TRENT UNIVERSITY ALUMNI BOOK FUND This book is a gift of TRENT UNIVERSITY ALUMNI ASSOCIATION as part of the Book Fund of the Trent University Alumni Association Presented on August 17 , 19 82 to The Thomas J. Bata Library Trent University, Peterborough, Canada. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/rightwingauthoriOOOOalte RIGHT-WING AUTHORITARIANISM All of us submit to established authority to some extent, but are many of us astonishingly accepting of governmental injustice and tyranny? All of us are sometimes aggressive, but do some of us seethe with a self-righteous hostility waiting to be licenced? All of us follow social conventions, but do some of us sanctify our notion of conventionality as though it were the only defense against catastrophe? And do these things occur together in many people? Is there a broadly based right-wing authoritarianism in many western democracies that supports unjust and unwise wars, that despises pro¬ test and dissent, that believes the unbelievable because high officials have said so, that longs for authorities to “crack down on the deviants,” that does not care how many times the government breaks the law, that when marshalled can determine elections and pass repressive laws, and that, by its sheer numbers, continually invites dictatorship? It is the thesis of this book that the answer to all these questions is yes. Professor Altemeyer begins by closely examining the scientific litera¬ ture on right-wing authoritarianism. He argues that, because of vague conceptualizations and poorly developed measures, many earlier approaches were doomed to failure. In the second part of the volume, the author describes his previously unpublished twelve-year research program on right-wing authoritarian¬ ism. The construct is defined as the covariation of three attitudinal clusters —authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and con¬ ventionalism—and it is operationally determined by the score on an attitude measure, the Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale. The author describes a large pitting experiment which established the psychometric and predictive advantages of the RWA Scale over its predecessors. A number of studies of the covariates and dynamics of authoritarianism then investigated the way in which the construct interacts with other variables in determining behavior. In the final section, the author presents a social learning theory of the origins of right-wing authoritarianism which he compares with the psycho¬ analytic theory advanced thirty years ago in The Authoritarian Personality. This timely volume surveys the history of social psychological research on right-wing authoritarianism and describes a more fruitful direction for future work. It concludes with a disturbing comment on the pervasiveness of authoritarian behavior in our society. Bob Altemeyer is a graduate of Yale University and Carnegie-Mellon University. He is a member of the Psychology Department of the University of Manitoba. Right-Wing Authoritarianism BOB ALTEMEYER THE UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA PRESS Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 1 A critique of previous social psychological research on right-wing authoritarianism 13 2 The response set issue 117 3 A suggested conceptualization of right-wing authoritarianism 147 4 A test of the construct validity of the RWA and five other authoritarianism scales 175 5 Explorations of the dynamics and covariates of right-wing authoritarianism 215 6 Some exploratory findings on the origins of right-wing authoritarianism 253 Epilog 273 Appendixes 277 Notes 309 References 331 Index 349