Derogation of an innocent victim as a function of authoritarianism and involvement

Two studies are reported in which observers witnessed a peer (learner) receiving electric shock and where they did or did not play a role in her suffering (Involved vs Noninvolved conditions). It was found in both studies that while High authoritarians were more likely than Low authoritarians to derogate the learner in Involved conditions, the reverse was true in Noninvolved conditions. These significant interactions (p < .03, p < .01) were interpreted in terms of Low authoritarians derogating in order to preserve their belief in a “just world” and High authoritarians derogating in order to avoid self-blame.     

Reactions to an offense in relation to authoritarianism,knowledge about risk,and freedom of action

This research investigated a situation where a fictitious company distributed contaminated meat that led to serious food poisoning. Participants (N = 241) responded to scenarios that varied information about knowledge of risk (aware, unaware) and freedom of action (free to act, constrained by higher authority). They provided judgments concerning compliance, foreseeability, negligence, recklessness, seriousness of offense, responsibility, deservingness, anger, sympathy, harshness/leniency of penalty, compensation, jail sentence, and community service. They also completed Altemeyer's Right‐Wing Authoritarianism Scale. Results implied that high authoritarians were less sensitive and less responsive to information about the risk of contamination and more sensitive and more responsive to information about constraints from the higher authority when compared with low authoritarians. These interaction effects involving authoritarianism and the two contextual variables occurred for judgments that related to the organizations and to the executive officers within them. These differences in the reactions of high and low authoritarians to the contextual cues were interpreted as reflecting the effects of value differences and possible differences in the way information was subsequently processed. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

In-Group/Out-Group Bias as a Function of Differential Contact and Authoritarian Personality

Abstract

The subjects, volunteers of both sexes who signed up for intermediate-level ski lessons at a large New England ski resort, were randomly assigned to a blue or a green subgroup after having filled out a shortened version of the California F (Fascism) scale (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950). Each of 18 sessions was randomly assigned to one of three in-group/out-group conditions: anticipated, moderate, or maximum differential contact. Following these sessions, each subject rated the performance of the other subjects, both blue and green, who participated in that session. Low authoritarians demonstrated no in-group/out-group rating bias in any condition. High authoritarians enhanced the in-group and disparaged the out-group relative to low authoritarians, showing an in-group/out-group bias in all three conditions that increased as a function of differential contact.     

Evaluation and recall of evidence: Authoritarianism and the Patty Hearst case

By using the Patricia Hearst case as the stimulus material, two experiments were conducted to examine the relationship between authoritarianism and recall of evidence. In Experiment I it was found that high authoritarians recall more prosecution evidence than defense evidence. This was not the case for the low authoritarians. Results concerning the hypothesis that high authoritarians would recall more character information than low authoritarians were equivocal. In Experiment II a trend indicating that high authoritarians draw more direct inferences from incriminating evidence than do low authoritarians or an attorney was obtained. The results are discussed in terms of previous findings, authoritarian theory, and characteristics of the Patricia Hearst case.     

Meet Your Neighbours. Authoritarians Engage in Intergroup Contact When They have the Opportunity

Research indicates that authoritarians tend to avoid intergroup contact. This study tested the hypothesis that living in a neighbourhood with a higher proportion of Asian peoples increases the likelihood of contact with them for the majority (New Zealand Europeans), and that this effect should increase intergroup contact for authoritarians. Multi‐level Random Coefficient Modelling of data from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (N = 3903) indicated that New Zealand Europeans high in authoritarianism in neighbourhoods with a high proportion of Asian peoples have more contact with Asian friends, relative to authoritarians in less ethnically diverse areas. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Juror decision making: A case of attitude change mediated by authoritarianism

For a jury to reach a unanimous decision, certain individuals must change their attitudes with regard to the defendant's guilt during deliberations. Because these changers are the key to the group decision-making process, they were carefully scrutinized to ascertain demographic or personality characteristics which might be mediating their behavior. In three experiments, two using college students as subjects and one using Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas jury pool members, it was found that authoritarians changed their attitude with regard to the defendant's guilt more than equalitarians. Further, most of these “changers” were aware they had changed their attitude. There was no generalizable evidence for the proposition that authoritarians are more likely to favor a guilty verdict.     

