By Emma Young
Authoritarianism has been well-studied
by psychologists. Well, right-wing authoritarianism has. In fact, as that’s
typically the only type that’s studied, you might be forgiven for thinking that’s
what authoritarianism is. The very idea of left-wing authoritarianism
(LWA) has received not only little academic attention, but a lot of scepticism
from psychologists. “I think I have not found any authoritarians on the left
because if there ever were any, most of them have dried up and blown away….”
wrote Bob Altemeyer, pioneer of work on
right-wing authoritarianism, in 1996.
But as Thomas Costello at Emory
University and colleagues write in their new paper in
the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes
and Individual Differences, “From Maoist China to the Khmer Rouge (and
perhaps even the French Reign of Terror), history abounds with examples of LWA
at the broader societal level, rendering psychology’s inability to identify
left-wing authoritarians puzzling.”
Puzzling is right. Perhaps predominantly
left-leaning researchers have been unwilling to even go there…. But in their
new paper, Costello and his colleagues absolutely go there. They conclude that
LWA does indeed exist, and they define not only its characteristics but the
characteristics of the people who subscribe to it. They also reveal substantial
similarities between authoritarians on the political right and the left.
First, the team used a bottom-up
approach to devise a scale to get at LWA. As well as scouring research papers
for items that might relate to authoritarianism, they solicited ideas for items
from psychologists, political scientists and philosophers. Using multiple
batches of online participants, the team gradually whittled down and revised
these items. They ended up with 39 items that reflected three conceptually
distinct dimensions of LWA. I’ll take the definitions directly from the
paper:
- Antihierarchical
Aggression – the belief
that those currently in power should be punished, the established order
should be overthrown, and that extreme actions, such as political
violence, are justifiable to achieve these aims.
- Anticonventionalism – the
rejection of traditional values, a moral absolutism concerning progressive
values and concomitant dismissal of conservatives as inherently immoral,
and a need for political homogeneity in one’s social environment.
- Top-Down
Censorship – preferences
for the use of governmental and institutional authority to quash
opposition and bar offensive and intolerant speech.
Looking over that list, I certainly know
some people who I’m sure think of themselves as being extremely liberal but who
would score pretty highly on the anti-conventionalism dimension, at least.
The researchers then ran studies using
fresh batches of participants and an impressive array of self-report scales to
look at everything from personality, to mood, to cognition. They found a few
differences between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians. People who scored
highly on the LWA scale reported more negative emotions and were more neurotic
than average (unlike RWAs). They were also more likely to report schadenfreude.
The RWAs, meanwhile, scored higher for unjustified certainty in their beliefs
and confirmatory thinking (a tendency to favour information that supports your
beliefs). RWA was also more strongly linked to cognitive rigidity and low
openness, as well as a lower than typical belief in science.
However, there were a lot more
similarities between the two groups than differences. So much so, that it seems
there is a shared constellation of traits “that might be considered the ‘heart’
of authoritarianism”, the team writes. These shared traits include (and again,
I’ll quote directly from the paper): a “preference for social uniformity,
prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to
coerce behaviour, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards
perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy and moral absolutism.”
In terms of potentially dangerous
implications for others, both left- and ring-wing authoritarianism was linked
to the endorsement of political violence; but for the LWAs, that was violence
directed at the state (violent protests, for example), whereas
for the RWAs, it was in support of the state (supporting
police crackdowns, say).
As well as analysing this self-report
data, the team ran a study designed to look at LWA and actual behaviour. Online
participants selected the difficulty level of a set of puzzles that they
believed they were giving to another participant to complete. Before they chose
the puzzles, though, they were shown what they were told was the Facebook
profile of this ‘partner’. Those who’d scored highly for LWA ‘punished’
partners with right-wing profiles with harder puzzles and ‘helped’ those with
left-wing profiles with easier puzzles. This was the case even when
participants’ political ideology was taken into account, showing that LWA can
be linked to actual aggressive behaviour towards the political outgroup above
and beyond any effects of political ideology, the team concluded.
None of these studies were on groups of
participants who were representative of a general population, however. So the
researchers ran a fresh study on 834 who were selected to be representative of
the population of the US. Again, they found large correlations between LWA
scores and dogmatism, as well as schadenfreude, moral disengagement and
violence towards out-groups. This included actual participation in the use of
force for a political cause over the preceding five years. It also included
support of violent group action during protests against police brutality
towards Black Americans over the summer of 2020, in the wake of the murder of
George Floyd.
All in all, then, the team present a lot
of studies — and a lot of analyses. There are some limitations to the work,
however. Because of the nature of the scales, it’s not possible to tell whether
right-wing authoritarians are more authoritarian than the left-wing type, or
vice versa, say. Also, the route to LWA may be more well-meaning than the route
to RWA, the researchers write; for example, someone who wants passionately to
challenge inequality in society may end up thinking violent protest is the only
option. “Any similarities across LWA and RWA notwithstanding, we endorse no
claims of motivational or moral equivalence (or lack thereof) across the two
constructs at present,” they write.
Their body of results surely suggests,
though, that arguments that the search for LWA should be abandoned should
themselves be abandoned. In fact, excluding left-wing features from studies of
authoritarianism “has limited the kinds of knowledge we can produce as
psychological scientists,” the team argues. And given the relevance of
authoritarianism to politics, globally, and to how societies respond to and
fight for change, surely it’s high time for that to shift.
Reference Clarifying the structure
and nature of left-wing authoritarianism.
Emma
Young (@EmmaELYoung) is
a staff writer at BPS Research Digest
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