary world beliefs are only correlated among high‐NTE individuals. NTE does not moderate cultivation through nonfiction. The theoretical implications of memory‐based attitudes for second‐order cultivation are discussed, and suggestions are made for future research on attitudinal media effects.     

No Postmaterialists in Foxholes: Postmaterialist Values,Nationalism, and National Threat in the People's Republic of China

In this article, I present findings from a survey experiment in which Chinese university students exposed to a treatment designed to increase feelings of national threat were—based on their responses to the four‐item postmaterialism values‐priority battery—significantly more likely to be classified as “pure materialists.” These findings are presented in support of the proposition that perception of a hostile international environment may tend to exaggerate citizens' authoritarian and nationalistic sentiments at the expense of more democratically favorable value orientations. Media and political figures in the West who rail against the evils of China's authoritarian leadership might believe that they are championing and encouraging democratic aspirations among the Chinese people, but might instead be inciting impulses and attitudes that are far less “democracy‐friendly.”     

Social Capital and Fear of Crime in Adolescence: A Multilevel Study

Hierarchical linear modeling was used to examine the relationships between social capital (at the individual, the neighborhood, and the regional levels) and adolescents' fear of crime, while controlling for the main individual (sociodemographics, television viewing, and bullying victimization), neighborhood (neighborhood size and aggregated victimization), and regional (crime rate and level of urbanization) variables. Data were analyzed using a three‐level model based on 22,639 15.7‐year‐old (SD = 0.67) students nested within 1081 neighborhoods and 19 Italian regions. The findings revealed that individual and contextual measures of social capital, modeled at the individual, neighborhood, and regional levels simultaneously, showed negative associations with adolescents' fear of crime. Males and participants with higher family affluence were less likely to feel fear of crime, whereas victimization, both at the individual and neighborhood levels, had a positive association with fear of crime. Strengths, limitations, and potential applications of the study are discussed.     

The Two Dimensions of Narcissistic Personality and Support for the Radical Right: The Role of Right-wing Authoritarianism,Social Dominance Orientation and Anti-immigrant Sentiment

This paper offers an explanation of the link between grandiose narcissism and support for radical right parties. Drawing on representative data of the GESIS Panel (N = 2827), focusing on support for the German radical right populist party Alternative for Germany in 2016 and treating grandiose narcissism as a two-dimensional concept, it is shown that the effects of grandiose narcissism are indirect rather than direct. The paper also reveals that it is mainly narcissistic rivalry that accounts for radical right party support, whereas narcissistic admiration has a protecting relationship. Finally, our results indicate that the indirect effects of narcissistic rivalry on radical right party support via right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, respectively, are mediated by anti-immigrant sentiment. All in all, our results suggest that in studies on ideological orientations and voting behaviour, both dimensions of grandiose narcissism should be considered due to their contradictory relationship. Moreover, our findings indicate that the success of radical right parties might be the expression of personality dispositions of some parts of the electorate. © 2020 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology     

Modern Racism Attitudes Among White Students: The Role of Dominance and Authoritarianism and the Mediating Effects of Racial Color-Blindness

ABSTRACT

Among 342 white college students, we examined the effects of social dominance orientation (SDO), right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and racial color-blindness on modern racism attitudes. Structural equation modeling was used to test the indirect effects of SDO and RWA on modern racism attitudes through color-blind racial attitudes. We found strong indirect effects of SDO and RWA on modern racism through racial color-blindness. We did not find support for an alternative model, in which we tested racial color-blindness as a moderator of the effects of SDO and RWA on modern racism. Findings suggest that highly dominant and authoritarian white students endorse color-blind racial attitudes, although likely for different reasons. In turn, this predicts their modern racism attitudes. These findings indicate racial color-blindness is important to address as part of anti-racism education.