For a truly horrifying argument that the president ought to be above the law, see Professor H. Mansfield’s op-ed piece in the May 2, 2007 Wall Street Journal.
14 Lest I seem to be Yank-bashing, when some of my best friends are Americans (including I), let me add that I have obtained the same results many times in Canadian samples regarding Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And Sam McFarland, Vladimir Ageyev and Marina Abalakina (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1992, 63, 1004—1010) discovered “very strong” to “almost unheard of” correlations (see the end of note 12) between RWA scale scores and dislike of dissidents, rejection of a free press, and opposition to democracy in a representative poll of Soviet adults during the last days of the USSR.
15 Blass, T. (1992) “Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Role as Predictors of Attributions about Obedience to Authority.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Boston.
16 This is the third time I have referred to George W. Bush, his administration, or his supporters, and we’re only half-way through chapter 1. I am running a risk, in a book I hope will have some lasting value, by anchoring it so much in the here-and-now. I’m doing so partly because the here-and-now naturally appeals to contemporary readers. But mainly I am doing it because the past six years have provided so many examples of authoritarian behavior in American government. There has never been a more obvious, appropriate, and pressing time for this discussion. The threat that authoritarians poses to American democracy has probably never been clearer. It is just a coincidence, but human affairs have provided the foremost example of how badly right-wing authoritarianism can damage the United States at the same time my work has come to an end and I am telling everyone what I’ve found. George W. Bush has been the most authoritarian president in my lifetime, as well as the worst. And that’s not a coincidence.
17 High RWAs are also slightly more likely to “blame the victim” for misfortunes suffered. This is especially so when the victim has done something the authoritarian disapproves of (e.g., a young woman who is raped after going to a party sexily dressed, a young man who gets beaten after leaving a bar, a woman who is killed by her husband when she leaves him, seeks a divorce and starts dating another man). But it even shows up in some situations in which the victim was utterly blameless (e.g., a family that was standing on a grate on a downtown sidewalk when an electrical transformer underneath them exploded).
Social psychologists generally think that people blame victims because it maintains belief in a just world. You see, if tragedies happen to the virtuous, and you think you are virtuous, then bad things could happen to you. It’s more comforting to believe bad things usually happen to bad people—so you are safe.
18 Right-wing authoritarians are prejudiced compared to other people. That does not mean they think that Jews can’t be trusted at all, that all Black people are naturally violent, or that every Japanese is cruel. High RWAs may, as a group, even disagree with these blatantly racist statements. However they don’t disagree very much, while most people strongly or very strongly disagree. So authoritarian followers are relatively prejudiced, which means it would presumably take less persuasion or social pressure to get them to discriminate than it would most people.
19 Of course, what would have happened if the Warsaw Pact had been preparing an attack on NATO? Wouldn’t the low RWA teams have been caught unprepared? Probably not, because the ambiguous opening moves by the Communist Bloc were not that immediately serious. But many people perceive “liberals” as being “weak on defense,” too trusting of their enemies, and proven fools when dealing with potentially dangerous situations. So in 1996 I asked students to pretend they were the leader of Israel. Israel wanted to be recognized by its Arab neighbors and live in peace. But it also feared that Arab nations would destroy it if they had the chance. So Israel had the strongest armed forces in the region. One thing Israel could do, the subjects were told, that might open the door to peace would be to return the strategic Golan Heights to Syria. Suppose the chances of this bringing a lasting peace were only one in four. Would the subject do it? Suppose it had a 50-50 chance of working, other subjects were asked. Would they take the chance? Suppose, a third group was told, the odds were three-to-one that Syria would prove trustworthy and a lasting peace would result. Would you surrender the Heights?
What did the low RWAs do in these various conditions? Only 37 percent said they would take the chance against 3-1 odds, but most of the lows (61 percent) facing the 50-50 situation would have given back the Golan Heights. With 3-1 odds in favor of a lasting peace, 73 percent of those lows would have made the move. Whether you think all of these foolishly high, or foolishly low, they do follow the logic of being more willing to take the chance as the odds of success increase.
What did the high RWAs say? Nothing very logical, I’m afraid. Nearly half (48 percent) said they’d return the Golan Heights if the odds for peace were 3-1 against. Increasing the odds for a successful outcome to 50-50 made highs less willing (41 percent) to make the gesture. When the odds got to 3-1 in favor of peace, 60 percent said “Go for it.” The authoritarian followers thus didn’t seem to pay much attention to the odds for success, and they proved to be the ones who’d take a foolish chance for peace in this situation. So who’s the peacenik?
I ran the experiment again with a sample of parents in 1997, using just the first and third conditions. The low RWAs again showed sensitivity to the chances for success, with 37 percent willing to return the Heights if the odds for peace were 3-1 against, but 57 percent saying they would do so if the odds were 3-1 in favor. The high RWAs again proved unfathomable and bigger risk takers, with 62 percent and 63 percent returning the Heights in the two respective conditions.
Maybe high RWAs don’t like Israel. But I doubt they like Syria more. Or maybe this has something to do with religious fundamentalists wanting a big war in the middle east so the End of the World can gloriously occur. But just as the data from the NATO simulation indicate high RWAs tend to make an ambiguous situation dangerous, the Golan Heights experiment indicates that high RWAs are likely to turn a secure situation into a dangerous one. Their thinking simply baffles one at times—a topic we’ll take up in chapter 3.