Zur Häufigkeit der Schuldfähigkeitsbegutachtung von Sexualstraftätern im Erkenntnisverfahren

This study investigated how often and depending on which factors sexual offenders are examined by mental health experts regarding their criminal responsibility. Out of a total of 306 legal charges against sex offenders accused of child sexual abuse (CSA: n?=?145), rape or sexual assault (n?=?89), exhibitionism (n?=?39), sexual abuse of adolescents, mentally defective, physically helpless or warded persons (n?=?18) that were admitted by a criminal court in 2001 in the German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein, 209 (95.6 %) were analyzed regarding the following questions: how often was the accused examined by a mental health professional regarding mental responsibility? Was the chance of being examined systematically related to certain factors (e.g., personality of the accused)? Expert advice regarding the mental responsibility of the accused was obtained by the court in only 34 cases (11.7 %). No systematic relationships of personal variables as well as the modus operandi and the chance of commissioning a mental health expert were found. The main reason for assigning a forensic expert opinion was the vague impression of a psychic disorder. Re-offending increased the rate of a mental health examination only in CSA (34.6 % of re-offenders were examined compared to 9.2 % of first-time offenders), but not in rape or sexual assault. Also age does not predict the commissioning of an expert opinion. Only one fifth of all accused below the age of 21 were investigated by a mental health professional. Results are discussed in terms of legal background, consequences for risk assessment and relapse prevention.     

Authoritarianism and Economic Threat: Implications for Political Behavior

This study examined whether authoritarians experiencing economic threat are more likely than other authoritarians to support social policy and political agendas that restrict benefits or curtail rights for disadvantaged groups. A sample of 131 college students completed questionnaires that measured authoritarianism, degree of economic and societal insecurity, and attitudes toward eight political issues. Economic and social insecurity were indexed to perceptions of whether one's standard of livingg had declined, whether incom inequality had grown among social classes, and whether crime, race relations, environmental quality, and governmental services had worsened. The political scales reflected issues currently debated in public forums; they included funding mechanisms for social security and health care, the state's role in regulating abortion, government services for illegal immigrants, terminating welfare for unemployed women with children, and regulation of sexual conduct. A logistic model found that, relative to non-threatened authoritarians or nonauthoritarians, threatened authoritarians were six times as likely to favor restricting benefits to powerless groups and eight times as likely to support the state's preventing women from securing anabortion. These results are discussed in terms of systemic changes in the economy that have resulted in declines in real income and increasing income inequality.     

Threat, Authoritarianism, and Selective Exposure to Information

We examined the hypothesis that threat alters the cognitive strategies used by high authoritarians in seeking out new political information from the environment. In a laboratory experiment, threat was manipulated through a "mortality salience" manipulation used in research on terror management theory ( Pyszczynski, Solomon & Greenberg, 2003 ). Subjects (N = 92) were then invited to read one of three editorial articles on the topic of capital punishment. We found that in the absence of threat, both low and high authoritarians were responsive to salient norms of evenhandedness in information selection, preferring exposure to a two-sided article that presents the merits of both sides of an issue to an article that selectively touts the benefits of the pro or con side of the issue. However, in the presence of threat, high but not low authoritarians became significantly more interested in exposure to an article containing uniformly pro-attitudinal arguments, and significantly less interested in a balanced, two-sided article. Finally, a path analysis indicated that selective exposure to attitude-congruent information led to more internally consistent policy attitudes and inhibited attitude change. Discussion focuses on the role of threat in conditioning the cognitive and attitudinal effects of authoritarianism.     

