Progressive Authoritarianism: The “Loch Ness Monster of Political Psychology”

The research of Jonathan Haidt and Yoel Inbar has revealed liberal bias in the field of social psychology. Only six percent of social psychologists identify themselves as conservative, and they are under significant pressure to hide their politics:

One in six respondents said that she or he would be somewhat (or more) inclined to discriminate against conservatives in inviting them for symposia or reviewing their work. One in four would discriminate in reviewing their grant applications. More than one in three would discriminate against them when making hiring decisions.

This may explain certain deficiencies in the field, certain errors in the results it produces—which definitely do exist. One notable error is the well-known claim by the political psychologist Robert Altemeyer, who made his reputation by studying ‘right-wing authoritarianism’, that “there’s no such thing as a left-wing authoritarian”—that such a person is the “Loch Ness monster of political psychology”.

Right-wing authoritarianism, for Altemeyer, is a set of personality traits: RWA followers, he says, submit to established authorities, support aggression in the name of those authorities, and exhibit a high level of conventionalism; they are dogmatic, prejudiced, and reluctant to reëvaluate their conclusions; and they gravitate toward conservative parties and fundamentalist churches.

Sound familiar? It should: Altemeyer’s research is a development of the F-scale (the F, of course, stands for ‘fascist’), designed by the Frankfurt School critical theorist Theodor Adorno to sniff out democracy-threatening authoritarians. And it plays into a common trope: Left is right and Right is wrong; progressives are rational and opposition to progressivism is a mental defect; people who aren’t progressives blindly inherit the prejudices of their parents, never questioning or changing their minds. There’s even a book called The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—And Reality, written by the “bestselling author of The Republican War on Science“. (“They”? And is this really specific to Republicans? The progressive thesis of human biological uniformity hasn’t stood up very well to scientific investigation, but many think it’s completely unquestionable. Of course, groups are bad at discovering their own biases…)

All this, of course, is inaccurate. The research may well be accurate, but pieces are missing from the picture—so even if the research is accurate, the conclusions the picture draws are not. Altemeyer’s own research hints at some of that inaccuracy:

Interestingly enough, authoritarian followers show a remarkable capacity for change IF they have some of the important experiences. For example, they are far less likely to have known a homosexual (or realized an acquaintance was homosexual) than most people. But if you look at the high RWAs who do know someone gay or lesbian, they are much less hostile toward homosexuals in general than most authoritarians are. Getting to know a homosexual usually makes one more accepting of homosexuals as a group. Personal experiences can make a lot of difference, which is a truly hopeful discovery.

But there’s more: left-wing authoritarianism has been found in both Western and Eastern Europe, and its discovery is marked with the quote: “We believe that the fact that thus far not a lot of evidence is found for left-wing authoritarianism is not due to nonexistence of left-wing authoritarianism, but is due to the fact that we have not looked at the right places.” I wonder why not!

George Yancey, at least, does look in the right places. Here’s what he has found:

I sent the survey out to a diverse, but nonrandom, sample collected through Amazon Mechanical Turk. I wanted to see if those high in RWA are also likely to hate conservative Christians by testing my index against a similar length RWA index. I found that the indexes were negatively correlated (r = -.636). This is important since some RWA theorists argue that authoritarians want to use authorities against all groups – including conservative groups. I had to make sure that the same people who are authoritarians are not the same ones who hated conservative Christians. …

I found that those who scored high in RWA are less likely to see the scenarios of traditional targets of authoritarianism of abuses of power. However, they were more likely to see scenarios where conservative Christians are the victims as abuses of power. This contradicts the assertions of several supporters of RWA theory that those higher in RWA are willing to use authoritarianism against all social groups. In my sample those scoring high in RWA are not willing to use authority figures against conservative Christians.

Who is willing to? Yancey continues:

Those who dehumanize Christians are not right-wing authoritarians but rather a different population from those authoritarians. But we also saw that such individuals were willing to use authority figures against conservative Christians, just as it is predicted that right-wing authoritarians are willing to do. With this entry we see that those individuals are religious and political progressives. Kind of throws a wrench in the wheels of the arguments that political and religious conservatives react in a way that is uniquely oppressive to out-group members. …

The desire to punish those who differ from us is not limited in scope or in intensity by political ideology.

It’s not hard to see what’s going on here, but he spells it out further:

There is a generous amount of research arguing that RWA is a viable explanation for social problems such as racism, intolerance, and oppression. The theory of RWA paints a picture of vengeful, irrational individuals looking for an authoritarian leader to follow. That leader tells them who to hate and oppress which they promptly decide to do. But my research indicates that authoritarianism is not the best way to understand the results generated by those who have developed theories of RWA. Rather, ethnocentrism is a better way to understand what has occurred. Results tied to RWA are caused by the ethnocentrism of those with conventional social attitudes. Results tied to my findings concerning Christian dehumanization are caused by the ethnocentrism of those with unconventional social attitudes. Ethnocentrism is a more universal phenomenon than RWA and thus it more accurately explains why religious/political conservatives are willing to use authority figures to suppress political radicals and why religious/political progressives are willing to use authority figures to suppress conservative Christians.

‘Ethnocentrism’ isn’t quite the right word; progressives aren’t an ethnicity. But it’s close. People just don’t like people who are in thedes opposed to theirs; to every ingroup, there are outgroups. This applies no less to Brahmins, progressives, and so on than to their opponents. They just don’t realize it; their dislikes appear to them as natural and reasonable, unlike those of the people they dislike. And since most research is done and most media reports are written by progressive Brahmins, their own dislikes end up appearing natural and reasonable to the general public, and those of their opponents end up looking like pathologies.