Attitudes toward immigrants: The interactive role of the authoritarian predisposition,social norms,and humanitarian values

This investigation tested whether social norms and endorsement of humanitarian values interact to influence authoritarians' attitudes toward immigrants. Oyamot, Borgida, and Fisher (2006) found correlational evidence for a model in which: (1) clear social norms for attitudes toward an outgroup (favorable or unfavorable) influence the authoritarianism–attitude relationship in the direction of the norm, and (2) in the absence of clear social norms, endorsement of humanitarian–egalitarian values attenuate the intolerant tendencies of authoritarians. The current investigation tested the model in a survey experiment conducted in a diverse adult sample (N = 388). We measured participants' levels of authoritarian predisposition and endorsement of humanitarian values. Participants were then randomly told that Americans in general had either negative, positive, or mixed opinions about immigrants and immigration (social norm condition), and then asked about their attitude toward immigrants. Consistent with the model, authoritarianism was negatively related to attitudes toward immigrants in the negative norm condition. However, authoritarians' tendency toward intolerance was attenuated when they thought that Americans in general had positive opinions about immigrants. Also as predicted, when societal norms were depicted as mixed, authoritarians' attitudes depended upon endorsement of humanitarian values: humanitarian authoritarians held positive attitudes and non-humanitarian authoritarians held the most negative attitudes toward immigrants. Implications for understanding the effects of authoritarian predispositions in varying social contexts are discussed.     

Social Norms and Egalitarian Values Mitigate Authoritarian Intolerance Toward Sexual Minorities

In the United States, acceptance of sexual minorities (e.g., gay men and lesbians) has increased substantially since the early 1990s. This study examined whether authoritarians' attitudes have been influenced by the societal shift toward greater acceptance of sexual minorities. Using data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) collected between 1992 and 2012, we tested a model in which authoritarianism, endorsement of egalitarian values, and social norms shifting in the direction of tolerance predict individual attitudes toward sexual minorities and LGBT rights issues. Results indicated that (1) there was a subset of authoritarians who endorsed egalitarian values, (2) authoritarians in general became more tolerant (i.e., held less negative attitudes) toward sexual minorities between 1992 and 2012, and (3) “egalitarian authoritarians” held more positive attitudes toward sexual minorities than other authoritarians. The findings contribute to contemporary theory and research on authoritarianism, which is moving from a monolithic view of authoritarianism to one in which culture and core values activate and shape manifestations of authoritarian tendencies.     

Culture and Status as Influences on Account Giving: A Comparison Between the United States and Japan1

Being accused of breaking a social norm often forces the accused person to offer an explanation, or an account, for the alleged misdeed. In the present study, American and Japanese participants rated the appropriateness of 4 account types as a function of status of the transgressor and status of the victim. A vignette described a situation in which a person was accused of breaking a promise at work and asked to give an account. While Japanese participants rated apology as significantly more appropriate than did American participants, the Americans rated justification as significantly more appropriate than did the Japanese. Status did not influence Americans' ratings of account appropriateness, but the status of the victim did influence the Japanese participants' ratings. An attributional analysis of the data revealed the same underlying motivational pattern for the two cultures.     

Societal Threat to Safety,Compensatory Control,and Right‐Wing Authoritarianism

We analyzed directly and indirectly the relationships between societal threat to safety, perceived control, and the increase in right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA) in two studies. In Study 1 (national sample of the Italian population, N = 1,169), we performed a longitudinal analysis structured into three waves (January 2003, September 2004, and January 2005). A moderated regression analysis showed that RWA increased from 2003 to 2005 as a function of perceived societal threat to safety more among low‐ than among high RWA scorers. In experimental Study 2 (Italian university students, N = 131) a moderated mediation model showed loss of perceived control to mediate the relation between societal threat to safety and the increase in RWA, but among low authoritarians only. Limitations, implications, and possible developments of this research are discussed.     

Physical Size Stereotyping as a Mediator of Attributions of Responsibility in an Alleged Date-Rape Situation1

This research focuses on male and female observers' attributions of responsibility to a female accuser and a male accused of rape. Observers read 1 of 2 scenarios in which the accuser was either smaller or larger than the accused and then made judgments concerning each person's responsibility for what happened. The data indicated that the larger accuser was considered more responsible than the smaller accuser and the larger accused was perceived to be more responsible than the smaller accused. Females attributed more responsibility and had less sympathy, respect, and liking for the accused, whereas males attributed more responsibility and reported more negative attitudes toward the accuser. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for legal and health-care professionals.     

A new methodological approach to nonverbal behavior analysis in cultural perspective

The measurement of human behavior is a complex task, both for psychologists and human sciences researchers and with respect to technology, since advanced and sophisticated instruments may have to be implemented to manage the plurality of variables involved. In this article, an observational study is presented in which a quantitative procedure, theexternal variables method (Duncan & Fiske, 1977), was integrated with a structural analysis (Magnusson, 1993, 2000) in order to detect the hidden organization of nonverbal behavior in Italian and Icelandic interactions. To this aim, Theme software was introduced and employed. The results showed that both the frequency and the typology of gestures deeply change as a function of culture. Moreover, a high number of patterns was detected in both Italian and Icelandic interactions: They appeared to be complex sequences in which a huge number of events were constantly happening and recurring. In this domain, Theme software provides a methodological progression from the quantitative to the structural approach.     

Authoritarianism,Projection, and Person Perception: What Do Authoritarians Infer From Another's Attempt to Rebut a Rumor?

In the course of a field study, subjects first filled out a short form of the California F Scale (Adorno, 1973). In addition, one group of subjects was led to reflect on an episode in which a rumor had proven to be true. Another group of subjects was led to reflect on an episode in which they themselves had been a target of an unjustified accusation. A third (control) group did not undergo a priming procedure. All subjects read a brief newspaper advertisement in which a person issued the warning to take legal proceedings if anyone continued to spread untrue rumors concerning him. Subjects were asked to give reasons why the person initiated the rebuttal. High authoritarians, as identified by their responses to the California F Scale, were more likely than low authoritarians to infer anxiety, paranoia, and guilty conscience as motives for the rebuttal. This effect was particularly pronounced in the two priming conditions. Further, authoritarians evaluated the target person more negatively than did nonauthoritarians. The interpretation of the results dwells on repressive developmental and environmental forces causing the authoritarian style and the role of projection in person perception.     

Authoritarianism and Political Impoverishment: Deficits in Knowledge and Civic Disinterest

Past research shows that authoritarian individuals hold strong opinions about a variety of political and social issues, such as race relations and military conflict. What has not been established, though, is the amount of general political knowledge that authoritarians possess. In this study, three groups of college students were administered Altemeyer's Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale; most of them also received items assessing general political knowledge and specific knowledge about the 2000 presidential election, as well as items assessing interest in politics. Relative to students with low RWA scores, those with high scores possessed less political knowledge; moreover, they expressed less interest in learning about politics. In general, authoritarianism was unrelated to how individuals got their political information or how credible they found their sources. The implication that authoritarians hold strong attitudinal beliefs with weak political knowledge is discussed.     

Authoritarianism and recall of evidence about criminal behavior

Research by Marshall (1966) suggested that high authoritarian persons might be more accurate at recalling evidence about criminal behavior than low authoritarian persons. Drawing on other research findings, Marshall's hypothesis was expanded to predict that high authoritarians would recall more about evidence relating to defendant character and low authoritarians would recall more about situational evidence. In two jury-simulation experiments the new hypothesis was confirmed.     

Thought paralysis: tolerance,and the fear of Islam

In much contemporary public debate, ideas of hate and terror have become synonymous with Islam. It is difficult to talk about how justified these associations might or might not be, as protagonists are readily accused either of Islamaphobia or of a naïve and dangerous tolerance. The paper will critically draw on elements from political theory, group analysis and psychoanalysis to reflect on some of the possible psycho-social reasons and mechanisms behind this impasse. It will be suggested that part of the reason for the thought-impasse is to be found in the way that liberalism has come to be taken up by some influential strands within the multicultural and diversity movements.